Nine Lives

by Aneela Babar

(Epilogue by Arhaan Babar Ray)

‘And this mess is so big

And so deep and so tall,

We cannot pick it up.

There is no way at all!’

— Dr Seuss, The Cat in the Hat

As a people, we are guilty of repeating our stories. But what if this is not because we have run out of stories to tell? What if we have cornered ourselves in a time loop and now just relive the same anecdotes we are so fond of sharing? My cats are the nine lives I have lived. I may have been trying to write down the story of my life with felines for a while, but here, now, while writing this, I realize that they, in turn, are chronicling all the Aneelas I am—and will be in the coming days. And though all these years I have struggled with change and disruption (and fears, if it results with a homebody cat walking off into the sunset)—what if each episode was actually drawing me closer to the very version of my life I have aspired to?

Part I: Rawalpindi, 1988

I am walking down the street—and there is a cat in the bag. It will take me some years to usher in all the bad puns and references to Schrödinger. Until the cat is out of the bag, for a brief period I can be considered simultaneously a child with a pet or not, both linked to a random event.

The cat escaping.

Suffocating.

Gulp! The mind wanders.

However, in the very same moment, I am self-aware that I have become the worst kind of cliché for my community. A Pashtun walking down a street, with a bag containing something (someone?) that is visibly squirming. I am beside myself just then. For how could it be that despite all the efforts previous generations of Babars may have made, I am walking down the street, an epitome of the Pashtun jo bori mai bacho ko utha kar le jaate hain, a Pashtun that steals your children and puts them in a sack?

Later, much later, years to this afternoon in Rawalpindi, my sister and I will have an exchange where I will ask her:

‘Hey Have You Been Kidnapping Little Children?’

‘Umm, no.’

‘Well, neither have I. This makes two out of three Pashtuns. Who could this third child-snatching Pashtun be then?’

But there, just then, I am a young person, nervous and ultimately thrilled of being simultaneously a cliché and a Schrödinger away from a cat as a pet.

And not just any cat.

This is a cat that has been rescued and fostered by the most glamorous family in Rawalpindi, which, by the way, is simultaneously small-town Pakistan and the power-centre for the country, General Head Quarters, cough cough.

Unless the denizens of the cantonment are readying themselves for another coup, Rawalpindi is every afternoon in Maycomb (Great Depression and rabid-dog-slowing-down-the-town, optional). Until the day a fast bowler will run up to the crease, and the long-haired son of my cat’s foster family will Dil Dil his town onto the map of Pakistan, until then Pindi is small-town, the Army Museum is ‘culture’, and Karachi is abroad. Until then, our years in Rawalpindi are marked by a gardener painting the flowerpots fire-engine red, with a white border, every spring, the flowerbeds prepared and lined with brick that has been carefully whitewashed.

One day I actually look up whether there is a cardinal rule out there somewhere, for the support staff to salute everything that moves and whitewash anything that is stationary. The results of this search remain uncertain. However, I do know for certain that there are clear, if unwritten, rules that govern the turning-on or switching-off of room-heaters and geysers, based on precise dates on the Gregorian calendar. It could very well be that this is a date our grandmothers and General Head Quarters, Rawalpindi, had agreed upon one year. Say it was 1950. Since that year, neither the Rawalpindi grandmothers nor the GHQ have relented. There are no accommodating weather gods or climate change. And so, we shiver under a cold tap on a particularly cruel day in autumn, and wonder at the blazing room-heater in offices on a freak warm winter day.

On this Rawalpindi afternoon, not unseasonably warm or cold, with the cat in the bag, I am walking down a street with gardens similar to mine, lined by trees with identical tree-trunks, whitewashed in the regulation military white. I may not be able to spell social capital. But in a town so provincial, and being a young person so inconsequential, I am hoping to build myself some capital adopting this particular cat. Could aura and charm be passed on if you were a cat-beat away from a charismatic family?

I hope that it is.

