My Cat Teacher

 

In nature, nothing exist in vacuum. And so it was when our stray dog adopted by everyone in the building disappeared after a particularly deafening Diwali, her place was taken by a gorgeous ‘tortie’ kitten whom I decided to call Stripey whether she responded to the name or not.

In our area, many cats move from terrace to terrace because of the street dogs below. It was nighttime when I first saw Stripey going down the building staircase. Our eyes had met and she had stopped to look at me. And as simply, our friendship began. She came back every night as I left food for her outside our top floor house door. Soon, she started coming in the morning and afternoon as well.

Stripey was an adolescent when she made this building hers. She was loud and demanding, scratching me, my mom and scaring neighbours in her eagerness to get to her food. She also liked attention and would forever be rolling around our feet or lying down and stretching herself in front of us. This irritated me a lot as it reminded me of my behavior in my younger days. But Stripey was very clear about one thing – she never allowed any one to touch or pet her.

I watched her as she went through her first heat, how confused and in pain she was. She was scared of the attention from this rather gentlemanly male cat, but her instinct made her follow him to the next building. I prayed that she would not get pregnant, as she was still very young. Six months later, during her next heat, she promptly got pregnant.

I was travelling when she gave birth to two kittens in a neighbour’s courtyard. One was weak and died. Stripey became a doting mother to her surviving kitten. Within two days of my return, I heard her downstairs cajoling and encouraging the prettiest kitten to climb three flights of stairs to my door. She wanted to introduce her kitten to me. Needless to say, everyone was smitten.

Motherhood had transformed Stripey dramatically. From an attention seeking kitten, she became poised, patient and deeply attentive to the needs of her kitten. She left his side only when she wanted food. Gone were her hunger tantrums and she retracted her claws when we were around. She meowed once or twice to let us know she wanted food, waiting patiently, eating quickly and rushing back to her son. Cats are known to keep changing sites for their kittens’ safety every two weeks or so. Once, Stripey brought Moje (socks in hindi, as all four paws were white) to our doorstep for two nights before taking him away again. She had sensed in advance that the new site could be unsafe due to the upcoming Lohri celebrations.

One day, my ground floor neighbor called me frantically. Strpiey was badly hurt and she wanted to take her to a vet. I told her to wait and watch. The next morning Stripey came up to me with Moje in tow. She had hurt one of her hind legs and was limping. Strpiey was an agile and prolific hunter and constantly fighting with other cats in the area because of which she was almost always hurt. But this time, I could see her exposed bone and feel the pain in her eyes. I spoke softly to her, tentatively extending my hand to caress her head. This was the first time she allowed me to touch her. I brought an antiseptic and she allowed me to put that on her wound as well. As I watched her recover, she taught me so much about self-care, healing and motherhood. All she did was lick her wound and sleep in the sun allowing her body to heal itself. She did not eat, but would come down with Moje when he was hungry. Something shifted in our friendship during this time. She became more loving and trusting to let me rub her belly and lift her up.  

As Moje was growing up, her form of play with him kept changing with time. Initially it was just play to encourage movement and exploration, then it shifted to a lot of running around and allowing Moje to bite and play. Somewhere it became hiding and attacking as if stalking a prey. Stripey would jump like an Olympic pro in order to avoid his stealth and attack play. The in-between times were filled with a lot of licking and suckling. She would bring him to everyone’s door at particular times, so that he became familiar with feeding times and how to ask for food. When it was time for Moje to learn hunting, she would hunt pigeons, rats and bulbul, all in a day and leave the carcass in front of him. As he grew up, she sometimes feigned aggression to teach him boundaries and how to protect his territory. Unlike other cat moms, she was never competitive about food, always letting Moje eat first.    

In the fifty years of my life so far, no human mother has ever inspired me enough to feel that I should have become a mother. Watching Stripey’s evolution from a kitten to an effortless, matter-of-fact, and graceful mother with so much love for everyone, I suddenly felt a doubt, the first and the only time, if I missed something by not becoming a mother.

