Seventy Per Cent Cat

by Vangmayi Parakala

Are you a dog person? You might be a cat.

I may be most unsuited to be a part of this anthology. I have never had a cat and have never sought the company of one. I can also safely say I don’t quite like cat company.

However, my first foray into writing, mere days after bringing home a dog—the pet that I had begged for, for months—was a short story about a family of cats.

Let me explain. Spark, a black Labrador-Coon Hound cross, was barely a few months old, when Amma drove him home from a friend’s house in her blue Maruti van. He was little and scared, confused in new surroundings, and burrowed himself under the back seat. He refused to come prancing out into his new ‘forever home’, as I had expected he would.

We whistled, petted, tchtched, offered treats. A few minutes later, it seemed as though a whole army of us had assembled to coax the cute little mutt with liquid gold eyes, into the house.

All of this within just an hour of bringing Spark home. This had to be the red-flag that I, seven years old and sibling-less, should’ve seen. I hadn’t.

Over the next few months, I slowly but surely felt a slow erosion of my rights and privileges as the Only Child. Amma and Paatti were changing too. They were falling in love with him! I almost never saw Amma. If it wasn’t work, she was busy taking Spark for walks, feeding him, toilet-training him, and keeping up with his doctors’ appointments. Paatti was still reserved in her affection—her routine with him was a rough pat-pat-‘okay enough, go now’, but the glee on her face, when his tail whipped against the folds of her almost-uniform of Sungudi saris, was unmistakable.

I was feeling neglected, petulant, and jealous.

In a not-very-thought-out passive aggressive move, I wrote a ‘short story’ about a family of cats. (The real reason I suppose was I’d recently learnt how to draw a cartoon cat from someone at school: two ovals, one big and one small; two triangles for the ears; three dots, for the eyes and nose; a free flow of lines for whiskers and the tail.)

I then did a fair copy onto quartered-and-cut A4 size sheets of paper. The topmost page, the book cover, carried the illustration. I self-published this by stapling these sheets together, and presenting it to my family. I was sure I’d made some sort of a statement.

Whatever this act of defiance meant, two things were certain: one, I had begun warming up to Spark as he sat by my side, snout on his paw, as I angrily wrote my first literary tome. And two, that I owe my fictional family of felines an indescribable debt: to date, it’s one of my earliest memories, if not one of the very few over all from my childhood, of the one thing that I have wanted to keep doing since—writing.

Regardless, something about cats has disconcerted me and mostly everyone with whom I am close.

The insincere protagonist

I have spent more than two decades being not very interested in cats due to this same reason. Cats are, in a vague sense, unreachable. You’d never know them. They never show themselves to you as dogs do.

Given the cultural and generational unease with keeping a pet at home, the immediate family on Amma’s side never had any. Yet Paatti, who was touching seventy by the time we got Spark, had her own weirdly expressed love for him. Could I fathom her with a cat in the room we shared till she passed away when I was sixteen?

No. But irrelevant, because when, with my incessant pleas, I had initiated the discussion on the possibility of a pet in the house, there was never a doubt in my mind that the pet needed to be a dog. This was, after all, a few years after the whole country saw that shrill little Pomeranian, Tuffy, in Hum Aapke Hai Koun..! (1994)

I’d had the Spot series of books by Eric Hill, which Amma had bought for my bedtime reading, influence me deeply too—for days I’d want her to read me nothing but Spot in the Garden.

There was, however, just the one story about a cat that Nanna had told me. He’d made it up on the fly, as I suspect many fathers do when it’s their turn with bedtime stories. It had no beginning or end.

‘Once upon a time, there was a cat. He was playing cricket with his other cat friends. The first ball that the cat got was a blue one. He hit it successfully.’

‘And then?’

‘Next, he got a green-coloured one, he hit that too.’

‘And then?’

‘Then, he got a red-coloured ball. Aa ball ni kooda gheettiiiga kottedu.’ (He hit that ball too, reeeealllly hard.)

And on and on it went till he started to repeat colours, or I fell asleep. My father had, I suspect, strongly banked on the latter.

There is many a positive mention of dogs in our epics and sacred texts. The most famous is in the ‘Mahaprasthanika Parva’ of The Mahabharata. After his wife Draupadi and the rest of the Pandavas have died, Yudhisthira continues his journey on to Mount Meru with only a dog for company. Soon, Indra appears on his chariot, telling Yudhishthira to hop on, that he needn’t walk the rest of the way. Yudhisthira refuses to get on without his beloved friend, the dog.

But there were no such inseparable cat-friends, were there?

