Through the Sands of Time

A Dog Person, a Cat Person, and a Mother who was Both

by Jai Arjun Singh

Anyone who has known me over the last few years—in person or through blog posts, Facebook posts, WhatsApp profile pictures, Instagram pages— will assure you that I’m a dog person. An obsessive dog person, even.

Much of my life currently centres around Lara, the second of my two major canine loves—the only two creatures I have seriously been able to describe as my “children”. (Falling deeply in love with her predecessor Foxie—chronically unwell, short-lived Foxie—in the summer of 2008 was what unlocked my Dog Person-ness.) I have also been increasingly involved with street dogs around my two flats in south Delhi’s Saket. These animals have helped me feel more rooted in a neighbourhood I have lived in for over three decades, more aware of it as a symbiotic village within an impossible metropolis. An artist friend and I have even discussed a collaborative project, Dogs and Humans of Saket.

As I write this, though, most creative projects are very uncertain. It is May 2020, there’s a global pandemic underway, and a series of lockdowns have taken a crippling toll on unprivileged humans and animals; we have no idea what is to come in the next few months. If things get much worse, if the virus mutates and mutates and—to channel TS Eliot’s cat analogy—becomes a yellow smoke rubbing its muzzle along the protective coverings of our inner organs, then this essay might not be published.

Meanwhile, there are jokes and memes to help us through. One goes: ‘Your dog thinks you have left your job to spend time with him. Your cat thinks you have been fired, like the loser you always were.’ The accompanying images show a smiling dog and a cranky cat. It is an old stereotype, calculated to pique those who have experienced the warm, loving side of cats (and such stereotypes and generalisations will crop up again in this piece)— but one also sees a flash of truth in it.

When the first lockdown began in March and the streets cleared of humans, when I realised how many street dogs—social animals, dependent on their two-legged friends—were going to be left adrift, hungry and disoriented, I got on animal-care groups, got in touch with feeders in my neighbourhood, started getting out myself. To do what little I could to quell the urgent howls that were keeping me up at night.

If dogs were my focus through all this, it was a function of the dog person I had become in the past decade; but it was also based on another simplification—or stereotype—about dogs and cats: street dogs need the kindness and attention of humans; cats, not so much.

But then, a few days into the lockdown, outside a Mother Dairy, a white-and-bluish-grey cat pressed against my leg, looked up at me, mewed desperately. I knew this cat—who lived near the local meat shop, now closed—to be one of the calmer, more dignified residents of the area. Now, fending for himself, he looked wild and lost. He knew there was paneer in the bag I was carrying.

There was something deeply unsettling about this gap between the cat’s regal good looks and the hollow desperation in his eyes. In some ways, it made me feel worse than I had been feeling about the sociable, always-needy dogs.

More than that, I felt a tug from the distant past. If this cat had been of a particular coloration and had had an unusually bushy tail, I would have thought to myself, ‘This could be Sandy’s great-great-great-grandchild. Who knows... ’

Sandy. Delicate-looking, hoarse-voiced, fleeting Sandy. Perhaps my first real experience in caring for an animal. Though there had been others before him.

Flashbacks, Fragments, Dates, Diary Entries: Memories of Three Cats

It is July 11, 1993: (Since I began writing a diary in January 1990, and maintained it daily for the next 17 years, I can call on specific dates during this period quite easily.) My mother and I have been visiting relatives and have just hailed an autorickshaw to go back to Saket when we see this little ginger-coloured thing, not more than 20-25 days old, looking at us through bright, intelligent eyes. Lots of things about him are surprising: he has a grand tail even at that age, and an incongruously gruff voice. Picking him up and taking him home is an instinctive move, and comes mainly out of concern (there are cars tearing about on the road). We don’t think it through, we don’t worry much about how our part-time cat, Kittu, will react.

Flashback to early 1990: The unimaginatively named Kittu enters our lives, just a couple of months after I begin writing my very first diary (most of the early entries refer to him only as Cat). As the year wears on he spends more time inside our flat, mainly during the day when he comes for his siesta after a long hard night of being the colony’s dominant Tom.

