The Wildings

by Nilanjana Roy

  Southpaw was holding still now, and Hulo sensed that the kitten was suppressing a whimper as the gash where his whisker had been pulled out was cleaned. The wound had scabbed over, but had to be kept clear of dirt and pus; the cats took turns to wash the kitten. The kitten’s remaining whiskers shot up as a series of mews rang out above their heads, apparently coming from the rooftops.

  “But why do you not rejoice, Bigfeet? I have found a game we can both play—see how carefully I push these nasty figurines and doodads off the shelf, just to give you the pleasure of picking them up yourself? We can play for hours—noooooo! Put me down, you beast! How dare you smack my bottom!”

  Southpaw started in surprise; it seemed to him that an orange kitten wriggled upside down in the air, suspended from an unseen hand. Her paws swiped at the breeze, and her eyes crossed as she displayed her indignation. “Waaoooowww!” she said to the top of Southpaw’s head, and then she was gone.

  “What was that?” he said, astonished. His whiskers extended as far as they could—he’d been practising—but there was no kitten-scent in the air, nothing except for the faint, distant hint of rain.

  The tomcat’s black scruffy tail was lashing back and forth, and his eyes had gone a vivid green. “That,” he replied, his ears stiff, “is Beraal’s appallingly noisy little pupil.”

  Southpaw’s nose wrinkled in disappointment. That was the Sender? A scruffy orange kitten with her paws flailing in mid-air, at the mercy of her Bigfeet? He had thought she would be mysterious and solemn, like a miniature version of Miao.

  “So what’s so special about her?” Southpaw asked.

  “You’d have to ask Beraal,” the tomcat said. “I don’t know what everyone’s making such a fuss about—aside from interrupting our daily business, she doesn’t seem to do much. And besides, she’s an inside cat. You can’t trust them an inch.”

  Southpaw’s tail wavered and went all the way down.

  “She’s like Datura?” he said in a small voice, his whiskers trembling ever so faintly. Somehow he didn’t like the idea of the Sender, whom everybody talked about with their whiskers raised in grudging respect, being like Datura and his friends.

  “Like Datura—no, no,” said Hulo, “though you have to wonder why she brought the tigers into Nizamuddin, that didn’t seem friendly at all. It’s just that inside cats are different from you and me, Southpaw. What kind of cat would rather live with Bigfeet than have all this?”

  “So the house she lives in isn’t like the Shuttered House?” Southpaw said, thinking of the stinking floors and the old, shuffling Bigfoot.

  “Not at all!” said Hulo, seeing what was going through the kitten’s mind. “Didn’t you come with me when we did the kitchen raid—”

  The tom glanced at Southpaw and saw the kitten’s ears rise in sharpened interest. “Never mind the kitchen expedition,” he said, not wanting to encourage Southpaw to plunge into more trouble. “Most Bigfeet houses are like large, clean cages, and though everyone knows the Bigfeet are mad, building hutch after hutch for themselves like rabbits, some of them seem to like our kind. It’s just that—come on, youngling, let me show you what I mean.”

  The tom stretched and, checking for cars and Bigfeet, padded away from the fig tree, back towards the row of houses near the canal. Southpaw followed in his wake, trying hard to imitate Hulo’s swagger, but conscious that what he could manage with his shorter paws was closer to a waddle than a walk.

  The tomcat took a shortcut up a massive Bengal quince tree, ducking the large globes of fruit that hung from its branches, waiting for the kitten to make his way through. The two cats made their way through the branches, Hulo sending a quick twitch of his whiskers to clear the way, and also to let the tree’s inhabitants know that they weren’t on the hunt. Southpaw loved walking through the green, papery leaves, high above the world, the bark massaging his paw pads. The winds were picking up now, and he could smell the sharp change in the air: a storm was on its way, making the walk through the tree that much more exhilarating. He was almost sorry when the tom dropped down from the Bengal quince onto a gatepost, moving easily from there to a window ledge.

