The Trouble with a Cat

by Sandip Roy

There were two things that Soham knew as immutable truths.

He hated cats.

And he hated fish.

Everything else he thought was subject to change. Like how as a child the yolk of eggs repulsed him. Now he loved it, scooping out the dense golden center of a hardboiled egg like crumbly sunshine. ‘Sunny side up,’ he told the waiter at the diner on the corner of Church and 15th Street. Two eggs any style with bacon or sausage it said on the menu. Breakfast served 24 hours.

‘That’s what you always get,’ said Derek, laughing gently. ‘Sunny side up.’

Soham smiled sheepishly. It was true. He was a creature of habit, gently blurring into his father. The diner buzzed with noise and laughter, and the walls plastered with old posters seemed to sweat coffee and fried eggs. Someone had fed coins in the jukebox and it was playing the Supremes. Derek ordered a spinach and cheese omelette. Soham was content. The universe was spinning in a very orderly fashion.

At that precise moment, Derek turned to him and said, apropos of nothing, ‘think we should get a cat.’

The universe braked to a halt around him. He imagined omelettes and pancakes and ketchup bottles sliding off the tables and crashing to the floor.

‘Why do you think we should get a umm—that?’ Soham asked cautiously, as if even saying the word would make it materialise between them. In the forests of the Sundarbans, near Calcutta where he was from, the villagers never took the name of the tiger, afraid it would summon the beast.

Derek just looked at him. Soham recognised the look. It meant he had again committed some cultural transgression like falling asleep at the opera or not realizing Derek had made the pasta sauce from scratch. Derek picked up his fork and struck the bottle of ketchup with it. Then he said, ‘Because now that we have a house we need a cat to make it a home.’

It was spring in San Francisco, the spring they bought a house together. It was the first house he had ever owned in America. The little two-bedroom two-bath house, the colour of lemon cream, clung precariously to the San Francisco hillside, as though an extra-strong gust of wind would send it tumbling. It was advertised as needing some TLC. That was the only reason they could afford it. Soham could hardly believe he owned a house in San Francisco. For years he had lived out of suitcases, very proud that his entire life fit into his Honda hatchback.

Derek called it his commitment issue. ‘You can’t even commit to a piece of furniture,’ he’d said once. ‘I’m always afraid I’ll wake up one morning and find you have gone back to India.’

They had been dating for almost four years. On a foggy April morning Soham had signed his name to a piece of paper that tied him to 1090 square feet in San Francisco. The first time they sat in the empty living room, eating cold fried rice and chicken with black bean sauce from the cheap Chinese takeaway, Soham realised there was no going back. Derek was talking about where to place the couch. Soham was wondering how he would tell his mother he had bought a house in San Francisco and was moving in with his boyfriend.

That night after they got home from the diner, Soham called his mother. She knew about Derek but they’d never quite acknowledged it. She listened silently while he nervously rambled on about mortgage interest tax breaks and investment values. Then when he had run out of steam, she asked, ‘Does that mean you are settling in America?’

Soham froze. He watched Derek carefully arranging spices in alphabetical order in the kitchen cabinet. Once, all his spices lived in plastic bags and empty yogurt containers while Derek’s were in spice jars. No longer. Cumin. Oregano. Panchphoran. Poppyseed. Rosemary. Turmeric. Their lives had merged into identical matching clear spice jars with white lids. He changed the subject to his mother’s health but her question hung in the air until as if by some unspoken agreement they both turned their backs to it.

In bed that night Soham pulled Derek close to him and buried his face in his hair. He kissed his earlobe and then said, ‘What about a dog?’

‘Cats are low maintenance,’ said Derek. ‘With our jobs, it’s not fair on a dog.’

Soham sighed, ‘Why do you like cats so much?’

‘I’ve always grown up with cats,’ Derek replied. ‘It’s nice to come home and see your cat sitting at the window staring out. Why do you hate cats so much?’

Soham could visualise the cat at the window in a Hallmark card sort of way. But he sighed and said, ‘I don’t like cats, just as I don’t like fish. There’s no reason. It just is.’ In the dark he could sense Derek smiling at him.