Naming my cat in a town like Rawalpindi should be an interesting exercise—should I go with Karnail-ia? Dhol Sipahiya? Jarnail-ia? Captaan Sahib? Askari Meow? But I have read the Bible of Rawalpindi bookshelves: the Reader’s Digest. ‘Try hollering your child’s name out of your kitchen-door twice a day, asking him to get home,’ one of the contributors counselled new parents. As a new cat-parent, I think this over, and consider the prospect of calling out for a Lucifer every afternoon quite attractive. Lucifer. (When the animated rendition of Cinderella came out on VHS, my peers started daydreaming of a flesh-and-blood incarnation of Prince Charming while I lost my heart to the Tremaine family cat, Lucifer.) This wily black cat is my first encounter with charming antagonists with complicated origin stories. Long before the Hindi films Darr and Baazigar—and a very likeable Shahrukh Khan—made us pledge our troth to anti-heroes.

Unfortunately, I know my surroundings are not yet ready for any of my latent anti-establishment tendencies, so I tell everyone that I am naming him Lucifer after the Lucifer match-sticks, as he will grow up to strike everywhere and anything. Sadly, the moniker Lucifer is bastardised as Mausoofa by the help. So Mausoofa he is, until he is christened Miao ji (out of respect) when Chica-the-kitten joins our household.

Before I set out to leave their house with my Lucifer, the matriarch familia glamarosa of the foster-family advises me to rub butter on the cat’s paws once I get home. She explains there is something to the act of licking off the butter from her paws that assures a cat she is finally home.

Aunty does not tell me anything though about what could cure me of being born with a mole under the foot. In a town where spending summer break with grandparents is the most a Rawalpindi child can aspire to, the wanderlust it brought was positively dangerous.

Part II: Melbourne, 2007

My husband has arranged to adopt a kitten while I am away in Rawalpindi. I now live in Melbourne.

Back home, I walk around the kitchen one evening, trying to dodge an extremely active kitten, who darts from under the table to pounce on my toes, as is true to her curriculum vitae. While we have started to share how we are feeling on Facebook these days, we still get our news from the TV and the papers; and so, I hear about Benazir Bhutto’s assassination from the news channels. It is after an election rally in Rawalpindi.

Twenty-eight years ago her father had been led to the gallows from a jail cell in the same town. There are urban legends of how he would stand in the window, looking out towards the Prime Minister House, until I realise that the raconteur may just be confusing him with a certain Shah Jehan, looking out at the Taj Mahal. The old Pindi jail was brought down one year, all except the lone cell that had housed this former premier—the Pakistan People Party is still hoping to build a memorial. One summer, I walked around the site and tried photographing it, but the photo studio returned the film-reel saying it had been exposed to light. I am convinced the jail cell is sacred-land and like capturing poltergeists on film, it is impossible to photograph.⁰¹

Upon hearing of the assassination, I alternate between our shared kitten-care duties and crying for our loss. Ours is a generation that has been scarred by General Zia, and though we had learnt that our dreams for Benazir Bhutto were flawed, the Benazir Bhutto years are as close to Camelot as one can get. And now, between the embers of the bomb blast and the roses on her grave, it seems that these dreams are finally being laid to rest. I am a Bhutto acolyte, yes, but the year before her death saw me critical of her Machiavellian politics.

But this Melbourne morning it seems she is having the last laugh as she becomes immortalized as our slain democrat. In death, she is becoming the elusive Salome of the seven veils of popular imagination, with her obituaries giving tantalizing hints to her real self. From a flighty young woman who consumed paperback romances and sped past us in her yellow MG, searching for the closest Baskin Robbins, she turns into a thorn in the side of a military dictator, a serious foe, indulging in a decade-long struggle to keep her father’s name and political legacy alive. She is at times the workaholic, campaigning long hours through pregnancies, a diligent politician surviving on four hours’ sleep, and then a much-maligned name with corruption and nepotism cases brought against her and her coterie.

I promptly name the kitten Pesho Bibi. (Pesho is Pushto for Cat. Bibi, or lady, sounded a lot like BB.)