Recently, Amma stumbled upon a mention of a cat, when reading Volume 8 of The Mahabharata as translated by Bibek Debroy. This is in the ‘Apad Dharma Parva’, the chapter on guidelines for desperate and dangerous times. Bhishma tells Yudhisthira about Palita, a wise rat, who initiates friendship with Lomasha, a cat who is otherwise out to eat him.

One night, Palita calculates that Lomasha too would need to escape a net that a Chandala had cast. They join forces, but the next morning, once the danger of the night has passed, Lomasha calls out to Palita, hoping they can be friends. Lomasha also promises not to harm the rat. But Palita is wiser than that, gives Lomasha a sassy earful of wisdom—how one may join forces with an enemy to defeat a common foe, but that you ought to be wise and not trust them once your mutual goal is achieved—and goes on his way.

Such cat-wary tales are also popular at tourist sites.

When on a trip to Chennai for a wedding a few years ago, my history-loving great-uncle N Mama wanted to use the opportunity to drive me to Ma-habalipuram. It wasn’t for the Shore Temple, as much as it was to spend time viewing the details of the impressive bas-relief of Bhageeratha’s Penance.

As dusk turned to night, so did our excitement to cranky disappointment—how would we see its details in the dark? But thanks to an ingenious cab driver who spotlighted the rock with the car’s headlights, I had a hurried, DIY sound-and-light-show in the two-and-a-half minutes before traffic picked back up.

In that time, N Mama had drawn my attention to a specific detail in the bas relief—it was a cat standing with his palms joined in a namaste over his head, as the Ganga flowed nearby, brought to Earth thanks to Bhageeratha’s penance.

As Mahabalipuram receded into the night, N Mama recalled the story: a deceptive cat, pretending to be an ascetic, gains the trust of the mice around him. He tells them that strict asceticism has made him weak, and that to get to the river’s bank every day, he needs their help. The mice, duped, agree to carry him over. Every day at the other banks, he made a meal of the group that brought him there. One day, a wise mouse quietly followed the cat to uncover the truth about the missing mice. Seeing the cat is no ascetic, he goes back home, and informs the rest of the mice of this horrible truth.

The end. The message was clear. The only cat I was going near was the cat-pose in yoga, which, when effectively coupled with the cow-pose (!), eased my lower back that was imprisoned in a chair all day long at work.

A distrust of independence

I have often thought about these stories. In the earlier story of Palita and Lomasha from The Mahabharata, is the rat’s the lesser evil than what the cat would have committed because the former is upfront and the latter could have been sneaky, like the ascetic from the rock at Mahabalipuram?

Maybe what we see as deception isn’t that at all in cats’ dictionaries; maybe, through history, cats were only trying to look out for themselves, just as the rat Palita had done. It just seems that cats didn’t think they owed anyone much of their truth… it’s also possible they didn’t figure it out enough themselves to be able to lay it out.

It is a dog-eat-dog world after all… hold on—where was that highly regarded loyalty when this expression was coined?

Loyalty. This very righteous quality forms the bedrock of how and why we’ve domesticated dogs for as long as we can remember. Much research has been done on this: humans brought canines into their lives to fulfil specific purposes—hunting, keeping their sheep together, guarding their settlements, or their person on journeys. There was a contractual undercurrent to the relationship, which has now evolved into dogs loving us unconditionally if we give them some bit of love and a whole lot of food.

Cats however, a cat-keeping friend theorised, seem to have domesticated themselves.

It makes me want to say they’re the pinnacle of petdom—because cats have, in the evolution of friendly relations between man and beast, skipped the ‘domestication’ stage altogether. Their pet-status is the beginning and end of their relationship with humans. Some also choose to be absent from pet duties when they please. We don’t expect a cat to alert us when a stranger is at our door. They’d only entered our settlements to eat the rats that came for our scraps.

In an essay in the New Yorker from October 2015, author Ferris Jabr cites a study by Wesley Warren, a geneticist at Washington University in St Louis: ‘cats have diverged much less from their wildcat ancestors than dogs have from wolves and that the cat genome has much more modest signatures of artificial selection.’

Meaning that cats—who humans haven’t domesticated like they have dogs —retain more of their wild traits, like a hunch for hunting, and are largely more self-reliant in their instincts than a pet dog is.

I’ve come to believe that this feral quality is to blame for words like ‘sly’, ‘deceitful’, ‘not loyal’, being tagged to cats. The most you’d hear against a dog—but only say from the last decade and a little more—is that it’ll be too much work or that its shedding coat will get the house messy.