Moje is a shy, slow kitten with a barely audible voice. He, like me, is a slow bloomer and Stripey understood this. Cats drive away their kittens after 12-16 weeks to fend for themselves. But Stripey kept Moje with her for 22 weeks sometimes leaving him alone for days. And one fine day, instead of chasing Moje away, she left the building quietly never to return.  

Where is the night?

 

                                                                Paper collage by Bipasha M

The electricity went off in my area. In Delhi. For an hour.

And finally after years, the darkness settled back in. Even if it was for the briefest while. Like one nano second of a heartbeat. A tiny pulse of a long forgotten time and experience that unexpectedly gifted me with a deep sense of calm, aliveness and an awareness of my presence as a human on Earth.

With the electricity gone, the area fell silent. How much we live with white noise around us can be gauged only during such moments. The shops which used to shut at 10pm, closed shutters earlier that day. People who walked the streets at night stopping for ice-cream, also made their way back home. For a precious half an hour, all was dark and quiet around me. There was a soft summer breeze and I could finally hear some insects of the night.    

That night I remembered how much my body misses the rhythm of the darkness. How much my eyes need the rest of the darkness, I saw that night. And for the briefest while, I felt complete in my body, like those of my ancestors who once roamed the land in sync with the rhythm of the Earth.  

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Long hours of ‘load-shedding’ was a common things in erstwhile Bihar while growing up. Many times, power cuts happened because of sudden thunderstorms or cyclonic weather. Our bodies were so tuned to nature then that we never felt the discomfort. Darkness was a much needed ebb and flow of life – a time when families gathered together on the verandahs, laughing, telling stories, watching the stars in the sky, chasing fireflies in dark corners, listening to the sounds of the night. Sometimes, a black cat would sneak past us into the house looking for food taking advantage of the darkness. In smaller towns, we could hear the yelp of the foxes close by. Those were times when we respected the darkness. Even though we spent many hours outside waiting for the electricity to come back, we never ventured beyond our verandahs. There was an unsaid rule that we all followed – not to go into the garden or nature areas; for it was the time of the spirits of the night to own their spaces.

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We had camped somewhere in the Changthang region of Ladakh, 15000ft or more above sea level. It was bitterly cold and a strong wind blew at night. This was way back in the early 2000s when adventure sports gears were not available in India. I had a worn a warm fleeced jacket brought from Benetton and felt chilled to the bone. The rest of the small group of trekkers had retired into the tents, but I stayed outside drawn to the night despite the icy breath of the wind. In that utter darkness of the mountains, the Milky Way shone bright along with a dazzling display of trillions of stars. Countless stars fell and shot across the sky. Somewhere a lone wolf howled. In those moments while I stood transfixed as the wind buffeted me, I felt incredibly tiny. Not insignificant, but tiny. That moment in the darkness was a turning point in my life, a time that eventually changed the course of my life.

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The landscape was raw and felt ancient. It was a stark reminder of what we have lost here in India. The village in east Nepal could be accessed after a 45-minute walk from the main road. Most of the houses in the village had electricity used by yellow 60-watt bulbs. In the night, the light was not so harsh.

One night, the electricity kept switching off and on. In those moments of inky darkness, I would run outside to experience the night. Our host’s lovely family found my behavior peculiar and asked why I was so interested in the darkness. I fumbled for words then. How could I explain what it meant to live in the constant glare of light in the cities, how we cannot see stars in the night sky anymore, not even from mountain villages, how we are disconnected from nature moving towards a darkness of the soul with all the light dazzling around us.

But the question made me realize how much I missed the essence of the night. In cities and elsewhere these days, I feel safer in well-lit places. But my body longs for a space and time when I can be alone with the silence and darkness of the night.

