I said to Kamla, expecting some solace from her, “And now we have nothing.”
She said, “And now we have nothing.”
My sorrow lasted for two years. For two years I mentally dated everything, even the purchase of a book, by its distance from Shiva’s death.
Nadira was living in Bahawalpur, in Pakistan. One day, she saw a cat on the window ledge of her room. It was looking into the room in a disquieting way, and she told the servant to get rid of the cat. He misunderstood and killed the poor creature. Not long after this, in a laundry basket near the window, Nadira found a tiny kitten who was so young that its eyes were still closed. She understood then that the poor creature that had been so casually killed was the mother of the little kitten, who was probably the last of the litter. She thought she should adopt him. The kitten slept in her bed, with Nadira and her two children. He received every attention that Nadira could think of. She knew very little about animals, and almost nothing about cats. She must have made mistakes, but the kitten, later the cat, repaid the devotion with extraordinary love. The cat appeared to know when Nadira was going to come back to the house. It just turned up, and it was an infallible sign that in a day or two Nadira herself would return.
This happy relationship lasted for seven or eight years. Nadira decided then to leave the city and go and live in the desert. She took the cat with her, not knowing that a cat cannot easily change where it lives: all the extraordinary knowledge in its head, of friends and enemies and hiding places, built up over time, has to do with a particular place. A cat in a new setting is half helpless. So it turned out here.
She came back one day to her desert village and found the people agitated. They had a terrible story. A pack of wild desert dogs had dragged away the unfortunate cat into a cane field. Nadira looked, fruitlessly, and was almost glad that she couldn’t find her cat. It would have been an awful sight: the wild dogs of the desert would have torn the cat to pieces. The cat was big, but the desert dogs were bigger, and the cat would have had no chance against a ravening pack. If it had got to know the area better, the cat might have known how to hide and protect itself. The dogs were later shot dead, but that revenge couldn’t bring back the cat whom she had known as the tiniest kitten, motherless, in the laundry basket. Grief for that particular cat, whose ways she knew so well, almost like the ways of a person, never left her.
And it was only when she came to live with me in Wiltshire—a domesticated landscape, the downs seemingly swept every day: no desert here, no wild dogs—that she thought she could risk having another cat, to undo the sorrow connected with the last.
She went to the Battersea rescue home. In one cage she saw a very small black-and-white kitten, of no great beauty. Its nose was bruised and it was crying. It was being bullied by the bigger cats in the cage. It was the runt of its litter and had been found in a rubbish bin, where it had been thrown away. Everything about this kitten appealed to Nadira. And this was the kitten that, after the Battersea formalities, two friends, Nancy Sladek and Farrukh Dhondy, brought to us.
The kitten was absolutely terrified. It had had an up-and-down life for many days and had no idea what was coming next. It tried now to run away, though there was no place for it to run to. It dug its little claws into the screen door and raced up to the ceiling of the utility room. That was as far as it could go, and I reached up and brought him down. Something extraordinary then happened. It was as though, feeling my hand, he felt my benignity. He became calm, then he became content; he was happy to be in my hand (not much bigger than him), so that in a few seconds, guided by a cat’s instinct alone, he moved from terror to trust. He ran up my arm to my shoulder; when I introduced him to some of my lunchtime guests, he sought to do the same with them. I knew nothing about cats. But he was easy to like.
I was asked if he had already been given a name. He hadn’t, but there was one that came easily to mind: Augustus, not because it was a proper cat’s name but because to anyone with a little knowledge of Roman history it fitted. He had been nervous at the beginning; then he had been confident. But some little element of caution remained. When I took him in my arms—really so very small—to walk him around the house plot, he seemed to forget his earlier playful character; some extraordinary instinct made him tremble with panic when I got too close to the boundary of my plot, though he hardly knew the place. It was another demonstration of the mystery and wonder of cats.
The local vet said, “Cats are rewarding.”
That was reassuring, but when I went to the pet shop in Salisbury, to find out a little more, I was cast down. The shop was full of goods I as yet knew nothing of, and had a smell, not a disagreeable one, a little like the smell that came from the old-fashioned shops of the wholesale merchants in central Port of Spain selling (among other things) brown sugar in jute sacks, the sacks set in the shop doorways, full of flies and bees, the sugar turning liquid in the heat and in a few places oozing through the sacking.
Cartoon by Liana Finck Copy link to cartoon Copy link to cartoon Shop Shop
It didn’t take me long to understand that around this simple love of cats was a whole culture I knew nothing about and would have to master before cats could become fully rewarding. I needed to know about their sanitary needs; I needed to know about litter trays. I needed to know about their food. There was a gadget here that claimed to divide a cat’s food for the day into four portions, keeping all the portions refrigerated and at a fixed time releasing one chilled portion for a lucky cat. Would I be able to get that thing to work? At the end of this knowledge, if it ever came, there were the cat toys which this shop had in abundance: the other side of the grimness of cat life, the little balls, the lengths of string. That first afternoon in the pet shop, I doubted that I would win through to the toys and games.
But, with Nadira’s encouragement, I persevered, and soon I was able, with delight, to follow Augustus’s development. I loved to see him sleeping. I loved to see him stretch (pressing down on his legs, his body curved) when he got up. I loved to see him trotting in grass half as high as he was. He jumped beautifully, assessing the height of the barrier and the narrowness of the ledge that was to receive him. He was a terrific runner; he liked to pretend there was some pursuer behind him, and as he ran he often looked back at this phantom pursuer. These athletic gifts came to him when he was very young, hardly out of kittenhood. I assumed they would be with him forever. It never occurred to me that gifts that had matured so quickly would fade in the same way; I never thought that Augustus’s old age would be marred by arthritis.
But with cats, so brief is their span, every sign of vigor invariably comes with a foreshadowing of decay. Cats, they say, have nine lives, and even in those early days Augustus began to expend his lives. His very first life would have been when, only a few days old, he was thrown away in a dustbin. His second, in our house, was when, having no tutor, no cat he might imitate, he ate or began to eat a mole, and poisoned himself. Feeling death approaching, he ran away from the house, in order to die in the dignity of solitude. This was new to me. I knew it only from a fading memory of French poetry from the sixth form: in the poem by Vigny, this was how the wolf suffered and died, without speaking. It was extraordinary to have this poetic grandeur replicated by little Augustus, so small, so young, and on my own doorstep, so to speak.
He had travelled far on that hard journey which he must have intended to be his last. He had instinctively followed the line of the hedge, which would have concealed him, all the way down to the river. It was as though with what remained of his intelligence and strength he wished now to drown himself. He was at the end of his tether when we found him. He allowed himself to be coaxed back into our hands. He was crying with pain, making a terrible mewing sound. We took him to the house, and the vet came and cured him in no time with modern medicine. Without the medicine he would not have been cured. So he had his luck; with medicine (and a vet always on hand), over the next ten years, he had his many lucky lives.