Of cats and dogs

Nila, our first puppy, was a hoarder.

She hoarded everything-toys, food, bones. The strangest, and, often, filthiest things on the road-Nila found them and stashed them in our portico( Here I will insert a parantheses, to point out with not-so-little bitterness, that we paid someone to keep the portico clean and tidy.)

Her kleptomaniacal tendencies were often a source of great conflict between Nila and us. They quickly earned her the label of polladhu- a handy Tamil word that referred to a unique blend of mischievousness, arrogance, and disobedience.  When she found a rotting carcass, a piece of cowdung, or any other equally discomfiting scrap on the sides of the road, she would snatch it up in a sudden burst of speed, keep her head carefully turned away to ensure we could not pluck it from her jaws without sanitizing our hands with the new and improved saliva flavor, and, the minute she got a chance, duck into the house in order to squirrel it away in the one corner which would be both the cleanest and the hardest to reach.

(I was never quite sure how she found that corner. I believe she used an algorithm that factored in the cleanliness, coziness, inconvenience, and the vehemence of our reaction to her being there)

She had this occasional, amusing ritual-one carried out everyday with an endearingly grim concentration. She would find all her toys, a bone that we might have thrown her, and any blankets that we hadn’t kept out her reach. These would then become the building blocks of a small pile between her paws, around which she would curl protectively. Often, she would doze posed like that, small head pillowed on a stuffed toy.

When our next puppy, Bali, came, we found that Nila guarded her territory just as jealously as her toys. It took weeks for her to get used to his presence. Bali, thankfully, was an unassuming little fellow, who accepted Nila’s boisterous antics with equanimity.  To our great relief, he did not share Nila’s penchant for hoarding.

(Despite this, or more likely because of it, he was one of her foremost victims. More often that not, we would give them each a bone, only to return and find both bones tucked safely between Nila’s paws and Bali gazing at her pitifully.)

But the one thing that Nila hoarded most voraciously was her affection. We were lucky- we had it in spades, because Nila was a dog first and polladhu second. Bali had to work harder, but with time he wormed his way into her heart. Through stealing his bones and fighting with him and growling when he was trying to eat, she loved him.

Lola, though. She was a kitten, she was new, she had, herself, that streak of regal arrogance so characteristic of cats. We doubted that she had much of a chance.

***

We brought Lola home on the 22^nd of May. She was tiny, barely twenty days old, abandoned by her mother because of her negligible size. She fit neatly in my hand when we carried her home, and I could hear her small heart against my palm.

When we came home, Nila, unsurprisingly, didn’t take well to her. In fact, she seemed to think Lola was some small, particularly delicious treat. She jumped up, mouth open, then squatted and hurriedly ran through her small collection of tricks. Sit, shake, jump, high five, roll, can I please have the yummy kitten now?

Yeah, no, Nila. Ain’t gonna be that easy.

We put Lola in the long passageway just outside the hall, with a box full of soft cloths, a bowl of milk and a litterbox. The passageway was blocked off from the portico by a big white gate, which kept Lola safe from the dogs. The gate was big and strong and made of iron, but it had bars through which she could see them, shoving wet noses and gaping mouths and playful paws through the too-thin gates, and that made it protection flimsy at best in her eyes.

She whiled away the days basking in the backyard sun or curled up in our laps, but when night fell she was unceremoniously deposited in the passageway. Yes, we are immune to indignant meows now, thanks for asking.

It was clear to us from the start that Nila and Lola were destined to lived on opposite sides of the planet. Unfortunately, our resources only extended to cover opposite sides of the gate. This made them, literally, next door neighbors, light on the next.

There couldn’t have been two neighbors who hated each other more, we were sure. Every time Nila caught sight of Lola, she broke into a round of raucous barking, punctuated by her teeth closing on empty air as she strained to reach the kitten. This was a source of great frustration for us, not least because Nila had a policy of uniformly submissive friendliness to the humans we had brought her to guard from.

Lola, obligingly, always responded to the barking by puffing up like a mini balloon, fur sticking up every which way and teeth bared in a hiss. She, herself, was no innocent- even at twenty days, she had a natural flair for pettiness. She would sit just out of Nila’s reach, tail reminiscent of a bottlebrush as she stubbornly licked her butt clean, breaking away only for the occasional hiss.

This duet often lasted until the early hours of the morning. We had mostly taught ourselves to ignore it, but there were many hours spent half-asleep , groaning with a pillow over our heads.

***

On the third day of her arrival, Lola slipped out from the house in the middle of the afternoon. Naturally, the dogs were unleashed, and showed no qualms about leaping on her.

Bali was, as usual, an angel. He sniffed her, licked her, then lost interest and waddled off to investigate a carrot toy.

Nila we caught by her collar just in time, and she strained against us. We pulled her away and scooped up Lola, depositing her in the house with a string of words that I really wasn’t supposed to be using running through our heads.

One would think such an incident would be a lesson learned, the sort of thing Lola could use to wisely explain to her grandchildren why she avoided dogs a few years in the future. But Lola, ever contrary, appeared to take it as a catalyst.

After that day, she was almost always bent on creeping outside. Nila in particular was very fond of this habit, and expressed her appreciation by doing her best to catch Lola. It often fell upon us to race out, dragging Nila away by the collar and dumping Lola inside with increasing annoyance. We often wondered why Nila was so fixated on catching Lola, when we had told her so clearly not to. Outside of her kleptomania, Nila was relatively obedient most of the time.

It happened when we went out one day, for about an hour. We left Lola locked in the passageway and the dogs free in the portico.

Lola must have slipped out of the gap at the bottom of the gate. Or perhaps Nila had managed to drag her out, using her paws. Maybe Lola had jumped out through the bars of the gate.

We’ll never know now, will we? I don’t think we will ever locking Lola in the passage again.

Not after what we saw.

Oblivious, naïve us, pulling up in our car, clambering out still arguing about something or the other. Stopping dead the next minute at the sight before us. Each of us had our thoughts apiece, but I doubt any of us were thinking anything other than how the hell could we be so stupid?

Lola was curled up between Nila’s paws, purring happily. Nila was lying circled around her, head pillowed in Lola’s tail. Three of Nila’s toys surrounded Lola.

We were so, so embarrassingly wrong. I’ll bet you saw that one coming.

Nila, our first puppy, was a hoarder. And Lola, our first kitten, was a collectible.