One Rainy August Day

Rain fell in a steady drizzle. The trees and the hills beyond were the colour of moss—dark and ancient. Some old memories stirred. Of dark monsoons days in my childhood when rain fell incessantly and steadily, turning everything wet, silent, and gloomy. Of days of our ancient ancestors when rain rejuvenated the Earth for life to flourish. A pair of lapwing stood guard on top of the asbestos roof that covered the neighbor’s terrace shrieking their heads off whenever a myna or a bulbul came too close. I wondered if they had nested on top of the roof instead of in the fields. They did not, however, shoo the pigeons away who sat along with them in the rain.

The bulbul parents were oblivious to all the shrieking around them. They would just hop in and out grabbing at small bites here and there as the little one fluttered around. I realized that they were not feeding the chick; instead they were teaching the young one the tricks of their trade and how to be smart about reaching to the food. Once in a while, a grey pied myna would fly and disappear into one of the many holes in the dead tree that was still standing next to the gate. It seemed like a magic show—a fleck of grey disappearing and reappearing in the greyness of the clouds and the dead bark. While the rain kept the humans indoor, it brought a shy and introverted black and brown coucal out of its hiding to forage right in the middle of the puddled streets. 

The rain had slowed down and thin clouds fleeted in and out of the distant hills. Water dripped from the huge tree in front of the house. A rain-drenched hush fell as dusk approached. The sound of crickets and other insects grew louder. A pair of owls hooted from top of the dead tree. Bats, replacing the black kites of day time, soared across the dark sky. And late at night when most of the houses had switched off their lights and its inhabitants fallen asleep, a few fireflies showed up in the big tree dancing away in the wet night.

What is Love, Anyway?

 

What if I say that our idea of love is conditioned by the roles we play in our lives – a daughter, a mother, a father, a lover, a husband, a colleague?

What if I say that the roles we play are conditioned by the stories and fables we have grown up with – that we are expected to behave in certain ways if we are to be a perfect wife, a perfect son or a perfect grandson, a good friend?

What if I say that we limit our capacity to love by putting it within definitions – romantic love, motherly love, love for the dog, love for a best friend?

What if I say that real love exists outside these roles and definitions – because love is just simply love, anyway?

What if I say that love is vaster than the realm of the human world – that love pervades the land, animals, trees, Earth and beyond?

What if I say that we are all capable of loving every human, every living soul - be it a tree, an insect, an animal - with as much fierceness as the person you love the most right now?

Can we uncondition ourselves enough to know that what we think of love is just a shadow of the real thing?

Can we uncondition ourselves enough to know that by defining love, we are trying to encompass the universe within a tiny box?

Do we have the courage to open our hearts to the real Love?

The Sea and I

Agatti, Lakshadweep

N Ikka points at the stars ahead. There are three big ones vertically aligned. He says we need to head in the stars’ direction. The sky is inky black, thousands of stars strewn across its vastness. The boat jumps along with the waves as we hold on to the plank we are sitting on. The excitement of being on a fishing boat at night dies down eventually and wonder replaces it. Our whispered conversation ebbs, and F and I just sit there in silence.

The faintest of light appears in the eastern sky, and slowly one by one the stars acknowledge the presence of the approaching sun and begin to recede. In the semi-darkness, much before dawn, F nudges me and points to the back of the boat. Under a still bright crescent moon with a shining star above it sat a fisherman on his mat facing west, deep in prayer. Around us is the silence of the vast ocean.  

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The sun is high in the sky and beating down unrelenting. The sea is indigo blue. I wonder how the fishermen can see through the dazzle of the noon sun. I am wearing my sunglasses, yet squinting through it. But their gaze is fixed scanning the surface of the sea for signs of tuna shoals around. There seems to be none, as we keep going further out into the sea. The live bait fishing early morning was full of excitement for me. It was routine work for the 11 fishermen on the boat. Though they are not, I feel tired and doze off under the shade near the bait fish tank. MK wakes me up with one word – Dolphins.

