You may like cats or not, but one thing is clear to everybody: They are incredibly complex creatures and they often do the exact opposite of what you would expect. They possess an astonishing ability to be incredibly endearing and totally irritating at the same time.
Cats are king, and they are everywhere. I am told that there are 38 species of felids – meaning feline species - ranging from the seven-pound domestic tabby in your lap to 500-pound Siberian tigers — with cheetahs, leopards, ocelots and other large striped and spotted predators in between.
Some of these felines express what I have phrased ‘cat-titude’, which is not just ‘attitude’ with ‘cat’ spliced in. No, no, no. It is a whole separate idea. Many with cat-titude might try to act unimpressed with your attempts to pamper them. They may swat at you whenever you try to hand them things, scratch the door whenever they want to go outside, or suddenly sit on your laptop while you’re using it, without explanation.
The first real cat-fancier I encountered was my former journalist colleague, Neville de Silva, who was crazy about them. But then it must be said that he was a lover of all kinds of animals furry or the feathered kind. He was so ‘paw-sitively’ concerned when the office cat in the Daily News editorial had littered. He brought in a bowl and instructed the peons to have it filled with warm milk from the cafeteria for the nursing mother.
When the kittens were weaned he would place them in the pockets of his safari suit – they were in vogue then, you know, those big Bwana game-hunter outfits. He would saunter around the office making casual conversation while the kits peered out curiously at the journalistic world of what punsters called the Daily Mews around them. Actually the furry little things must have felt like the cat’s whiskers and not what the office cat brought in.
Talk about being smitten by a kitten, or a whole fluffy bunch of them! Now Neville did manage to give away his entire menagerie of kittens for adoption among his colleagues. Just think about this argument he would use as a sales pitch: “Why do we still use the phrase ‘puppy dog eyes’ when ‘kitten eyes’ are much more persuasive? Kittens have a certain innocence about them that make them incredibly convincing.” One look at them and guys like Neville would give them anything they want. Neville too was possessed with the similar power of ‘purr-suasion.’ That is obviously why he was handpicked in later life to serve his country as a high-ranking diplomat.
He managed to gift the quintuplet litter of kitties and carried the last of the furry felines over to my wife Thelma’s desk and convinced her to adopt him. They named her Inky for her black spots on a white fur-lined backdrop. Months later Thelma wrote a piece about Inky which was headlined: ‘Inky – a newspaper cat!’
No one in his right mind could refute that Neville was the cat’s pyjamas when it came to feline devotion. Even the mature mousers could never resist Neville’s presence. During liquid lunch breaks a colony of Lake House journos would frequent the varied pubs in the Fort. Among the more popular of these watering holes was the Lord Nelson pub located at Chatham Street. The Lord Nelson was a spacious pub and could accommodate some 150 patrons at a lunch time sitting.
Whenever Neville strode into the Lord Nelson, he was greeted like a conquering hero by the overgrown pub tomcat. Before he could settle comfortably in his chair there was pandemonium all round. One synonym for ‘athletic’ that the dictionary neglects to mention is ‘cathletic’ - an astounding agility the pub tom displayed when he spotted his favourite patron. A large gray, furry streak scuttled between the legs of tipplers with the velocity of a panther and plunked itself squarely in Neville’s lap. It was more than simply an emotional bond between cat and man because Neville never failed to order an extra plate of fish sausages for the adoring Tom.
Inky was a great ‘mouse-keteer’ and defied the fierce Alsatian ‘Pasha’ with slashes of his scimitar-like claws. A year later he had grown into a heavy-set tom who began romancing the female felines and was suspected of contributing generously to the neighbourhood’s kitty population explosion. A year later we had to leave the country as I had to take up an appointment in Malaysia.
The retainers informed us that Inky had refused to enter the house since the day we left. He had become a maverick and only returned to take his meals outside the kitchen door. A year or two later when we returned on holiday Inky leaped off the roof and made a bee-line for Thelma. He snuggled up to her and nipped her finger in what must have been some sort of remonstration for abandoning him.
In later years a cute marmalade she cat appeared on our driveway seemingly from nowhere and fell at Thelma’s feet in a rare gesture of reverential devotion. Marmalade as she was christened, we called her Marmie for short, sported deep reddish orange splotches interspersed with black and white. She was the most colourful tabby we had ever encountered.
As with Neville’s charges she clawed her way into the hearts of the household and wouldn’t let go. Marmie could purr her way out of anything. She was above all a dramatist and flatterer. She had other fine qualities as well. She also demonstrated that she was quite a loveable character and a connoisseur of comfort. That was proof, if any more were needed, of the marmalade cat’s talismanic superiority.
I subscribe to the theory that cats especially female cats are sexually promiscuous creatures. And Marmie proved that assumption convincingly. Whenever she came into heat she called out to let the toms know that she was ready for romantic interludes. She also paired frequently and often with different males that had fought each other to win mating rights. Her resulting litter of kittens had obviously been sired by different males which accounted for littermates that looked surprisingly different from one another.
Many of her suitors were ‘meow-sicians’ with cultivated tenors whose caterwauling clashed with her soprano screeches. She was also fiercely proud and would stalk out of the home when reprimanded. But would always return when she was about to unload her litter. We finally had her spayed because she had appropriated the divine injunction to increase and multiply. And the result was always a supply beyond any rational demand.
And finally we became the cat’s–paws in a cat culture that left us in a catatonic state.
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