I don’t remember exactly how and when my mother started feeding Kittu, but I do know that at this point she had gone a few years—a few messy years that included a divorce and a custody battle—without having had an animal to care for. Thinking about this in hindsight, knowing her, I realise how hard that must have been.

But back to 1993, the advent of the new kitten. There are teething problems, so to speak. Things go okay on the Kittu front (he is indifferent; this newcomer is no threat to his sole-bachelor-in-colony status yet) but the kitten is wailing, restless. We feed him milk with a small dropper and fret that we might have unwittingly separated him from his mother—what if she was nearby and we didn’t look for her?—when he was too small.

In the next few days, as he settles in, I offer him the entire length of my left arm as a chew toy; for weeks, all you’d see on that limb were several parallel red lines and tiny fang marks.

‘We’ll call him Sandy,’ my mother says. ‘He’s so compact,’ she adds. A beat of silence, and then: ‘Do you remember Blackie?’

(Did she really say this, or has my mind put together conversations that took place at different times? My diaries don’t tell me everything.)

Going back almost a decade, it is 1984 or 1985, Panchshila Park, Delhi. Close to bedtime, I am reading an Archie comic when mum comes in and tells me in a strained but matter-of-fact voice that Blackie has been run over, on the service lane just outside. Still breathing, but head crushed, no hope. She is going to a doctor to get him “put to sleep”, put out of his suffering. It is probably the first time I have heard this phrase.

My memory is unreliable but I think I went to the car and saw part of a small black body (not the head, which is covered) draped in a white blanket or towel. I wish I had been writing my diary back then—not just for these details but also to know if “Blackie” was what we really called him. Or was it Sooty (entirely possible, since I had read one of Enid Blyton’s Pink-Whistle books which had a black cat with that name)? I do remember my mother coming back, tearing up about how casual the doctor had been—how he was more worried about whether she had the cash on hand to pay him than getting the thing done with compassion and efficiency.

Childhood recollections often create the sense that something went on for months or years, when in reality it lasted only a few weeks. I have no idea exactly how long we had Blackie, and there is no one around now whom I can ask. Either way, he was the first animal to enter my consciousness—my first “pet”. The memory fragments include mum removing ticks with a tweezer; shielding him from my father who was prone to violence during substance abuse, and who, once, bit the tiny thing’s ear, causing shrieks; most vividly, a rain-soaked night when we realised Blackie had fallen into the drain running just outside the house, and our cook, Chhatar Singh, managed somehow in the dark to locate him by his wails and rescue him.

It was touch and go. How relieved we were. But this was probably only a few days before the speeding car got him.

More than three decades later. It is 2017 and I am in the same Panchshila Park house where I had lived till age nine, until my mother and I escaped. It’s a decaying ghost house now, with my grandmother and my father having both died in the span of a few months. It is exhausting to walk through the rooms of my childhood, sifting through possessions, trying to avoid looking at my father’s diaries—troubling evidence that this delusional, possibly schizophrenic man had a writer’s impulse too, that he needed to set his thoughts down on paper the same way I did.

In a room on the first floor, I draw a curtain across the balcony door. A jet-black cat is sitting outside on a ledge beyond the small balcony space, sunning himself, looking back at me—or what he can see of me through the tinted glass—in irritation.

In exactly the same space where my mother and I had found a stranded black kitten half a lifetime ago. I have another memory flash: mum getting Chhatar Singh to climb up with a ladder and bring the mewling thing down so we could feed it. Blackie.

When I get home, I tell my mother about this, show her the fuzzy photo I’d managed to take. She smiles, seems to remember, but she is in a lot of pain; a second round of chemotherapy has left her worse off than before, and there isn’t much time.

It is early 2020, and Devapriya Roy—editing a book about cats—is saying, ‘I thought you were a dog-person!’

Back to 1993. Have you seen a kitten on a leash?

We weren’t yet ready to let Sandy go out by himself the way Kittu freely did; but he did need to explore the wild occasionally, so every morning—before leaving for school—and evening, I would take him down for 20 minutes at the end of two leashes tied together. (This is how you distinguish walking a cat from walking a dog: a little more independence, the illusion of greater freedom.) I even gave him his first rudimentary lessons in tree-climbing; okay, that’s an exaggeration but I would goad him up the trunk of the largest tree in our park and watch (holding on to the leash) as he tested branches. A couple of times, when he showed no interest in descending and I was in danger of missing my school bus, I may have yanked him down roughly— wherein he landed on his feet, and frowned.