In one-tenth of a second, I am at the bow of the boat peering down at the blue water. There, just next to our boat, on both sides, are about twenty or thirty dolphins swimming along. So close, I could have touched them if my arms were a little longer. Sharp and sleek bodies moving as fast as the boat. Suddenly, they all move away together. Just as I am thinking that the show is over, they return jumping and frolicking. I want to jump in, touch them, feel them, swim with them, say a big thank you for being with us humans for so long. A few minutes later, they disappear leaving me wondering if it was all real or just magic.

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It’s my last day on the island. I am standing at the edge of the eastern jetty, the deepest blue sea spread ahead of me. There’s something different about the current today. Or so I feel. Small eddies form below the jetty and I can see a shoal of a deepest blue fish. There’s a stillness in the air, a rise in humidity. A sign that a thunderstorm and rains are approaching. I stand there under the afternoon sun in awareness of the ocean that is breathing, ebbing and flowing, in a beautiful dance with the moon. This is where life started, billions of years ago - in the womb of the Earth. I had lived for 12 years in a coastal city, but it is here that I experience her magnanimity and strength. I turn back, forever changed.  

The Speaking Land

This was an attempt at writing prose-poetry for Alpine Fellowship Award. The idea was to try out a different style of writing using the Award as motivation.The topic was civilization and the wild and the post is about my experience with the last standing virgin forests in Chhattisgarh

The land spoke, the children of the land spoke. Only we could not hear, land’s children bred of civilization. 

 

She throbbed with an energy that no human commune, today, can bring to birth. Deep and ancient, it ran through the veins of the forest, held in the trees’ girth. The trees spoke of times when they grew with a wild freedom, carrying with them centuries of wisdom gathered with patience and groundedness. Were they there when our land was drifting in the great wide oceans, I could only guess. These ancient teachers: so old that my life, here on this land, felt just an exhalation long. So huge, their panoramic canopy I could fathom only lying on the forest floor. So tall, I felt like a grain of sand at the base of a Himalayan mountain. The soft winter sun filtering down threw shadows that reminded of a time when my ancestors roamed the land on all fours, their memories perhaps carried in our cells. It made me long, just long, for what, my heart then couldn’t tell. 

 

Oh, you speak of a land, imaginary and magical – you would say. Which ancient forest is left now that speak of age-old tales? It’s no fiction, I say, for its there, still there! Right in the heart of my country, a land of forests filled with tigers, elephants, and bears. Where jungle streams gurgle with happiness and flow with ease. Where tribes live among them deeply caring for others, away from things plastic or life filled with disease. 

 

But young towns nearest to the forests, slowly being fed on adrenaline that is money, were abuzz with the idea of wealth under their feet, forgetting that abundance not wealth lay in the nurturing land and wisdom of grandmother trees. They dreamt of a glitzy life and said rightly – how can you have a forest if you desire a city like Mumbai and a life of ease? 

 

I was following the trail of coal, Earth’s gift but civilization’s greed. And it led me here, India’s last wilderness untamed. Deep in the forest, peopled with innocence, were villages unaware of what civilization had in store. For hundreds of acres of this primeval land were marked for mining, and the rivers for dams to clean the gouged coal. They did not know that their home and a life of peace were being readied to be handed away to companies who termed mining – “clean and green”. 

 

Did anyone ask the land, these ancient trees, the people and other children of the forests, if they wanted their home plundered to fuel the lives of the rich? The forests, trees, rivers, and land are all a waste if not for the use of humans. And animals - are they really there or figment of tribal imaginations? The tribes who ‘are so backward’ as to not even know plastic, will be ‘compensated’ with money and given offers of manual labour to ‘improve their livelihood’, they would preach. 

 

As I stood carrying the weight of consequences, a deep ancient grief as old and huge as the trees, welled up in me. Desperate, I walked inside the forest and looked at the trees. And I whispered, “Sorry for all of humanity’s misdeeds”. In that moment, the forest fell deathly silent, no birds chirped and not a leaf stirred. In that eloquent silence, I understood, without a doubt, that the forest knew what her future held.

 

I turned away helpless, stricken by the collective loss. But even in that loss, I returned with a gift. For now I know that the land speaks and all children of the land speaks - of magic and wisdom, of non-judgment and compassion, of balance and a future shift. 