Things have obviously changed, and it’s less taboo to have cats as pets now. In my generation, particularly. I think I saw the discourse expanding in the mid-2000s, when the sound of dial-up internet started to screech into our homes.

A lot of us, who felt we were misfits in our social circles, whether with our middle- and high-school crowds or with our band of cousins, had managed to forge deep friendships on Internet forums. Friendships thrived especially in the writing and art communities or blogging platforms.

With our Internet experience then still blissfully free of trolls and bots, we had owned our otherwise dubious labels—geeky, awkward, klutzy—and flaunted them with a humorous ease. In such spaces, the ‘crazy’ was dropped from ‘cat lady’, and it was alright, sometimes celebratory even, to identify as an introvert. It was on such forums that cute cat videos and gifs started becoming popular (alongside dog videos too, but who didn’t love dogs already), and then later, cat memes too originated.

So, you see, it is almost tempting to armchair-hypothesise that it is the people who gave more to the world than they got, kind of like dogs did, and those who started to feel slightly ill-at-ease with their immediate world and its rules—even those who seemed gregarious and extroverted while inhabiting it—who turned to cats for company. Yet, there may be some truth in it.

Why and how else would a few similar women, who grew up way before this Internet age, and belonged to orthodox, traditional South Indian families, have also taken to them?

Low-maintenance love

It was this question, and my faint recollection of the Telugu writer, late Abburi Chayadevi garu having cats, that led me to agree to this essay. My parents knew her and her late husband, the writer Abburi Varada Rajeswara Rao garu well. I was very young when we’d go over to her place in Bagh Lingampally in Hyderabad. As is the practice between families in Andhra, we would exchange little jaadis of avakaya and magaya every summer.

It’s a shame that I remember close to nothing of those visits, except three things. One: I recall Chayadevi garu’s soft, slightly raspy voice that felt like the salted and sun-drying mangoes that we made magaya with. Two: her crafty doll-making. And three: her cats and her cat-themed sofa covers.

Chayadevi garu wasn’t a prolific writer, but when she did write, she pricked you into being aware. She was woke before ‘being woke’ was even a thing.

So far, everything I’ve read by her has been a comment on domesticity, a woman’s place in the society that she was born in, and fictionalised versions of her and her family’s lives. She was born in 1933 in Rajahmundry to a strict writer-father who was vocal about having expected a son instead; the family’s older daughter had inspired this younger one to write her most popular work, Bonsai Brathuku (1974), translated into English as Bonsai Lives—a comment on how women aren’t given the opportunity to grow into their own selves; they’re carefully brought up only to occupy the limited space of domesticity.

For a woman of such vision, being the wife of the fastidious Rajeswara Rao garu—he expected only full, fresh, hot meals each time he ate, no tiffin or snack business for him; he was even particular about how much tempering there ought to be in a dish—couldn’t have been easy.

In March 2006, the Sahitya Akademi had published a ‘Meet The Author’ with her, soon after she received their award for Tanamargam (Her Way), a collection of stories. Some anecdotes from this interview show how, despite the limitations of the times, she’d carved a niche for herself as a feminist writer. She lived in the system but had her own subtle ways of subverting it.

For instance, in the interview she recalls how her unfulfilled yearning to have children of her own, prompted her to write the story Gaddu Nela (A Bad Month). ‘When I mentioned the theme to my husband, he uttered the word “chi!” considering it ridiculous,’ she said in the interview. But she never stopped writing what she wanted and needed to. She also went on to recall how the poet and translator Srinivas Rayaprol had omitted a line from one of her stories, ‘Srimati Udyogini’, when he translated it in 1975: ‘…perhaps, considering it anti-traditional. [In the story] [t]he interviewer at the end of the interview, asks the housewife if she would marry the same man given another chance. She replies emphatically, saying “Yes,” but says to herself, “It’s supposed to be the duty of the Indian woman to say so!” I found the omission of this sentence after the book came out,’ the interview quotes her as having said.

On paper, Chayadevi garu wasn’t bound by the usual traditional shackles that limited women. Because her father had wanted a son, he treated her like one, sent her to school in short-pants as opposed to a parikini (long skirt) till a teacher suggested one day that it was perhaps time to make the switch. She earned an MA in Political Science, went on to study Library Sciences and ended up doing a ten-year-stint at the Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi as Deputy Librarian. A major contrast even to her own older sister, let alone many girls, and later, women her age, she was appreciated and respected by her male peers. But somehow I get the sense they weren’t ready for all that it might really entail.