It’s hard to pinpoint exactly how I became so close to him. I know that he spent hours each day in my room, allowing me to cuddle him after I returned from school. There are photos, including one of the two cats curled up in a ball, hugging each other, and another of mum and me holding one in each arm—this being in the weeks of Cautious Peace, before Sandy became a threat to Kittu’s genetic legacy.

Some of my earliest lessons about care were learnt during this time. When Kittu came into our lives, he was almost entirely my mother’s responsibility —except for the tummy-rubbing, which I helped with—and it mostly stayed that way. Besides, he was already an adult who had spent time walking the mean streets of Saket. With Sandy, my relationship began (literally) from scratch, and I played a more defined role: in the feeding, the walking, the providing of general entertainment, the collecting and disposing of sand for the kitty litter. With my mother watching over us, I think I grew as a person during those months.

By the end of the year, I was letting him out for one or two hours at a time, keeping an eye on him from the balcony, occasionally going down to check that he wouldn’t get too adventurous and would come home by the late evening. For weeks, this was part of my daily routine. And then, gradually, the time came to loosen the strings even more.

Feb 1, 1994: ‘I’m writing this on the balcony, watching Sandy sitting on a tree, with the black dog circling around beneath. Today was a landmark day in his becoming independent. Before leaving for school I told mum not to let him down before 11.30 if at all. When I returned she told me he’d leapt off the balcony almost as soon as I’d left. And he’s been out ever since!’

And a few days later: ‘It’s 6 pm, Sandy may or may not go down now—anyway, it’s no longer my concern (and that makes me feel a little sad).’

Though I wouldn’t have articulated it in such terms back then, I was experiencing a rite of passage that was parent-like, or a prelude to being a parent. And now I wonder how my mother felt as she watched her 16-year-old son undergo such emotions.

It is March 2003, in the Business Standard newspaper office, which I have recently joined, and I have made a new friend, Abhilasha. We bond over the fact that we are both “cat people”. While I still vaguely think of myself in those terms, I haven’t been close to a cat for over five years; Abhilasha, on the other hand, has a family of cats at home. We exchange stories, discuss the dumb, jowly cuteness of a certain variety of horny tom-cat; we mock dogs, especially the annoying little ones that go yap-yap. I tell her about my mother’s Pomeranian, Chinky, who is just such a creature. (Despite living in the same house as Chinky, I only dimly register her presence: she isn’t mine, the way Sandy or Kittu had been.)

Abhilasha will meet Chinky when she comes to my place for the first time nearly a year later, and will pretend to be very taken with her, mainly to impress my mother. Exiting the house, out of my mother’s earshot, we will joke again about how silly these noisy little dogs are.

We don’t know that a few years later, in 2008, we will find ourselves co-parenting a canine child—again with my mother as a super-parent of sorts—and that four years after that, we will experience the darkest, most devastating day of our lives in a vet’s clinic.

Inching towards May 1994, and another dark day: the evening I saw Sandy for the last time.

Once he started going down by himself—even staying out at nights—his rivalry with Kittu became dangerous. They had to be kept apart if they were both in the house at the same time; my mother and I tiptoed about like scared grandparents in a Hindi film melodrama about a family divided, keeping one cat locked in a room and feeding the other one elsewhere.

Something had to give, and it did. A day came when we had pet-unfriendly guests over, my Nani didn’t want to advertise the fact that our house had become a Kurukshetra for feline turf-wars, someone got careless and didn’t shut a door properly, the two cats had a brief scuffle, we hurriedly threw the main door open for Sandy while keeping Kittu inside. And that’s it. Sandy never returned.

Of course, that wasn’t really “it”. I spent half an hour each morning for the next few months scouting all the familiar spots where I used to take him walking, calling out to him. Looking at my mid-1994 diary entries, I see sentences that are still a sharp, painful reminder of that time.

Today’s the 11th non-Sandy day in our lives, and we’re miserable.

I’m feeling terrible about Sandy, seem to see him everywhere I look.