 

 

In the Land of the Blue-Green Sea

 The east coast was three shades of never-seen-before blue; the west coast a deep green that kept changing with the sun. And I was there, somewhere in the middle, lost in nature’s grandness.

The island of Agatti, like most islands of Lakshadweep, is small and can be covered end-to-end within half an hour, if you are on a motorbike. Which means the sea is always with you wherever you go. The sea’s constant presence, however, did not prevent me from being shocked to momentary stillness every time I caught a glimpse of her colours in the month that I was there. During one thunderstorm that I witnessed, the colours shifted with the mood of the weather – light green, dark green, grey, light blue and dark blue – as if the sea was playing her own grand symphony.            

Placed within a unique geography, Lakshadweep is as beautiful as the tourist brochures want you to believe. Perhaps even more if you get to know the sea. But as life in the island started to reveal itself, it became clear as the water that there is no other place in the country like these islands.    

Agatti: Photo - Bipasha M

Almost the entire population follows Islam as its religion with a floating population of ‘outsiders’ largely in Kavaratti, its capital. Though some anthropologists have mentioned Wahabi and Sunni as the main sects here, one can find many traces of Sufism in their rituals and ancient healing traditions. Socio-culturally, they carry the lineage of their Kerala ancestry. They are a matrilineal society, the only other being Meghalaya, where the property passes from mothers to daughters. Unlike Meghalaya, here the husbands do not stay with the wives but visit them from time to time and have to pay money (similar to dowry) to the wives’ family during marriage negotiations. Apart from the island of Minicoy where social mobility of women is known to be higher, the rest of the islands have patriarchal value system where the men take most of the family and financial decisions. As such, participation of women in community level decision making seemed less, with them functioning mostly in the background. Gender segregation at the society level is high, with free interaction between girls and boys being almost non-existent. All across the island I saw young boys and fishermen largely occupying public spaces including tea-stalls, beaches, markets, and jetties, while groups of women and young girls would mostly chill out at the beach during sunset. This segregation also finds its manifestation in one of the simplest yet most obvious aspect of island life, where girls and women don’t know how to swim and are prone to major sea-sickness while travelling on sea.   

These aspects might make the place seem similar to that of north India’s many highly patriarchal and aggressively ‘male’ cities and villages. But this is where things get fascinating. These islanders are one of the warmest, friendliest, and most hospitable communities I have ever come across in the country. People are ready for some conversation and chai at any point in time. Despite gender segregation, there is high level of dignity and respect for each other, something which I find sorely missing in the plains. After I dropped my ‘mainland’ guard, I walked, sat, cycled freely without any fear or looks over the shoulder, even during times when electricity went off pitching the whole island in absolute darkness. The community operates under an invisible cloak of cooperation and collaboration even when ideologies and ideas did not match, for they know that all are dependent on each other in the small space that is their home. One can easily understand why crime rate is almost nil and incidences of domestic violence limited; I did not hear any raised voice or arguments in the month that I was there. With education a priority for all, marriage and child bearing are much delayed with women getting married after the age of 22 or 23 years and men after 25 years, trends that are in stark contrast to those in the mainland.             

It was sublime, the first day of Ramzan as the island slowed down and time reversed and people hurried to the call to prayers. In the days that followed, I would wake up early every day while the island slept and spend a couple of hours walking from the blue sea to the green one, observing life in the tidal pools, lying down on coconut fronds and watching clouds glide across the blue sky, or sitting quietly listening to the sea and the wind.   

Agatti: Photo - Bipasha M

I had to make a hurried exit from the island due to the covid resurgence across the country and the tightening rules there. As the flight made a turn towards the mainland, the island came into full view from above. A tranquil piece of white and green against a vast backdrop of blue appearing as if in a dream, for I couldn’t make out where the ocean ended and the sky began.

Indigenous earth-based traditions regard water as transformative. Living with a beautiful community in the midst of a world of water, I came back a changed person.