The Wildings

by Nilanjana Roy

  “Perhaps your Mara’s just weird,” said Katar. The tomcat’s tail rapped lightly on the ground. He had accepted the result of the battle between Hulo and Beraal as all the other cats had—whiskers didn’t turn backwards, as the ancient saying went. But as time went by and the Sender remained indoors, the tom’s view that inside cats were strange creatures was only reinforced.

  Miao stirred before Beraal could reply. “I knew Tigris well,” she said. “She grew up like every other wilding in Nizamuddin, learning to dodge the Bigfeet and stay out of their way. Mara had no mother or litter-mates to teach her the freedom of the canal road, or help her make her first kill in the wild. All she’s known from the time her eyes opened is the four walls of her Bigfeet’s home. And besides—”

  The Siamese’s sleek ears went up, the black patches of fur on her face standing up too as a muffled thud sounded in the distance. At the entrance of the shrine, the fakir looked around, puzzled, but turned back when he saw that there was no immediate cause for concern.

  “That sounded as though it came from the Shuttered House,” said Katar, his nostrils flaring as he scanned the rain and the wind for further information. The cats were alert, their ears swivelling around in the direction of the Shuttered House, but there was silence, and after a few moments, Miao and Katar let their hackles down.

  “—Tigris learned that she was a Sender when she was much older than Mara,” continued Miao. Beraal’s nose whiffled in interest. “It was only after she had seen her first summers and monsoons that her whiskers grew longer, and even then, her first sendings were pallid, faint glimpses, weak affairs compared to what your young pupil can do. It took Tigris three seasons to learn what Mara’s shown us in three moons. And in that time, Tigris changed.” The blue of Miao’s eyes deepened as she recollected the past.

  “Was Tigris still the Sender when I was born?” asked Katar. The tom’s tail was twitching in uncertainty. He didn’t remember Tigris at all, and felt that he should have remembered meeting the Sender, even if he’d been a youngling at the time.

  “By the time you were born, the Sender had retreated from the rest of us wildings,” said Miao, sadness lightly touching her whiskers. “After Tigris learned to send, she spent most of her time in the courtyard of a Bigfeet house—one of the old mansions on the canal road, it’s empty now. She wasn’t unfriendly, but she spent more and more time in her own world, and she had less and less time for us. Besides, you were born after the neighbourhood had quietened down.”

  “Quietened down?” said Beraal. Her mew was surprised: Nizamuddin bustled with the constant clamour of the Bigfeet, the cheerful chatter of the babblers and the predatory sorties of the cheels, besides regular upheavals among the canal pigs who were always fighting interporcine wars.

  Miao let her whiskers ripple in the rain and the wind. “Stretch your whiskers out,” she said. “Tell me what you feel.”

  The three cats raised their whiskers, and Katar felt his eyebrows tingle as they linked simultaneously. The link was calm, unruffled by turbulence or disaster; none of the cats they checked with had much to report. On the canal roads, Tabol had found shelter under a parked car and was trading stories with some of the older kittens. The market cats had retreated under blue tarpaulins, or curled up in the dry spaces behind stalls. Qawwali, who also didn’t mind the rain, was waiting patiently at the butcher’s shop in the dargah for a few scraps; the other dargah cats were curled up at the back of the fragrance seller’s stall, soothed by the vetiver and rose that scented the breeze.

  Katar’s tail rose questioningly as they left the link.

  “It’s all so normal,” said Miao. “But there was a time when there were only a handful of wildings in Nizamuddin—two or three families, not the many we have now. We lived in fear of the dogs, and the Bigfeet in those days were not friendly: we had to be prepared for them to hunt us out of our hiding places, or to pick cats up in their trucks and shift them elsewhere, entire families made to move away from the scents of their childhood years.”

  Beraal’s green eyes flashed with understanding. “That was when you needed the Sender,” she said. “The Sender could scent further than any of you, and understood the Bigfeet better—was that it?”

  “Yes, and more,” said Miao. “Tigris could smell danger long before it came to us, though it took time before the wildings learned to trust her nose.”

  Katar turned, yawning. “There is no danger in Nizamuddin now,” he said. “All we have to do is stay away from the Bigfeet, and every kitten learns to be careful—even rascals like Southpaw. No offence to you, Beraal, but the time you’re spending with Mara, training her as though she were from your own litter—what do we need a Sender for?”