Months later, there is an evening when my husband walks past an abandoned microwave in the kitchen—we have read an article about the perils of microwaved food. The cat now uses it as a vantage point to perch upon and play staring matches with the tabby from next door. I am watching a film on SBS in the living room, waiting for dinner.

The man sets two plates while lounge music plays on a laptop in the kitchen. The cat, from its corner, twitches its ears. So much cordiality and joviality does not bode well. Follow the two, she tells herself.

And so she does, from the kitchen to the living room, curling between legs, wondering why no one is paying attention to the TV any more. The humans are getting moony-eyed, her cat-radar catching signals that soon there might be mischief afoot. Must not let them get out of my cat-sight, must follow the humans. And so she follows the one who is getting a bottle of fragrant oil, while the other potters around the house putting dishes and glasses away. The humans make their way to the room on the landing; however, she too is quick; right on their non-tails in hot pursuit. No, no! They are closing the door now. Must. Not. Let. Them. Do. That.

The cat can hear one of them whispering inside now, and starts scratching the door.

‘Do something, I don’t think Pesho is going to go away.’

‘Ignore her.’

My own memories of that evening include looking up from the bed at one point, to the sight of a cat’s paw wedged under the door, furiously trying to wrest it open.

I burst out laughing.

People might say that getting a cat may help anxious couples in getting pregnant. Let us just say I got lucky despite all its efforts to hijack the project.

Motherhood—and being mother to Pesho and the Baby-in-the-Pram is not easy. There are days when I watch the baby and the cat stretched out on a blanket in the sun and get homesick for Rawalpindi winter afternoons, when the sun is out, but someone will complain, ‘This is not a good winter sun to sit out in, garmee nahee hai is mey!’I coax the cat to come down from the wall, and the baby to release the grass blades in his fist, reminiscing of other winter afternoons like this, when I played with a cat, all the while my heart sinking that the day is ending and there is so much homework to do.

On other days, the leaves turning red in Melbourne bring to mind memories of a cat diving under a canopy of red and purple leaves. And so I live and walk the lanes of a town that is now becoming familiar, even if I miss the streetscape of another. And, before long, my mind starts playing tricks with me—coaxing me that if I follow Pesho’s lead and escape behind the fence, I will emerge into a Rawalpindi afternoon and frequent the streets I crave.

I go back to these mind-games over and over, using the cats I meet as a portal to other streets, other timelines. I speak to these cats in Pushto.

Eventually, I have to move countries. Again. And am losing Pesho Bibi to quarantine rules. She is a fair dinkum Aussie and like generations of Brahmins who were at the danger of losing their faith once they crossed the kaala pani, she too is facing the risk of being excommunicated if she follows my gypsy stead.

I had planned to only be away for a year, but this year has now stretched to a decade.

Over the coming years, I visit Pesho Bibi each Christmas with my boy, and for a while he tells people that he has a sister who we have left behind in Australia.

I am living now in cities with my house-door locked to the outside world, telling myself it will be great to pretend it is the 1950s. For me, the 50s were the decade for good Hindi cinema, and so I too can be happy if I channel those years. Oh, the places I can go. But I have parked myself in the ‘The Waiting Place’, waiting, waiting, waiting for something (or someone) to happen, to break me out of my vigil. Later, I will read Marie Popova and how ‘happiness comes at us unbidden and elemental, there is almost a terror to its coming—to the totality of it, to the way it submerges and saturates and supinates us with something vast and uncontrollable and sublime, thrusting us past the limits of our longing’ and see myself in her words.

I decide never to keep cats again, spare the toddler—a child of diaspora— the heart ache I carry.

And so, to that end, I have installed the Japanese mobile game Neko Atsume on our gadgets; we busy ourselves trying to lure rare cats to the yard. We subscribe to cat-memes and create folders on our laptop. I have outsourced the cat-shaped hole in our hearts to cat-cafes. I plan school holidays around the desirability and access to cat-cafes and take photographs every summer with a rainbow bouquet of haughty cats. We sanitize our hands and put on carpet slippers, promise the staff that we will not touch any of the cats, we buy treats for them and are thrilled when they stoop to play with us.