Today is the 23rd day—the maximum Kittu has ever been gone was 22 days.

Naturally, my diary also reveals that other things were going on. (Other things are always going on.) I was watching old films, recording music videos on VHS cassettes, obsessing about my favourite soap opera. But the absence of Sandy shadowed this period. There were sleepless nights when I imagined I could hear his croaking call outside my bedroom window (located near the main door) and got up repeatedly to check. Memories of shivering in bed as my mind started to process the possibility that I would never see him again. This was the first major loss in my life.

For years, I wondered if he might still be living somewhere in one of Saket’s colonies, not too far from our house. One day, around 10 years after he had gone, it struck me—idly—that if he were still alive, he would now be old in Cat Years, and this was a sad and strange thought: my little sibling—about whom I had spent so many months worrying and being protective—being the equivalent of 70 or 80 human years, when I was still only in my twenties. It didn’t seem right.

It must have been around this same time that my mother returned from a walk and mentioned that on the far side of our colony—a spot we rarely visited—she had seen an old, grungy-looking, ginger cat lying dead near a drain, its hind legs apparently tied together with string. ‘He had a very bushy tail,’ she said. ‘I didn’t go too close.’ She didn’t say anything more, and I didn’t ask.

Sandy was with us for only ten months, compared with Kittu’s eight-odd years, and it might seem odd that he occupies a more central role in my cat-memories. But apart from the heightened nature of my responsibilities where Sandy was concerned, the intensity of the recollection comes from the ephemeral nature of our time with him; there was no closure, it’s still possible to wonder if we dreamt him up.

Kittu, on the other hand, was part of the woodwork for years (to the extent that a few days would sometimes go by without my even mentioning him in my diary). We watched him go from being a reasonably lithe cat into an undignified, burping mound of corruption and laziness; gluttonous, scruffy, torn from his fights, snoring away on my mother’s stomach after a night of perdition and sin. With him, there was a sense of a life full-lived.

At the same time, I mustn’t undermine his importance. Kittu was an essential part of my life with my mother, from our walks together to nearby Hauz Rani to buy beef for him (at a time when neither of us ate beef ourselves) to the many vet visits. And in his final months, I was very protective of him.

‘I hate those dogs.’

Early 1998.

I’m tense about Kittu not being able to come up because of those damn dogs—for the past hour I’ve been trying to keep them away with stones.

Those bloody dogs hanging around downstairs all the time. I wish mum had stopped encouraging them. Stupid woman has no sense.

January 24. Mum is back from hospital after her kidney-stone operation, sluggish and in pain, but very happy to see Kittu after being away for days. Kittu himself has been in poor shape over the past few weeks, slower than before, and this has caused me worry since there is only one stairway entrance to our first-floor flat, and a local dog—encouraged by my mother giving him biscuits in the park—has taken to sleeping there. There are times when I have to look out for Kittu from our balcony and then run down and shoo dogs away so he can make his way up the stairs. It is getting stressful.

When I recently revisited my diary entries, I found a disconnect between my recollection of my mother’s illness and how it really unfolded at the time. I had thought the kidney operation was a necessary but minor thing that caused maybe a week’s inconvenience, all told. In fact, I now realise, her illness was spread over a few months leading up to the surgery—and several weeks of frailty following it.

It was around this time that Kittu began his own decline.

February 13. Late afternoon. Kittu hasn’t been seen for over 24 hours. Mum, bedridden and weak, keeps asking about him during her lucid moments. I have to pick up some of her test reports from a nearby lab. As I get into my car and pull out towards our colony’s exit, I think I see something out of the corner of my eye. Staying calm, I pull the car over, get out, go across to check.

It is Kittu, lying stiff and dead, by the side of a car. No external wounds, at least none that I can see, so probably not killed by a dog—though there is a yellowish discoloration spread across his side. My mind numbly processes all this as I work out what I need to do. I drive quickly to the lab, pick up mum’s report, use their phone to call my grandmother in Panchshila Park, breathlessly explain that I need to get our cat buried without letting mum know what has happened.