  Hulo made room for Southpaw and they settled down behind a row of flowerpots, the kitten batting aside the dahlias so that he could see better. They were looking directly into a courtyard attached to one of the Bigfeet houses, and an Alsatian pup looked up sharply when he heard the leaves in the Bengal quince tree rustle, but the cats had moved fast, and all he saw were the squirrels running along the branches. His black-tipped ears, creamy on the inside, stayed cocked for a while, but then the dog relaxed and settled down again.

  A young Bigfoot woman came out with a large red plastic bowl of food. Though he was perched so far up, Southpaw could smell the meat and his whiskers rose in greed. The dog jumped up, barking happily, and rubbed his head against the Bigfoot’s hands. She settled down, petting him. Up on the parapet, the two cats watched as the dog ate his food in great gulps. Southpaw’s stomach emitted a hopeful gurgle, but Hulo glared at him, and the kitten flattened his stomach against the ledge, hoping it would shut up.

  “Now watch!” Hulo signalled.

  The Bigfoot picked up the empty bowl and left. The dog whined and stared at her, clearly willing her to come back with more food. The screen door that led back into the house shut with a click.

  The Alsatian pup stared at the place where his food had been set down. Then he stared at the door, and Southpaw could tell he was willing it to open again.

  It stayed shut.

  The Alsatian began barking. When no one came out, his barks grew louder and louder, until, losing patience, he lunged towards the door and was brought up short by his leash. He growled and then, his tail held expectantly still, he resumed barking.

  The door swung open, and a different Bigfoot came out. Southpaw wished he could tell the pup to shut up. Something about the way the Bigfoot was standing, arms folded across his chest, spelled trouble. “If he’d had a tail, it would be twitching,” Southpaw thought, and Hulo’s whiskers twitched, acknowledging the truth of this.

  The Bigfoot was staring down at the pup, who was barking hysterically now, tugging at his leash.

  The Bigfoot smacked the pup hard across his nose. Southpaw ducked back behind the dahlias and rested his whiskery chin on the flower’s soft petals. He didn’t like dogs, but it was hard to hear the pup’s sorrowful little whines without feeling sorry for the creature. Hulo was impassive, but his fur stood up just enough for Southpaw to think that perhaps the tom felt it too.

  THE DAY WAS ALMOST AT A CLOSE when they came back to the park in the centre of Nizamuddin, crossing over the rooftops, taking the stairs and the long route through the gardens and the lantana hedges. Southpaw loved coming over the roofs, especially those that were festooned with clotheslines: there was something about the scent of clean Bigfeet clothes that made him want to rub his face against them, and he was happy to dry his wet fur on some of the larger bedsheets and tablecloths. Sometimes, the Bigfeet could be surprisingly thoughtful.

  The kitten’s stomach rumbled again. He’d been so busy climbing the fig tree and then going on the excursion with Hulo that he hadn’t been able to forage in the garbage dump for a meal. It had been raining steadily for a while, and it seemed to him that it would go on all night. The stars were coming out, and with the rain pelting down like this, Southpaw knew it was unlikely that they would be able to hunt.

  Hulo stopped at his favourite spot, a corrugated tin roof that lay like a crooked hat over an abandoned garage. There was enough crawl space under its overlapping tin sheets to provide cover for the two cats after their long, wet trek. It was close enough to the houses and the park for him to keep an eye on the movements of the Bigfeet and other animals, and isolated enough to be a comfortable resting place.

  They listened to the fierce rat-a-tat of the rain on the roof, so loud now that it drowned out all the other sounds of the park at night. The headlights from the Bigfeet’s passin
g cars lit up the road every so often, and Southpaw shivered when he saw how the water ran off the streets in small rivers. He wondered if the pup had been taken into the house for shelter; he hoped so.

  “Do you remember the smell from that dog’s food bowl?” Hulo said suddenly.

  Southpaw couldn’t stop his stomach from letting out a gargantuan rumble. The small whisker twitch that meant “yes” was entirely superfluous.

  “What did it smell like to you?” the tom asked. His matted fur hung over his eyes, and he had picked up what looked like a tree’s worth of dead leaves and filth as they came back through the storm, but he radiated alertness to Southpaw. If Hulo was as hungry as the kitten, he hadn’t let it show.