The next day Derek took him to Hamano Sushi. ‘But I don’t eat sushi,’ he protested as they walked to the restaurant.

‘You can eat teriyaki if you must,’ Derek said, pushing him along. It started with just trying a little bit of the California roll. Then he got more adventurous and reached for the Philadelphia roll with its tangy cream cheese and smoked salmon. Then in a giant leap of faith he tried raw fatty tuna. To his amazement he quite liked it.

‘It’s not fishy with that icky black oily skin like fish curries back home,’ he said in a tone of wonder. As a little boy he would pout over his dinner if there was fish. ‘Too fishy’ he’d whine, his nose crinkled up in distaste at a rohu curry. ‘Too oily’ he’d complain about the koi that had his aunts breathless in anticipation. ‘Too many bones.’ The litany of complaints was endless.

His mother was flabbergasted. How on earth had a fish fanatic like her produced a boy like Soham? Especially in a place like Bengal, where you could barely eat anything without being impaled on a fish bone. Innocuous green leafy vegetables would get jazzed up with leftover fish skin and bones. The dal might have a fish head swimming in it for special occasions.

As he smeared pungent green wasabi on his tuna roll, and garnished it with a shell-pink sliver of pickled ginger, Soham felt that in the middle of San Francisco he had miraculously regained his cultural heritage. He was no more a fish outcaste.

‘I might be able to actually sit down and eat fish with my mother if she ever comes to San Francisco,’ he told Derek dipping his tuna roll into the soy sauce.

Derek smiled at him and Soham knew that he was going to demand payment for breaking the fish curse.

‘Meow,’ said Derek.

‘At least let’s get a short haired one,’ Soham mumbled, trying to assert some modicum of control over the situation. ‘And it has to be black. To match the couch.’

The cat Derek chose was a short-haired jet-black kitten with golden saucer eyes.

‘Isn’t he cute?’ Derek stuck his finger out at the kitten.

Soham shrugged and quoted Ogden Nash.

The trouble with a kitten is that

It grows into a cat.

‘You always say that,’ Derek said, rolling his eyes. The little thing inched forward tentatively and sniffed at the finger.

‘Whatever,’ Soham said grumpily. But watching Derek’s face light up as he scratched the kitten’s chin, he knew he was going to give in. He would do anything to see his face light up like that. He’d never told him that of course. It seemed too flowery. He couldn’t imagine his father ever saying that to his mother.

They named the cat Dumbledore. Harry Potter was one of the few books they both managed to read and enjoy. Soham had bought the book for his niece before one of his annual trips to India. Derek had stayed up till two in the morning to finish the book before he left.

‘You have to read it,’ he told him, tucking the book into his carry-on bag. Soham had been dismissive. His choice of fiction tended to be more from the Booker prize shortlist. But he’d tried Harry Potter on the airplane on the long journey. ‘You were right,’ he’d said when he called from India. ‘It was a great read.’ He could tell Derek had been pleased. It made Soham smile but he never told Derek that.

For the first few weeks he kept his distance from the cat. The cat, he made clear, was Derek’s. He needed to get it cat food, change its litter and make sure it got its shots. Soham felt that by tolerating it in the house he had come more than half-way. In the morning, if he was up before Derek, it would come padding up to its food bowl and mew piteously. Soham would turn on his electric toothbrush and try to block out its accusing little cries. Once it coughed up a little hair ball. Soham couldn’t bring himself to touch it.

‘It grosses me out,’ he complained later.

‘What would you do if we had a baby and it soiled its diapers?’ Derek demanded.

About to protest, Soham stopped himself. It was just about a cat he told himself, let’s not make it a training course for having a baby.

The next day when he woke up the cat was sitting on the comforter at the foot of the bed. It looked at him and stretched. He wagged his finger at it. ‘Not on the bed,’ he said. It swatted his hand with its little paw. As he stood in the bathroom, his eyes still half-closed, brushing his teeth, it came up and offered its head to be scratched.