My family takes a look at the photographs of us ensconced on sofas, trying to get as many cats in the camera frame. They remember the cat lady who had parked herself in front of the National Defence College in Rawalpindi. An old woman had fashioned herself a residence from wooden crates and tarpaulin, and spent her day plying skeins of wool and string, surrounded by her beloved cats. Every afternoon, she would hoist a bag on her shoulders, and walk the bazaar, crossing the photo studio around the corner with the framed photographs of long-haired US Marines in shalwar kamiz, posing with Darra Adamkhel guns. A local newspaper once did a feature on this cat lady of Lalkurti, Rawalpindi. But for the most, she was left to her own devices. When our love affair with the Americans waned, there were rumours that The Cats and Her were American spies clandestinely conducting surveillance of the National Defence College.

(I step away from my laptop to jot down a WhatsApp message to my mother, asking her when we last saw the woman with the many cats. My mother writes back: ‘She sat opp building which I think was national assembly. But what was it before that? Building has changed so many hands.’

I reply, ‘Im talking about the Lalkurti woman. Was the NDC building ever the National Assembly????’

*doing a quick search online*

‘Yes. It was Ayub Hall.’

Damn.)

The building, which hosted Pakistan’s national legislature while they waited out the shift of capital from Karachi to Islamabad, was the National Defence College of my childhood and later, it became the Pakistani-army run National University of Science and Technology. It is now the Garrison Human Resource Development Centre, a fun fact which tells you more of my country’s tryst with militarism than anything else.

I am back on the phone with my mother and she insists that those were kinder years—a woman could live on the streets if she was white-haired and didn’t mean anyone harm. Little boys didn’t throw stones though clearly she was struggling with emotional health. It could very well be that, around the same time, when the old lady with the cats was asked to move because Colonel/Brigadier/General sahib’s car is on the way, men started violating women’s bodies. Cats, buildings, women: there is Rushdie’s Salim Sinai-es-que being mysteriously shackled to history, our destinies and fates ‘indissolubly chained to those of (our) country’.

Part III: Delhi, 2020

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,

it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief,

it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness,

it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.

—Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

The world wakes up to sourdough starters and banana bread, Dalgona coffees and Zoom parties. My son and I bring home two cats. Maybe I am tired of saying Oh But I Have Always Had Cats or that my perfectly planned world and calendar has been so shook up that I am ready for what heartache may come.

Two cats.

Thing One and Thing Two.

Twiddle Dee Twiddle Dum.

Oh, no, no, no Dipankar, you haven’t got it at all—the primeval texture of Indian philosophy is that of Duality… yes, Duality…

The warp and weft of our ancient garment, the sari itself—a single length of cloth which yet swathes our Indian womanhood—the warp and weft of the universe itself, the tension between Being and Non-Being—yes, indubitably it is Duality alone that reigns over us here in our ancient land.

—Vikram Seth, A Suitable Boy

Some say, compar’d to Bononcini

That Mynheer Handel’s but a Ninny

Others aver, that he to Handel

Is scarcely fit to hold a Candle

Strange all this Difference should be

’Twixt Tweedle-dum and Tweedle-dee

—John Byrom, Tweedle-dum and Tweedle-dee

I see my cats and begin drawing parallels with Saleem and Shiva from Midnight’s Children. If one is a meticulous planner, the other rushes into adventures that involves us defying the lockdown and walking in the street in the middle of the night, calling out plaintively. If one is emotionally needy, the other watches us from a distance, biding time until we have won his approval.

We take our time naming them. Wait till their personalities develop, we tell each other. If I have ensured that our boy has a name that accommodates the duality of his Pakistan and India lives, why deprive the kittens of theirs?

Should their name be a requiem to all the cats I have ever loved? Should it be a hat tip to my love for Hindi popular culture: Chor and Sipahi? Karan and Arjun? Jai and Veeru? Lata and Noor Jehan? Ganga and Indus? Lahore and Benares? Sachin and Shahid?

A friend suggests that we name them 14 and 15 (August). Numerical names are greatly underestimated, it seems. The two fight and make up enough to live up to those names.