Yet, Rajeswara Rao garu never thwarted her. She continued to be a wonderful cook, catering to her husband’s exacting tastes, but she also spoke her mind with a graceful nuance, always with a little smile playing on her face. She advocated for feminism to be armed with a sense of humour. I’ve heard my parents recall on occasion, how she often punned on the words pillilu (cats) and pillalu (children), when people asked after her family’s well-being.

When she wasn’t split between her wifely duties and her writerly life—in addition to writing numerous short stories, she had columns in Telugu magazines like Bhumika, edited Vanita, and also translated German fiction into Telugu—she found solace in doll-making and spending time with the cats who were always in and out of the house.

I can’t imagine a dog in their place—another demanding commitment in a life such as hers, already filled with caring for others while forging her own path

Her feline friendships started in 1982. When they first moved into their Bagh Lingampally home, their yard was infested with rats. Her mother-in-law, who lived with them then had asked Chayadevi to coax some cats in to tackle this problem.

‘I brought a cat home by offering it milk. Slowly it became my pet,’ she recalled in an interview recorded in the book Sweeping the Front Yard, published by SPARROW. Her story ‘Brahmastram’ (Brahma’s Weapon) is about this. Soon, Chayadevi and the cat got so close that her mother-in-law got jealous, she recalled in the interview.

Rajeswara Rao garu too. ‘My husband used to get annoyed at all these cats and ask me to choose between the cats and him,’ she said. When they realised that he was allergic to them because of his asthma, she put their then-cat in a bag and tried leaving it far away from the house. The trick didn’t work— ten days later, it found its way back home, skinny and sad.

There was no looking back since. ‘Cats filled my entire life,’ she’d said.

The no-pets rule

Thirty years before Chayadevi garu first befriended a cat with a glass of milk, Amma’s older cousin and my Perima, V, did the same.

It was the early 1950’s. In Tiruchirapalli in Tamil Nadu, in the cowshed of a middle-class, conservative family’s home, a cat gave birth to five kittens.

Ordinarily, a house like this would not have a pet—especially not in the way that I, a child of post-liberalisation India, have come to think of keeping pets. Many households across India kept domesticated cows, but only in a shed in their backyards—not sitting by the feet of your writing desk or climbing into bed with you!—as they provided for the family’s daily dairy needs and were also seen as holy.

V Perima’s family, like many such families, would leave out grains and water for visiting birds and squirrels. If a dog decided to walk by the verandah or tinnai, it would’ve been fed with whatever was available at hand, or given some milk; it would keep coming back, out of habit, and become a part of their lives. Some would even be given generic names—there’s a family joke about Kuppuswamy, a regular stray-dog visitor, who usually ate everything given to him, except the one time he famously refused the terrible chapatis an aunt had tried to make.

Every day, V Perima’s family would also leave balls of rice out for crows— they were after all the avian avatars of the family’s ancestors, who were being remembered and fed everyday. Such animal-friendships were commonplace, but none crossed the threshold of the tinnai to come into the house.

But one day, a cat decided to give birth in the cow shed adjoining V Perima’s house. Days later, it continued to stay there. My aunt, only twelve years old then, had taken over some milk to feed the new mother; and once she did, the cat gradually began following her around, one day crossing over to the inside.

It was the beginning of a lifelong friendship. After this, V Perima was almost never pet-less. Later, when they lived in Bengaluru for a while, her children would bring home a dog—which would learn to co-exist with the cat they already had at home.

Amma recalls that V Perima, already very soft-spoken, quiet, and reserved, was even quieter with her cats. But her communication with them, over her conversations with people, flowed easier—between a melodious mutter and a meow, it was like a secret language between Tamil and Cat.

The first time I spoke to V Perima and her husband N, was during the initial days of the COVID-lockdown in 2020. The couple has long since moved out of Tamil Nadu, and now spend their retired years in a small pilgrimage town in Andhra Pradesh.

Five minutes in, I realised that recollections of her soft, almost hesitant and reluctant way of speaking, were not exaggerated. Perhaps to mitigate any possible awkwardness with a newly acquainted relative, N Perippa would step in and answer many of my questions for her. She would venture a whispered, almost dream-like sentence when she found a wedge between his words.

‘No one said anything if it didn’t create any problem,’ she said when I asked her if her family objected to her growing friendship with the cat from the cowshed. ‘Also, the cat would just go hide under the bed during the day, so mostly no one noticed it. But once, it brought home a dead mouse from somewhere. I chased it out,’ she recalled. From then on, the cat knew to go out, eat what it wanted outside, and to come back home later.

Becoming a Cat Lady

Almost a decade younger than V Perima is K Aunty, my friend S’s mother. She too had a similar upbringing vis-a-vis official pets coming indoors.