One day when he came home from the gym on a warm Sunday afternoon, he found Derek napping in bed. The open copy of Time magazine lay on the pillow next to him. The sunflowers he had picked up at the farmers market were in a vase above the bed. And Dumbledore sat on his chest, curled into a little ball, purring gently. He stood at the door watching the little tableau. A lock of his chestnut hair trailed across Derek’s face. The warm buttery sunshine streamed across the bed and his belly. The cat looked at him out of those round golden eyes and twitched its tail. He never forgot that moment. That was the moment he made peace with Dumbledore.

One day he noticed he was talking to Derek through Dumbledore.

‘Hey,’ he told the cat. ‘Go tell your daddy to get ready.’

In August, his mother announced she was coming to visit. It would be the first time she met either Derek or Dumbledore. She knew about Derek but had not been warned about Dumbledore.

‘She’s going to hate me,’ Derek said flatly.

‘Of course not. Why would she?’ Soham said defensively.

‘Because I am a man. I’m not Indian. And I have a piercing. Should I go on?’ Derek retorted. ‘Perhaps I should move out while she is here.’

‘Don’t be silly,’ Soham said. But a part of him knew life would be easier for all concerned if he did.

On the day his mother arrived, Derek got some calla lilies for her room. He placed the vase in the bedroom and went back to cooking chicken. Soham said he was sure she would have eaten on the plane. ‘Just in case, anyway,’ said Derek, his lips pursed over a copy of Madhur Jaffrey’s Quick and Easy Indian Cooking that he’d had express delivered.

In the end his mother had said nothing about the lilies though she managed to thank Derek for the chicken. Most of it she packed for Soham’s lunch the next day.

The rest of her trip she took over the kitchen and had already cooked three dishes by the time either he or Derek came home from work. Madhur Jaffrey languished on the counter.

But while she managed to compliment Derek on her chicken curry, the cat was a different matter.

‘My goodness, I didn’t know you had a cat,’ she screamed as she watched Dumbledore amble up the stairs. The cat, froze.

‘Oh my god, look how it stares at me,’ she said.

‘Ma, it’s just a cat,’ Soham said placatingly.

‘Just a cat? You know how I am around cats,’ she said sharply. ‘Where did you pick up such bad habits from?’ He noticed she was looking at Derek as she spoke.

‘Come here, kitty,’ said Derek evenly. He poured his dry food into a bowl.

‘My goodness,’ said his mother. ‘Its own special food. At least cats in India just ate what they could find—fish bones and mice.’

If Soham had hoped the cat would grow on her just like it had on him, he was mistaken.

His mother would try not to show her hostility in front of Derek and accepted it as a grim peculiar fact of life in America—on par with toilet paper, fat-free milk, seat belts and Derek. But when Derek was out of sight, Soham would hear a few choice Bengali expletives flung at the cat and an emphatic ‘Shoo, shoo,’ followed by a fake kick. Fake, because the last thing she wanted to do was physically touch the cat. Unlike cats in India, Dumbledore had never encountered someone like this hissing spitting woman before. He appeared flabbergasted.

‘Why don’t you do something before she kills the cat?’ demanded Derek.

Soham tried to explain cats in India were regarded as dirty scavenging beasts, mangy creatures that prowled along walls sneaking up to snatch a fish head when the cook wasn’t looking.

‘You won’t understand,’ he finally said wearily. How could he take him to his childhood, he wondered. There would be yappy white Spitzes with names like Fluffy, and Alsatians as big as wolves, fat-bellied orange goldfish, a bright green parrot that loved to eat red chillis. But cats just prowled the neighbourhood like thieves in the night, yowling and mating, scattering chicken feathers and fish bones on the terrace, hiding their little blind naked kittens in the coal bin.

It was the first time he felt a gulf between them that he could not bridge with a story. It was too many oceans apart, in languages that made no sense to him.

Two days later he was woken by his mother screaming. He rushed out of the bedroom to find her standing in the middle of her room clutching her housecoat around her. In the middle of the floor, between the door and her bed, lay a small dead mouse its little legs frozen in mid-air.