I hum, Muhabbat men nahi hai farq jeene aur marne ka/ Usi ko dekh kar jiite hain jis kafir pe dam nikle.

(When it comes to love there is not much difference between life and death. We draw a breath each time we catch a glimpse of our assassin.)

It soon transpires that I should name them Marie and Kondo as they proceed to demolish all that sparked joy in my life. Crockery, curtains, sofas, books, the newspaper, treats, a copper attar dan that had survived Partition and my moves across continents to return to India. (It is a clean break and I dub it ‘Breaking India’ and tell my boy that even Radcliffe was kinder.)

Well-wishers despair at our home and marvel at our courage to persevere. I quote the ‘Eastern beloved’ theory to explain my relationship with the cats. Just as in days of yore, a lovelorn poet would tell the world: no, no, my beloved is not snooty and cold-hearted, why do you assume so? I lament the intermediaries instead who will not deliver this missive to my beloved. Truth be told, my beloved would willingly reciprocate my love, but if only.

My cats are not that bad, I say. They can be really sweet and kind, it is just the times that are cruel and disorienting. We just have to wait.

One afternoon, I watch my cats who, depending on the time of the day, usually station themselves in a window, a balcony, by an open door, to watch what is happening in the streetscape below. Shades of Bazeecha-e-itfal hai duniya mere aage/ Hota hai shab-o-roz tamasha mere aage… The world is but a child’s playground before me, night and day a playhouse hosts performances before me. One of the cats stretches on his hind legs, preparing to claw his way up the bamboo fence that forms our balcony wall, all so he can enter into a staring competition with the cows that have parked themselves downstairs.

There is something however to how the cat peers across the fence that takes me back to my street in Rawalpindi and the deposed dictator who was placed under house arrest four houses down from us. After the initial excitement, the man became part of the street topography. No more so when he would clamber up a wooden crate to look at the world from the gap in the hedge bordering his compound. Some chapters are yet to be whitewashed from Rawalpindi’s history, the flailing energies of the constant gardeners notwithstanding.

Other afternoons, I look at my notebooks, my words interspersed with lines which read like a Ouija Board to me when I re-read them, steering me one way or the other. This is what I finally distill.

1) We cannot consign to history what is so much part of our present;

2) You should never move back to where you came from, because that’s where everything went wrong, the place you’ve been trying to escape from was inside your head your whole life.

Epilogue Delhi, 2021

Hi, I’m the Baby mentioned earlier. My name is Arhaan Babar Ray.

I am a proud owner of two cats. Jude and Bibigul. Frankly, Bibigul is a sweetheart. Jude is a true foodie. In fact, I think Jude would sell our organs for a bowl of dry food—we feed him every three minutes. Bibigul actually walks up to me and begs for pets and scratches.

I remember the day we got them, the first thing they did was poop in the cat litter. Now it’s not always that way.

These cats are quite naughty too. My grandmother did give us a fair warning though. In her words: ‘Agar ye Dilli ke ladke intne gande hain, to billi kaise honge?!’ If Delhi boys are so terrible, what would you expect of their cats. And of course, she was right.

Like mentioned earlier, they have done their fair share of damage. My mother has been telling me that every morning Bibi slaps her with her paw for food, and then bites her toes. I have experienced the toe-biting myself but the slaps, I don’t know. Jude likes Mama though. And Bibi loves me.

Fun fact: Bibigul is a girl’s name but he’s a boy. Apparently, this is not the first time my mother accidentally named a boy-cat as a girl. My mother’s cat in Rawalpindi was a Chico, not the ‘Chica’ she named him.

Another fun fact: When my mother was writing her part of the chapter, the cats kept coming close to her and sleeping on the table. Now they’re coming next to me. I feel that they know what we are doing and want to contribute too!

I always wanted cats when I was younger. I feel they’re much more civilized than dogs or other animals. But now, when I got these cats, I feel that these dilli ke bacchae are just as naughty.

Anyway, it’s time to feed them.

(Otherwise, Jude will end my free trial of life.)