My dadi arrives in her car two hours later (during which time I have somehow taken a sheet downstairs and wrapped Kittu in it). Her driver callously mutters ‘arre, issko toh kooday mein phenk do (throw the body in the garbage)’ and I growl at him. After calling a pet-burial centre that is too far away, we find a suitable patch of ground just outside the Panchshila house, and bury him there. There is something reassuring about having done this, about having kept him so close to a place that my mother and I had once called home. When mum gets well, she will be able to visit him there.

Thinking about it now: the spot where Kittu lies is just a few feet away from the spot where a black kitten had been run over a long, long time ago. There is a feeling of something having come full circle.

The next few days are tense, because I have to wait for the right moment —when mum is a little stronger—to tell her what has happened. When I do tell her, it is the hardest thing, emotionally, that I have attempted up to that point in my life. It is only while doing it that I realise the enormity of it: I am telling her about the death of a child she has loved for eight years.

Though my mother avoided saying irrational-sounding things to me, she would let it slip, months after Kittu’s death and her own kidney operation, that in some strange way it felt like Kittu had taken her illness on himself, and helped her to recover (while himself presumably fading from view, like a benevolent Cheshire Cat). That he had bought her some time.

I didn’t know it then, but this was the end of my “cat phase”—at least in terms of having an immediate relationship with a cat. And I certainly couldn’t have known that I would ever become close to dogs. I had had a visceral dislike for the colony dogs right from the time of Sandy’s disappearance, when I was emotionally vulnerable and having nightmares about the various ways in which he might have come to harm. In this state of mind, the last thing I needed to see was imperilled cats—cats mauled by dogs or cars—but fate had thrown a lot of that my way. In a lane near my house once, I had turned a corner just in time to see a kitten being scooped up by a dog, its cries of terror becoming fainter, even as one of its siblings watched from behind the water-meter grill it had escaped into. My attempts to chase the dog, shouting at it, gave way to a helplessness and melancholia that consumed me for weeks, adding to the festering Sandy-loss.

The day after I buried Kittu was the first day in months that I didn’t throw a little stone at the dog sitting outside our building, the dog my mother had been putting out food for. And simultaneously I entered an animal-free decade. Later that year, I joined a post-graduation course that brought me the first set of friends I made as an adult. A flurry of intimacies and heartaches was followed by my first internship and job, a growing sense of independence, another job, then a blog that set me on the path to writing the things I wanted to write about. This was an adrenaline rush, and animals were peripheral during this time. My mother got her darling Chinky in 2000, but I never even allowed this creature into my room—it was the one part of the flat that was off-limits for her. She adored me, sought my attention, looked beseechingly into the room when the door was open; I never returned that affection. It feels now like a subconscious form of revenge directed against my mother, for my anger about her continuing to feed dogs near our flat, when our cat was so vulnerable.

Then life fell into a routine, I got married, settled down, began working from home, became more tuned in to the world immediately around me—all of which would lead up to a magical moment where, out of an indeterminate huddle of eight stray puppies sleeping together in the lane behind our house, needing food and care, one would eventually resolve herself into my own special child.

And today, in the very same space, my life is organised around street dogs who are probably descendants of the creatures I hated 25 years ago.

The Cool, the Dramatic, and the Maternal

The human mind specialises in building narratives—we define ourselves, write clearly articulated “About Mes”. And for the movie nerd, films—discovered, obsessed over, re-encountered—are ways of understanding one’s relationship with the world, shaping narratives about personality and worldview, likes and dislikes.

As a professional critic I have often encountered the question: ‘Will this film appeal to a cat-person or a dog-person?’ But for the truly egalitarian movie-buff who watches and engages with everything—popular and arty, realistic and escapist, across genres, styles and forms of expression, with no preconceptions about one mode being “better” than another—the question is reductive. Can’t one be both extrovert and introvert? Dog and cat? Warm and gregarious and slurpy and needy, but also cool and taciturn and reserved and hissy? How flexible are these categories? Might the dog and cat sides of your personality take turns being in control, the same way a movie-buff might be in the mood for florid melodrama on one day and cool understatement on another?

