Nine Lives

I told my father about his father's death. Abbu had just driven up,
smiling, from running Saturday morning errands. I trod down the two
front steps of our house and hesitated by the car and told him there
on the driveway as he smiled at me. Abbu stood still for a second,
looking at me with a half-surprised look on his face. Then he laid his
head on the roof of the car and cried. I should have waited until he
was inside the house. But how do you decide when to tell someone their
father has died? I wonder how I will be told. This is my worst
nightmare.

My obsession with this nightmare began with the cat. Three years
earlier, in 1993, a family friend had given us two kittens, one brown,
the other black. My six-year-old brother paid tribute to Disney and
named the brown one Thumper. The shy long-eared rabbit in
Bambi, Thumper was Bambi's best friend and his furry little
foot would thump the ground uncontrollably whenever he was
excited. When Bambi's mother died, Thumper's feet had stayed put on
the ground. My brother was less imaginative in naming the black
kitten. He called him Blackie. Our cat Thumper was a bit of a tramp,
often disappearing for days on end. We would usually find him living
with the neighbours' cat down the road. What Thumper taught me about
feline ingratitude and promiscuity, Blackie taught me about
death. While Thumper just vanished one day, no doubt eloping with his
hussy girlfriend, Blackie continued to lead his unremarkable existence
in our garden. He'd eat, sleep, or catch something. He'd purr, bask in
the sun on the bonnet of our car, or when the metal got too hot,
underneath its cool darkness. He'd curl up on our front step and we'd
step over him to get into the house.

One afternoon after Thumper had disappeared for the last time, I
entered the kitchen to find Ayya staring out the window into our
yard. Ayya was our housekeeper, but she was also much more -she was my
second mother. At barely eighteen, she had come to take care of me
when I was a newborn. Her real name was Razia, but as I'd grown older
I found it hard to wrap my tongue around it. In my lisping efforts I'd
coined a name that stuck.

"Child, he looks dead", observed Ayya as she peered out the window.

"Who?"

"The cat. It's been lying on the empty plot for hours."

"He's probably sleeping", I said, even as I joined her at the window,
staring at the little black body exposed to the sun.

Blackie was resting on the rubble-ridden plot that joined our sparse
lawn. There was never enough water to keep both plots green. He was
black among brown and grey stones, a few feet away from the
brown-green grass.

"That's what I thought when I first saw him", said Ayya, turning
towards me. Ayya was also brown. Not bronze, but oak, with a kind,
lined face and black, wavy hair that she kept either in a bun or in a
braid. "But then the sun kept moving and he's been lying in the sun
for an hour now."

I knew my eyes were rounded in a mix of disbelief and dismay as I
gazed at the inert body outside. Yet all I really felt was a kind of
terrible fascination.

"But how did he die?"

She shrugged. "There are lots of ways".

We decided that I would go pick Blackie up.

"Wear these plastic bags on your hands", warned Ayya, handing them to
me, the kind one sees dangling twisted, like mangled crows, in
electric wires twenty feet in the air. "In case you get germs".

I put the makeshift glove on my left hand. It was a little tricky
putting the other one on with both hands encased in slippery plastic,
but I walked out of the house a few seconds later moist-handed with
triumph and anticipation. As I walked around the house towards the
sunny back plot, Blackie looked like he was sleeping. His body looked
soft and curved among the rough stones of the rubbly ground. But as I
drew near, I could sense something wrong -- something still. It was
not what was there, but rather, what was not there. Blackie looked
soft, but he was unmistakeably dead.

I walked up to the little body and looked down. Now I felt the same
terrible fascination, but it was mingled with sadness. I reached down
towards the soft carcass with my plastic-coated hands.

I'd never felt rigor mortis before. I jerked back from the hard, alien
object on the ground. I reached for it again and lifted it up. It
balanced in my hand in the exact position with which it had lain on
the ground, the belly curved to fit the earth's groove, the tail
curled and now standing absurdly apart from the body. When I dropped
it back on the ground, Blackie's carcass lay there like a stuffed cat,
its contours no longer fitting this new piece of earth, laying stiff
and unfitting.

I felt the plastic stick to my moist palms as I stared in pure
horror. This was not something I had expected. This was Death. This
was not my cat. I ran back inside to Ayya.