The cat who came in from the cold

She kept following me around. It was annoying. I’m the jumpy sort of a person. She would walk in silently and when I looked up, there she was, and I’d invariably start. She’d look at me with her big green eyes, but not make a sound. It amused her family (well, my family) to no end. I was visiting my sister over the Christmas break.

‘She doesn’t do that with other people, you know. She must really like you,’ they teased me. I couldn’t understand it. My body language made it perfectly clear, to anyone who was not blind, and she clearly wasn’t, that I did not appreciate her attention. It made no difference to her.

I’d be sitting on the sofa and she’d come and sit next to me. I’d be eating my breakfast at the dining table and she’d come and sit in the chair beside me. ‘What is wrong with her?’, I’d ask the others. ‘What does she want from me?’ ‘Oh, she just wants your attention!’ “but she has that from the rest of you. So why does she follow me around? Is she a dog? She may as well be, she’s so needy.’

She was a cat. I always thought that all cats were like Garfield, that they would save their unconscious owners from a fire only if the can-opener was in the owner’s pocket. But not this one. She clearly liked being around humans, even the ones who clearly did not like cats (or any other animals) around them.

I am so not an animal lover. I have an actual phobia of dogs, but even with other types of animals, I just don’t want them around me even if they’re cute and furry to everyone else. I even suggested to my twelve-year-old niece at one time, hopefully, ‘maybe if I swatted her with the mosquito bat…..?’.

The child was horrified and looked at me as if I were a serial killer who deserved to be handed over to the police, or at the very least to PETA. ‘You can’t do that! She would die! How would you like it if someone were to swat you with the mosquito bat?’

I realised that I have severely come down in her estimation and hastened to correct it with, ‘don’t worry. I wouldn’t do that. I only said it to get a rise out of you. I personally don’t like people who are cruel to animals, even though I’m not fond of animals myself.’ But I could see that she was not mollified, and for the rest of my visit, the child tried to avoid me as studiously as I tried to avoid the cat.

I learnt to keep the door to my room firmly shut so that the cat would not walk in my room as if she owned it, or even worse, (horror of horrors) climb into bed with me as I slept. I did not stop startling, but I eventually did get used enough to her presence to stop demanding from the others to lift her and take her away from my physically.

As my visit drew to an end, I actually started feeling a bit sorry for her. She’d surely miss me when I was gone. Who would she follow around now?

So I declared, on my last day, that I would pat her, so that my niece would be happy and I could re-earn her love and respect. I would be doing it for the purely altruistic purpose of making my niece and the cat happy, not because I had suddenly developed a love for animals, I told my sister, lest she get ideas.

She was quite thrilled and picked up the cat and started handing her to me. ‘Whoa, let’s not get too excited, shall we? I said I would pat her back, not hold her. Put her on the ground.’ I bent down with a bit of trepidation, and, drum rolls, reached out and patted her soft fur.

Princess looked startled, then displeased, and then walked away.

Damn, I waited too long. I should have tried this reverse psychology on her right from the start. She’d never have bothered me.

Sharmistha Khobragade is a freelance writer