When I think about my movement from “cat person” to “dog person”, I also think about a parallel movement. As a child I had gorged on masala Hindi films, but around 1991 (around the time Kittu had entered our life, and Sandy was in the near future), I moved away from the noisy, emotionally fraught world of these movies and submerged myself in the more restrained forms we then called “world cinema”. I was (to return to the stereotype) becoming a catlike viewer, watching things a cat might like to watch.

It was only in the mid-2000s that I returned to Hindi cinema’s fold and found myself stimulated again by these films: relishing the heightened dramas, the tonal unevenness, the messiness, developing a renewed appreciation for how popular cinema worked.

And is it a coincidence that it was around this time that I also discovered that I had a “dog person” inside me? I don’t know. I am wary of playing connect-the-dots. The point is that the same person, at different times in his life, can be both “types”—and in my case, the journey from one type to another coincided with returning to a cinema that was drenched in puddles of emotion.

Here’s the thing, though. The most important influence on my life—my mother—had no trouble being both types at once. Unlike me, she never had a “cat phase” followed, years later, by a “dog phase”—for her, they coexisted, and could be tapped into at a moment’s notice.

My mother and nani used to tell me a story from the early 1970s, when they spent a couple of weeks in London. An acquaintance let them stay in her flat for this duration, their one responsibility being the daily feeding of a tomcat who spent most of his time in a loft above a room. Instructions were clearly given: this many tins of food per day, no more. But my mother overfed the cat so much that at fortnight’s end its weight had doubled and it had a hard time getting up and down its stairway. ‘Thankfully,’ mum laughed, ‘We checked out of the flat a few hours before the woman returned, so we never had to explain how we had damaged her cat.’

When I first heard this, it was just a funny anecdote about a parent and a grandparent, bumpkins abroad, trying to negotiate the unfamiliar world of tinned pet food. But years later, as I became more attentive to my mother’s relationship with animals, how she indulged their every whim, it made complete sense that she would coddle a once-sleek and haughty feline into obesity. She could turn sophisticated cats into slobbering dogs.

By now, it is probably clear that this piece is as much about my mother as it is about cats and dogs. My interest in animals came from her, was steered by her, is inseparable from her matter-of-fact admittance that her non-human children were as important to her as her biological child was (and in some ways, in terms of the special responsibility one owes to a creature who can’t understand our language or the workings of a human-created world, more important).

Mum died in February 2018, exactly twenty years after that traumatic day when I had had to tell her about Kittu’s death. I could recount many stories here about the beloved dogs—Chinky aside—of her final few years. Lara, who was only a year old when mum was diagnosed with terminal cancer. Gentle Imli, whom mum used to feed once in a while, and who came to our house to spend the last night of her life in mum’s lap. The handsome, golden-haired fellow downstairs who had stopped visiting us after we adopted Lara, but who still looked up longingly at mum from the park. Small and feisty Chameli, whom my mother was convinced was the living embodiment of an almost life-sized furry toy I had brought home for Foxie many years earlier.

But there was also, importantly, another cat. A cat who visited her in the balcony every day in the final years. My mother called her Heena. She was somewhat sandy-coloured, but by now I was too preoccupied with puppy Lara to think much about this.

In mum’s last few weeks—when she was essentially bedridden, not walking about the house—Heena stopped coming altogether, even though there were others in the house to put out milk for her. Then, a few days after mum’s death, I was sitting in the living room when I looked up and saw the verandah door ajar, Heena sitting there soundlessly, looking at me in an abstracted way, reacting and bolting only when I got up and moved towards her.

Something about that moment reminds me of mum mentioning that it felt like Kittu had taken her illness on himself. And it makes me feel like my mother had a cat spirit somewhere in her. If that’s the case, so do I—no number of slobbering, love-demanding dogs will change that.

At the same time, one doesn’t have to get mystical about this. For all the countless things that have been written and said, about the differences between cats and dogs, the difference can sometimes come down to a practical detail: a dog, even a small dog, might be too ungainly for a physically compromised, bone-ravaged cancer patient to hold on her lap and cuddle; while a cat might leap lightly into this person’s arms and comfort her in its own aloof way, through its purring presence. When I think now of my mother in her twilight, in great pain, sitting on the balcony that had been her spot for decades—the balcony from where she had watched maternally over the many creatures she cared for—I see her with Heena in her arms, looking a little at peace.