‘Ohh,’ she screamed. ‘Look what I see the first thing in the morning. I am going to be sick.’

‘It’s a peace offering,’ said Derek who had come up behind Soham.

‘Peace?’ spluttered his mother in indignation. ‘Soham, get rid of this mouse at once. And the cat.’

‘This is pretty gross,’ said Soham as he tried to find something to pick up the mouse with. ‘Also you didn’t have to call it a peace offering.’

‘It’s not the cat your mother dislikes, Soham,’ said Derek. ‘Don’t you get that? Here. Move. Let me get rid of the mouse.’

When he came home that evening, he found Derek sitting in the garage with the cat on his lap.

‘Is something the matter?’ he said. Derek just looked at him but didn’t answer. The cat stared at him as well and meowed. Then he noticed its food bowl filled with salmon kibbles in the corner.

‘Oh, you moved the food bowl down from the kitchen,’ he said. ‘Probably a good idea, to get it out of my mom’s hair.’

‘I didn’t move the food bowl,’ said Derek, his voice taut, while he stroked the cat’s head.

‘Oh,’ Soham said, unsure what to do. Upstairs he could smell the frying onions as his mother cooked dinner. ‘It’s just a little while longer,’ he said placatingly. ‘Her cooking dinner is her own peace offering.’

‘She’s cooking your favourite things. For you,’ said Derek with a shrug.

‘Well I can’t ask her to not cook for me,’ replied Soham. ‘I mean I didn’t want her to make it.’

‘That’s the problem isn’t it, Soham? What do you want?’ Derek said and looked away.

It was time, Soham thought, to unleash the sushi.

His mother was skeptical.

‘Ma,’ Soham said proudly. ‘You must. I am sure you’ll love it—it’s fish and rice after all. Derek’s the one who taught me to enjoy it.’

‘You won’t eat my fish curry and you’ll eat fish sliced by some Japanese stranger!’ protested his mother.

At the restaurant, he expansively asked Derek to do all the ordering. Derek looked at his mother questioningly.

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ she said, nervously looking at the chopsticks. ‘You choose. I don’t know these fish.’

Derek asked for forks when he did the ordering and then poured out the green tea.

‘Green tea,’ she said gingerly taking a sip. ‘It’s different but very light. Not bad.’ Soham exhaled and smiled reassuringly at Derek. When the sushi arrived festooned with bits of avocado and sprinkled with glowing orange fish roe, Romola looked at it approvingly. ‘It’s pretty,’ she said smiling at Derek.

But as soon as she took her first bite of fatty tuna Soham knew it had all been a dreadful mistake. She gulped it down with water and put her fork down.

‘Are you okay?’ said Derek worriedly.

‘Yes,’ said Romola miserably. ‘I am just not so hungry. It’s so cold and clammy.’

‘Well, you don’t want warm raw fish,’ said Derek.

Soham saw the color drain from his mother’s face.

‘Raw fish?’ she said weakly. ‘Like raw raw? Doesn’t it make you sick?’

‘It doesn’t taste fishy,’ mumbled Soham.

‘You didn’t explain to your mother it was raw?’ Derek’s voice had a sharp edge.

Trapped in between them, Soham looked from one to the other, paralysed, unable to say anything. He wanted to say that he just wanted to please them both. But nothing came out.

Finally, Derek said, ‘Let me order some tempura. It’s fried vegetables and shrimp.’

‘It’s alright,’ his mother said. ‘I have some leftover dal and rice at home anyway. Don’t worry about me.’ Then she turned to Soham and said in Bengali, ‘Raw fish? What am I—a cat?’

As they got into the car Derek turned to Soham and hissed, ‘I can’t believe you didn’t tell her and just left it all to me. It was your big idea.’