  Southpaw moistened his pink mouth and his whiskers began quivering on their own. “It smelled like marrowbones and rich meat stew,” he said. “It smelled even better than fresh rat, and it smelled warm and good.”

  Hulo’s green eyes were almost opaque; Southpaw couldn’t tell what the tom was thinking.

  “Every meal that pup eats is like that,” he said. “Rich and warm, and savoury. Filling, on a day like this, when you can feel the first cold fingers of winter running through your fur and bones. He doesn’t have to do anything for his meals. No hunting, no digging through the garbage and fighting the rats for every scrap. No going out in the heat of summer to find food that isn’t spoiled, no expeditions in the rain when your fur soaks right through to your skin.”

  The tom stared out across the park. They were comfortable enough, but drifts of rain blew into their corner every so often, and Southpaw shivered from time to time from the cold.

  “Some Bigfeet will do that for cats as well,” he said. “Feed you milk and fish—you’ve tasted fish, haven’t you, Southpaw?—three times a day, give you a warm bed. Wouldn’t you like that?”

  The kitten’s eyes were huge, considering the lovely pictures that had begun dancing in his mind as Hulo shared his thoughts.

  “Yes,” he said, but his whiskers were uncertain. The tom said nothing. “Would the Bigfeet tie me up?” the kitten asked after a while. “No,” said the tomcat. “They never tie up cats, perhaps because we would bite through any leashes. But they might lock you up, in their hutches.”

  “Would the Bigfeet beat me?” the kitten asked.

  The tip of Hulo’s tail moved back and forth as he considered the question.

  “Perhaps,” he said.

  “Would they let me stay in the park and climb the roofs?” the kitten asked after considering the matter. He could still almost smell and taste that bowl of meat stew, and imagine how good it would feel to clean what little remained off his whiskers. His belly would be warm and bulging, instead of empty and slack.

  “Probably not,” said the tom. “Some cats around the dargah visit Bigfeet houses for the food and come away, but it’s an uncertain life. If you want your meals three times a day, then you have to become an inside cat. And as I’ve said earlier, it isn’t a bad life at all, if you don’t end up in a place like the Shuttered House.”

  Southpaw washed his paws several times over to try and sort out his thoughts.

  “Is the house the Sender lives in nice?” he said.

  “Yes,” said Hulo.

  “But she never comes out of the house?” the kitten asked, unable to imagine what that would be like. His thoughts went back briefly to the gloom and stench of the Shuttered House. He blinked the nightmarish image away and thought that even if he were to live in a comfortable Bigfeet house, the idea of being unable to see the sky would be unbearable. In summer, a few days after his eyes had opened, he had wandered into a cardboard crate and been unable to find his way out. His heart began to hammer as he remembered how closed in and suffocated he’d felt, before Katar heard his mews and clawed a path through the cardboard.

  Hulo said, “Only up to the stairs.”

  “How horrible it would be to live in a box!” Southpaw said. “Why does anyone want to be an inside cat?”

  The tomcat said, “How does your belly feel?”

  “Empty and sad,” said the kitten.

  “If you found the right Bigfeet family,” said Hulo, “you would never have to be hungry again.”

  Southpaw lay back, confused again, and tried to grab his tail with his paws to get his mind out of the dilemma. He could see what Hulo meant, and with his stomach reminding him that it didn’t like being empty, he began to understand why the life of an inside cat might have some appeal. But his mind refused to go beyond the sense of claustrophobia. He played with his tail, fluffing it up with his claws, smoothing it back down, and then he thought of the pup and the way it had whined, wanting more food, dependent on its Bigfoot. “I’d rather be an outside cat,” he said at last. And he felt Hulo’s smile radiating through the other cat’s fur and whiskers as clearly as if it had been light and he’d been able to see the tom’s face.

  “It’s a choice every cat has to make at some point,” said Hulo.

  “Did you ever want to be an inside cat?” Southpaw asked, thinking that he couldn’t imagine Hulo anywhere near the Bigfeet.

  The tom was licking his tangled fur clean, but at this he stopped, and his fur rippled with laughter. He turned his battered fighter’s face with the scars and the broad ugly features to Southpaw.

