When the cat came calling

My daughter’s encounters with the feline had their highs and lows.

‘A cat doesn’t care if you are smart or dumb; give him your heart, and he will give you his.”
--President Abraham Lincoln

One evening, my daughter came back from college, visibly excited. The reason was that she had befriended a cat. According to her, the cat chooses its master rather than the master choosing his pet, and so she was elated that the cat chose her as its friend, albeit after a lot of effort on her part. She was ecstatic. She named the cat ‘Inji,’ ginger in Tamil. She went on to narrate how she managed to woe the cat: she first sat near the lazing cat and made cat sounds to attract her attention. It seems that Inji had slowly brushed past her knee to show that she wanted to be friends with her. She narrated that, though she was excited, she remained calm as she could feel the cat’s soft fur touching her. Oh! Did I mention the fact that the cat was pregnant? It seems that made the cat all the more charming.

The next day, she came home and bought cat food from the market, and then she treated me to the story of how she fed the hungry cat! I was getting a blow-by-blow account of her encounters with the cat. The cat wouldn’t allow her to serve more food, even as the feline had licked the place clean after her first serving. “I had to gently move Inji’s head to serve more food. Every time Inji encounters me, she demands I pet her or she won’t even allow me to enter the class,” an excited daughter went on.

Each day, she came up with interesting episodes she had with the cat. One fine day, she came home sad. The cat was not to be seen anywhere on her college premises. While some of her friends said that the cat was mauled by a dog, others said that it might have met with an accident. She was dejected.

Days passed, and the cat’s memory slowly faded away. One day, while she chatted with her friends, she felt something soft touching her feet. She looked down to find her long-lost friend eagerly waiting to be petted. Oh! What a happy reunion it should have been. Incidentally, this reunion took place on International Cat Day, and that made seeing her friend appear out of nowhere even more memorable.

As the saying goes, “What greater gift than the love of a cat?” All’s well that ends well.