That night in bed he reached out to Derek but he curled away from him. The cat was purring at his feet. Soham poked at it with his toe but it wouldn’t budge. He lay awake for awhile. From his breathing, he knew Derek was awake too. He wanted to tell him things, he wanted to explain things, but he just lay there letting the inky silence grow between them. He imagined it rising like water in a dammed river, slowly filling up the space between them, the clock radio with its phosphorescent digital numbers floating away like a little tugboat. When the sun on his face jerked him awake, he felt he had been awake all night.

When he took his mother to see an Indian music concert at Stanford University he didn’t ask Derek if he wanted to go. ‘I knew you’d be bored,’ he told him. Derek nodded as if he understood. Halfway through the concert Soham noticed his mother’s eyes were closed as her lips silently formed the words to the song. She opened her eyes and saw Soham looking at her. She smiled and gently shook her head.

‘It was your father’s favourite song. We didn’t often go to concerts but I’d hear him singing it in the bathroom when he took his shower.’

Soham felt a pang as sharp as the sting of wasabi. Tears pricked the corners of his eyes but he blinked them away. My parents didn’t have that much in common he thought and yet somehow they made it work.

When they came home Derek was watching a sit-com on television, a half empty can of Diet Coke and a pizza box in front of him.

‘How was your concert?’ he said without taking his eyes or ears from the TV.

Four and a half months after his mother left, Derek moved out. Soham wanted to try counseling but Derek said it was too late. He had met an architect from Massachusetts. Like him, he had summered on the Cape as a kid. ‘We like the same things,’ he said. ‘It’s so much easier, you know.’

‘No, I don’t know,’ Soham thought. ‘My parents didn’t like the same things. But they built a life together.’ But as he watched Derek pack his things he realised even after almost five years together their lives remained tightly separated into individual compartments. There was never any question which book belonged to whom.

To his surprise, Derek left him the cat. The apartment he was moving into didn’t allow pets. ‘Plus, he’s used to this house, going in and out of the backyard,’ Derek said. ‘I don’t want him cooped up in a small apartment. I hope to buy a house in a few months. Then if you don’t want him, I can take Dumbledore.’

Soham shrugged. He felt tired and his head hurt.

Derek embraced him before he left and kissed him on the forehead. He picked up the cat and stroked its head. ‘Look after Soham,’ he told Dumbledore. ‘Make sure he gets up and goes to work and changes your litter.’

‘Don’t go,’ Soham wanted to say. ‘Stay here with me and the cat.’ But he just hugged him back woodenly and helped carry his bag down. When he got into the U-Haul van Derek’s eyes were smudged with tears.

‘Shut the door,’ Derek said. ‘The cat will get out.’

The first night after he left, Soham slept curled up on Derek’s side of the bed. Derek’s pillow still smelled of him. In the morning, he rolled over and felt a soft furry warmth engulf him. Spluttering, he opened his eyes and saw Dumbledore sitting by the pillow. He wondered if the cat missed Derek. But he seemed perfectly content as long as Soham poured him a heaping bowl of food.

‘Why didn’t he take that awful cat?’ his mother asked over the phone. ‘If anything, he should have taken that.’ Soham, busy making one cup of tea with one tea bag, did not answer.

‘Well, what’s over is over,’ said his mother soothingly. ‘How are you managing all alone?’

Outside it was raining, the gray wintry drizzle rolling down the hillside and spattering against the kitchen window. Soham could see the pine tree in the yard shivering in the wind. It was chilly. They needed to get double-paned glass for the windows he thought. That was on the long to-do list he and Derek had once drawn up.

‘Should I come back and stay with you for a little while?’ asked his mother.

He had a vision of his mother landing in San Francisco armed with folders bulging with resumes of suitable young women with post-graduate degrees and wheatish complexions. At the same time, there was a sudden rush of comfort at the thought of her standing in the kitchen, chopping onions, cooking a pot of chicken curry and humming some old Bengali song. ‘But by the time I come next time you need to get rid of that terrible thing,’ she continued. ‘It just makes me shudder to even think of it.’ Soham didn’t answer. The cat looked back at him out of those unblinking golden saucer eyes and gently flicked its tail. Soham quietly scratched Dumbledore’s chin and smiled at him.