  “What kind of Bigfoot would invite me with a face like this?” he said. “They usually greet me with their brooms!”

  Southpaw wriggled, enjoying the joke, and was about to curl into Hulo’s bulk for warmth when the tomcat stiffened, cocking his ragged ears. “Rats!” he said. “Look at them, swarming out into the street! The drainpipe must have flooded their homes out—all right, Southpaw, I’m off to hunt. Stay here!”

  The kitten scrambled to his feet, his nose twitching in excitement. “I’m coming too, Hulo!”

  The tom cuffed him gently, rolling the kitten over and back into safety.

  “No, you’re not,” he said. “You haven’t been on your first hunt yet and there’s too many of them—you might get bitten.” The black creatures were disappearing down the alley on the left, and the tom was already at the edge of the roof as he talked. “Don’t leave the park, Southpaw, stay right here. I’ll be back with fresh kill for you.” His bristly bottlebrush of a tail stayed waggling in the air for a second as he braced his paws on the broken drainpipe, and then Hulo was gone, his teeth already chattering in anticipation of the hunt.

  Southpaw’s tail dropped all the way down as he watched Hulo go. It’s not fair, the kitten thought. Hadn’t he watched Katar, Miao, Beraal and Hulo hunt from the time the blue had left his own eyes and he could see? But Hulo had been very clear: he was not to leave. Southpaw often got in trouble, but he never disobeyed the older cats when they gave him a direct order. He scratched at a discarded paper bag, feeling better when he’d torn it up into small, grease-stained shreds. “That’s what I’d do to a rat!” he said to himself. “Right paw! Left paw! Teeth at the ready for the killing bite! I’m a great ferocious hunter, look at me!”

  The storm seemed to be blowing itself out, and the rain dropped from its clatter to a low, steady, pleasant thrumming. Southpaw killed the paper bag again, but the second time around wasn’t as much fun. He chased his tail. He cleaned his whiskers. He stropped his tiny, emerging claws on a piece of cardboard.

  Across the park, the lights went on in the house Hulo had said the Sender lived in. Southpaw wondered what it was like, living in a house. Would it be exactly like living in a box, dark and stifling? Or would it be different? Idly, he skewered some strands of tinsel that were flapping in the breeze and killed them until he was sure they were dead. It must be different, because otherwise there would be no inside cats at all, even if Hulo and everyone else was right and inside cats were crazy.

  The rain had died down to the lightest patter. Southpaw looked across at the Sender’s house, at the well-lit staircase, the open kitchen door. Perhaps he could go and take a look, just a quick peek, he thought. There was no sign
of Hulo, perhaps he had met another cat, or decided to do his night rounds.

  The kitten sat up on his hind paws and sniffed the air carefully, his whiskers taut and listening for any sign of the tomcat. He stared at the Sender’s house again—it was such a short distance away, just a hop, skip and climb really. What Hulo had actually said was, “Don’t leave the park.” The kitten’s paws padded off more or less of their own volition, and Southpaw bounced down the roof and bounded across the wet grass. He would be inside the park, he told himself. Inside a house inside a park, but that was the merest quibble.

  Southpaw crept up the steps, flattening his belly the way he’d seen Beraal go up the stairs, keeping his nose alert for the scent of any passing Bigfeet. But the rain must have corralled them indoors, for he saw and smelled none. “Just a peek,” he told himself as he approached the kitchen door, which had been left ajar for the Sender’s convenience, he assumed.

  And then the smell hit him. The kitten let out a mew as he stuck his head cautiously over the sill, before he could tell himself to shut up. If the aroma from the pup’s bowl of food had been rich, meaty and filled with doggy wonders, this was an elixir carefully blended to perfection for cats. It smelled of fish-heads and fish broth, and fresh, caught-this-minute fish, better than the freshest of fresh rats, and Southpaw’s nose quivered with such intensity he thought it was going to fall off. The kitten stuck his whiskers out to check for Bigfeet: it was a hasty check, but they seemed to be elsewhere. Then he was across the floor and his head was in the bowl. As he gobbled he purred like a steam engine.