The Other Female in Shri Husband’s Life.

Shri Husband’s fallen in love. I’m far from jealous. I welcome the lack of attention. My ‘sauten’ has a tail, four legs and a whisper-mew that not even God can hear. How she came into our lives is a story by itself. A co-passenger on a Konkan Kanya journey exchanged phone numbers with me. I fall for the ‘we must meet again’ line and in some kind of stupid ‘josh’ end up doing such potentially dangerous things. This co-passenger was harmless, though, I thought, and once in Goa she really did connect with me. “My neighbour has this cute kitten” she wrote on WhatsApp, the sentence accompanied by a photo to prove it. Shri Husband, who hated felines until that moment, figured that it would be good to have a creature that eats cockroaches and spiders to save on pest control expenditure. Little did he know that the wiles of the yet-another-female in the house would change his life drastically. She’s officially named ‘Maows’, which rhymes with ‘mouse’, confusing people, rodents and the other cats in the neighbourhood when we call out to her. Bai Goanna calls her Chingi and I call her Chicktu… because she’s always clinging to Shri Husband (the other reason is because I’m Chick-one, see?) As practical first-things-first sort of people, we trained her to use a litter-box even before she had her first sip of milk in our house. She took to the cardboard-box lined with newspaper and did her ‘business’ dutifully in it. Till she discovered that there was more drama if she did it in the kitchen sink or fresh laundry pile. She hasn’t done it so far—in the kitchen sink or laundry pile, I meant-- just threatened to, but it was enough to have us running around, ‘koyto’ in hand, wanting to kill her then and there. That she’s still alive speaks much for her agility and the state of our aging reflexes and aching joints. Many are the times I’ve vowed to feed her to the monkey that occasionally visits our plot. Bai Goanna tells me monkeys are vegetarians. One taste of cat-meat might help them change their habits, I retort. When she sleeps or begs for something, it’s heart-melting. That look, oh, that look. Google told us inoculations against rabies and cat-flu were necessary. Getting in touch with a local veterinarian wasn’t difficult as Goa has a good doctor-patient ratio for pets. Astrid Almeida has further confused our cat by calling her MyLittleFriend. The cat doesn’t know what her real name is. Neither do we, although she’s been with us for a couple of months now. We have, within jogging distance, a couple of dog-spas and –salons and one clinic run by a dog-psychologist and –behaviour-therapist. Nothing for cats. My neighbours, ‘niz’-Goemkars all, consider cats as neither pets nor pests, just nuisances to be tolerated, like ‘jalleraan’ (mosquitoes, you know, in Konkanni). The cats that hover around ‘nustemkarnni’ Rose-Marie’s wooden plank when/where she sells fish each evening, are so tough, we could send them for the Olympics. I’ve seen people click their pictures. If ever you pass our village Panchayat in the evening, stop by for a ‘dekho’ where Rose-Marie squats to see what happens. It’s a very Goan activity, feeding fish heads, tails, fins and insides to cats. Dogs are named and called affectionately, ‘Tommy’, ‘Shivaji’, ‘Sultan’. The one in our ‘waddo’ responds to ‘peto’ (Konkanni for pet) or ‘guddo’ (good-dog mispronounced). Cats, poor things, are shooed away and seldom have decent names; ‘hoosh’ and ‘huttt’ are terms snapped at them whenever they come to close. In spite of having thin skins, cats don’t care. You can’t make the tiniest dent in a cat’s self-esteem no matter how many curses you hurl at it. I’ve observed that. Shri Husband, ever poking his nose into my affairs and articles, said: “You have so much time to observe such things. No wonder the dusting, chopping, shopping, cleaning, cooking, doesn’t get done ever… never mind on time.” I didn’t say a word. No point. Men are from Mars, etc. Also, Bai Goanna has pointed out that the lesser I do, the more he helps. I’m using that observational data to advantage. Cat has grown from kitten to adolescent. Lanky, adventurous nuisance. She gets into the fridge/wardrobe and after the door is shut, mews. We can’t make out from where the pathetic sound is coming and a frantic indoor hunt follows. In the compound, she climbs trees and is terrified of looking down. Shri Husband gallantly puts a ladder against the trunk and climbs up to rescue her. She goes further up and hisses and claws at him. Temptation in the form of fish-heads gets her safely back into his arms. Both behave like honey-mooning tourists crossing Chogm Road: disjointedly leaning towards each other, not bothering about what people will say, purring and cooing, petting and cuddling. Pets make people do strange things. Imagine a no-nonsense type A man behaving like this with a whimpering, spineless female. (Famous last words.) Now, cat has found herself a playmate-boyfriend. They chase the hose when we are watering the plants. He comes close to her, she spits viciously, he doesn’t mind. She invites him to share the fish she has for breakfast, he eats it all and she has to spend the rest of the day hunting moths, frogs and little birds for food; she doesn’t mind. She treats Shri Husband as a great big mouse and jumps all over him when he lays himself down to rest after a hard day’s work. Chiding, however severe, doesn’t work. A dog would have shrunk in shame if the Master had raised his voice, and behaved well for the rest of its life. The cat is Goan, doesn’t bother about wrong-doings being corrected, penalties are mere inconveniences. Shri Husband won’t give up. Conscientiously tries to remedy her ways. The government should employ him in the yet-to-be-formed Ministry of Morals and Ethics. Until then, I must share Shri Husband’s energy and affection with a furry, four-legged softly-mewing female.