‘The reason they didn’t let us have pets in our homes,’ she said, indicating a vegetarian household, socio-culturally similar to V Perima’s, but in this case in Swarna, in Prakasm district of Andhra Pradesh, ‘is the factor of cleanliness.’ Not only would the cats bring dead mice and other prey indoors, they would also quietly come into kitchens through many a backdoor, ‘put their mouths into’ open containers, and drink up any milk in the vicinity, before sneaking out.

Based in the U.S. for a long time now, K Aunty had hesitated initially when her son brought home a cat a few years ago. He had adopted Gandalf, his black-and-white pet cat when he was away at medical school. But soon, odd and long hours working at the hospital meant that Gandalf needed a stable home. When he brought the cat to his parents’ place, he had assured his mother that Gandalf wouldn’t behave like the strays she’d grown up seeing.

They’d struck a deal. Gandalf had a week to prove himself. If not, they’d give him away at a shelter nearby.

That week, with her husband and kids mostly away at work, it was just Gandalf and Aunty.

‘I became comfortable with him very suddenly. I don’t know how that happened,’ she says, trying to recall that first and important week. But S interrupts: ‘Gandalf chose her.’

The family remembers how Gandalf would sit next to her when she did her daily prayers. Soon, Aunty was looking up videos on Youtube on how to clip Gandalf’s claws, and starting grooming him all by herself when time came. She’s now even fluent in Gandalf’s love languages: ‘He blinks when he wants to say he loves us… did you know cats do that?!’ Aunty now speaks Cat thanks to specialised cat-related channels online, like that of ‘cat whisperer’ Jackson Galaxy.

If there’s one thing she doesn’t do for him, it’s to change his litter box, because she’s allergic. However, Gandalf is very aware of cleanliness, she stresses. Her son had already potty-trained him by putting his paws in the sand inside the litter box to show him where he was to relieve himself.

‘But I think it’s also an innate thing, that what you do has to be buried in the sand,’ S says. ‘There are a lot of things he knows by himself.’ She says this especially since Gandalf did not grow up around cats. This only confirms what Ferris Jabr had written in his article. ‘My brother got him when he was two weeks old. But things like sharpening his claws, cleaning himself, hunting, he just knows.’

Gandalf even hunted and brought home a dragonfly once, as a gift for his human family. These sharp feral instincts even if used to express love and belonging, would have been rejected by an older, more conservative generation. Not only on grounds of hygiene, but also because these were strictly vegetarian households that didn’t want the impurity of unattended dead animals anywhere near their living quarters.

This is us

I want to come back to this strong sense of self and self-reliance in cats. They know their way around the world. They quite literally land on their feet when they fall.

Are we scared of those that can be this way?

Humans favour communal cohesion. Our tendency to glorify loyalty perhaps is a subset of this. Appreciating and respecting, let alone understanding, stronger shades of individualism is a still-new and evolving thought. It is especially something that women, often associated in common metaphor with cats, have had to fight long and hard for. They still do.

On paper, everyone wants their children to be self-reliant. Presumably, that’s why they send them to boarding school, to summer camp, to different cities for college. We want our siblings and partners to all be able to stand up for themselves, to have their own interests and their own full lives, separate from our relationships with them.

I get the sense that while we all want to believe this, the true strength of our convictions here might be wanting.

We want dogs because they’re easier to understand and don’t stroll out by themselves when they feel like they need something else. Dogs shower us with their joy, they make obvious their pain, they mourn with us by never leaving our side if they sense we are grieving, and they wake us up with the bounce of energy that many of us lack on a Monday morning.

We also want dogs before we have babies, because it’s a shorter-term test of how much we can care for a dependent and loving creature, before we have a moody one that’s going to need us even when it turns thirty and has three degrees on her resumé.

But cats? Cats remind us of ourselves. They do everything that we want to do but don’t, can’t, or won’t.

It’s not like we are all deceiving or sly or sneaky, and neither are all cats. We only, maybe always, want to put ourselves first, with no consequences or questions asked.

We want to be loved only when we want to, and we need a partner who understands our love language and learns to speak it like it’s their mother tongue.

We want to show love, but will they get it when we say ‘I love you and did this for you’ with the weird and awkward equivalent of bringing back a dead dragonfly home to a human?

We want to be by their sides when they’re sick or grieving, but could we also take a quick stroll out in between to celebrate the things happening in our own lives and heads, when it might not be appropriate to do so publicly?

In that sense, I am, without doubt, at least 70% cat.

It’s no wonder then that I’ll always be a dog person. No wonder then, that I don’t like cat company. I mean, would I REALLY want to live with myself?