Reflection of a Dead Cat

It had just rained. Only sparingly though. It was a kind of a plaintive rain. I loved that, especially with the summer sun gleaming so furiously. I couldn’t help but feel a kind of a tepid irritation at the temperature. You could always wash off the sweat but the languid air of the afternoon gives me a kind of sickness I cannot easily get rid of. A kind of fatigue settles in me. I look at the slumbering dogs in the street with an amiable envy.

I think with a hot head that cruelty is a kin of life. Then one must ask oneself: how to deal with this cruelty. It was just yesterday, on the road, I saw a dead cat, its head smashed. ‘Ugh!’, my mother shrieked behind me, in the scooter. Then I was reminded yet again how people link a sense of ugliness to these cruelties of life. It was what differed us, I thought. For in that moment, as I saw the orange dead thing, I felt pity and sorrow. I wanted to pick up the cat and give it a funeral, but I had to bring mother to a clinic. And anyway mother has never really been fond of cats. Or dogs. Or anything. Her body aches. Ulcer, the doctors say. And other many undiagnosed issues. One that hasn’t been under speculation, her loathsome view of life. Whether it is a disposition that she has been induced to due to her illness, or it’s the other way round, I cannot possibly say. But what I know, what I have seen is her sullen gaze. Her ashen, drooping face. And her worrisome temperament.

I remember there used to be a litter of kittens in our house. It was the upper tenant’s pets. Mother would never allow them down. Not even in the corridor. Down the slope of the stairs, there was our kitchen which could be entered through the triangular opening beside the baluster-wall. A perfect side route for the kittens to enter into our kitchen. I used to sleep in the room right opposite the kitchen. As I was mostly awake during the early half of the night, I would hear them sneak. There used to be leftover milk from the day but it would be locked inside the fridge, which mother put extra caution on. Some nights, they would knock a few steel bowls and it would make a long sharp rattle. I feared mostly that it would wake mother up and they would have to flee, abandoning their sly mission. On some nights, I would go and pour some cold milk on a flat plate and keep it on the lower tread of the stair. And before going to bed, I would go back and put the plate after cleaning it. That way mother would never know what transpired as she slept.

Mother says she can’t drink milk as her piles gets worse. She doesn’t eat meat either. I hardly talk to my mother so I don’t know much about her illness, what foods she has to cut off to a meagre limit of permissible meals. I remembered these due to the sad case of the stray cat. Most people walk past such a spectacle with a twitch of nose, a foul disgust rubs on them, but since yesterday I feel a twitch in my bosom and I cannot forgive myself for passing by the cat without giving it a final adieu.

‘It’s so fucking hot!’, my friend shouted, as we got off his scooter and walked inside a tea shop. I had been thinking of the cat all through the ride that I don’t even know what else he talked about. I couldn’t tell him all that. ‘It’s just a cat’, he would say. Or something like that. Or perhaps he would nod and look listless and light his cigarette as he did so. It didn’t matter. I couldn’t say it out loud. I always feel like whenever I talk of sensitive things its effect is reduced as soon as it leaves my throat. I always imagine a heavy air and dense silence to follow it but it passes away like a cloud. So I assume a quiet persona. I stayed silent and lit a cigarette likewise.

Twice. It’s twice now that I have diluted my sensibility. Is it my response towards cruelty? To tone it down? Then I am no better than people who frown and disgust at it. I know it. I do it all the time. I slowly dilute the sensation until I can no longer feel it. Then my heart becomes insensitive. Then whether I see a man flinging a helmet against another’s head in a street brawl or protestors lighting fire on their opposition vehicle, it hardly makes me feel a thing. I have no sensitivity towards people who have given in to the cruelty of life. There are quite a lot of them. Those who in response to that cruelty become cruel themselves.

Mother is not the cruel kind. ‘I have faced a lot. No one is more ill-fated than I am. Yet I have learnt to bear my fate.’, she once said to me, with a mixture of pride and frailty that shocked me. Some people learn to bear things. It is their only grace. I find it both sad and relieving. But still there’s a bitterness impinged on that bearing. It’s still better than retorting into violence as that would be horrible for the world. I thought the world must be filled with people like that. And from then on, I had made a vow with myself not to turn out like them.

It has started to rain. A gentle rain. The temperature has gone down slightly. I think of the dead cat’s fur getting wet in the rain if it hasn't already been taken away. I have seen flat dried dead animals on the streets quite a lot. So it might be possible that still vehicles must be running over it. Last night, on my bed, as hard rain fell outside, a brooding dark lying over me, I had thought that the world was mourning for the cat. A satisfying farewell. And I felt then that the world is equally generous as it is cruel. It must be so, isn’t it? The world must have no personality. It is us who respond to it who have either a bleak, meek or comic disposition. We turn out one way or the other. Obviously the world cannot have a personal favoritism or grudge over anyone. Yet people seem to so easily forget that neutrality. Though it is reasonable: we cannot favor both generosity and cruelty at once.

Maybe some people think that this is only a rat-trap. A potato hooked on the thin metal inside the rat-trap, its mouth open in invitation. The potato stands for generosity for the rat that hasn’t perhaps eaten in weeks. The entrapment that succeeds it — cruelty. In the early summer days, rats would run amok in my room. There were three of them if I am not wrong. I found their company amiable. I do not maintain a preference in companions. I took them as my pets. They used to live right above me, on the gable space under the upper ridge of the roof. And they had made the window grills their commute to my room. I was amazed at that. I saw them as rat-ninjas. Though their effort hardly bore fruit to them for there would be nothing in my room to eat. I hardly ate myself. On nights I did, I would leave leftovers for them. Or would leave fruits under the water-tank for them. It was my landlord who had me put the trap in my room. I hadn’t complained. He had found them out on his own and wanted to get rid of them. I gave in to his sense. I couldn’t tell him how I pitied them. When one fell in the trap, I didn’t tell that to him, but for two nights kept feeding it through the tiny holes in the trap. He eventually found out. All three rats died. Yet again my sensibility had failed me. It made no difference. Sensibility without action is futile. It doesn’t make the world any better.

I had thought for long that with age people become a bore. But it isn’t exactly that. It isn’t age. It is their emotional decay. It is the loss of a genuine reaction to cruelty that makes one boring. An abject lack of sense of this primordial cruelty of life. Then perhaps mother, by her disgust, is still better than a lot of them. Maybe rage is favorable to a quiet inaction. I have been getting worse with each mutilation of my sensibility. My only uplifting virtue is that I can still feel the irritation of temperature. The shifting of weather. The melancholia of rain. In which one cannot anyway do anything to alter. Only most shade themselves from it. I preserve my sensibility by drowning in it.