  The fakir came out with a few scraps for the cats. Katar retreated cautiously behind the trunk of a graceful flame tree, though Miao and Beraal rubbed their heads happily against the fakir’s ankles, purring as they weaved through his legs so that he could accept their thanks. When he went back to the shrine, the three cats ate, Miao generously letting Katar have an equal share from her saucer.

  The Siamese was turning over Katar’s question, but it was only when they were done, and washing their whiskers, that she responded. “When you two linked, did you feel anything else in the air?” she asked.

  Beraal thought about it, her ears angled. “No,” she said. “Or wait—there was something rising in the air, but it was no more than a ripple. A hint of change to come, perhaps, but that happens with every season, Miao.”

  The Siamese was still, and her eyes hooded. “There was change in the air, and something darker,” she said. “I am no Sender, but my paws have been prickling ever since we went to the Shuttered House. We have had seven good seasons, Katar; you were born in the first of them.”

  Katar licked the last of the meal off his whiskers. “Seven mild winters, seven fat summers,” he said, thinking of the mice and rats, the abundant game that allowed most of the wildings of Nizamuddin to live well without needing to raid the Bigfeet’s garbage dumps.

  “Perhaps we will have seven more, but my bones tell me the winds are changing,” said Miao quietly. “It is just as well that we have hunters like Beraal and Hulo; perhaps we will need them. And as I reminded you once, the old saying about Senders, here and everywhere else I’ve travelled, is that they appear when the need is strong.”

  Katar caught Beraal’s unblinking eyes. He knew what the other cat was thinking, and though he raised his whiskers instinctively to test the air, neither of them understood why Miao was worried. They had full bellies, and so did most of the wildings; there was peace between the clans, a reasonable state of truce between the stray dogs and the cats, and the Bigfeet by and large left them alone.

  “But you wanted Mara dead,” said Beraal. Now that she’d spent time with the kitten, it was hard for her to imagine that she had once stalked and hunted Mara.

  “If she had been an adult with an outsider’s scent, I would have ripped her throat open myself,” said Miao calmly. “But a kitten with a possible claim on us is a different matter—we have to wait and see. Though I will give you fair warning: if Mara brings harm down on the wildings in the future, one of us will kill her. No clan can let a rogue Sender stay alive.”

  The Siamese saw the flash in Beraal’s eyes and curled her paws outwards, to show that her claws were held in. “It’s like culling kittens,” she added more gently. “Sometimes it has to be done, and as her teacher, you’ll see the warning signs before any of us. It’s more likely that her powers will help us some day, Beraal.”

  Katar poked his head up, pausing as he cleaned between his paw pads. “Some help she’s likely to be,” he said, “that Mara of yours doesn’t know whether she’s a Bigfoot with four paws or a cat with a Bigfoot brain.”

  Beraal’s eyes glittered emerald, always a warning sign with the young queen. “The tigers accept her,” she said, her whiskers reaching out to Miao as much as Katar. “She became friends with their cub—just think how
unusual that is. Could she make friends with the dogs? The cheels, who speak only to Miao? The pigs from the canals? Would she try to? And if she did, what would it mean for us? What about the Bigfeet—can she understand their endless chatter?”

  Katar had roamed the lanes and rooftops of Nizamuddin long enough to understand what this might mean. A complex web of alliances, temporary truces and occasional invasions and wars allowed the creatures who lived here to get on with each other, and it was understood that they all lived at the mercy of the Bigfeet’s often inexplicable whims. A Sender with Mara’s powers, and her apparent ability to make friends with other species was a rarity.

  “Why doesn’t she come out?” said Katar truculently. “How can she be our Sender when we don’t know her scent?”

  Beraal’s whiskers fell. She didn’t expect Katar to share her feelings for the kitten; Mara had filled the place either a mate or a litter of her own would have taken this year.

  “She smells our suspicion,” she said. “And she’s lonely, despite Southpaw’s visits. The last time I went over, she was trying to make friends with a house lizard.”

  Miao’s ears pricked up in curiosity. “How did that go?” she asked.

  “Not very well. All it had to say was ‘girgit, girgit.’ She said it was hard to carry on a conversation,” Beraal said, her eyes half-closed. Katar’s whiskers twitched, and then the whiskers over his eyes twitched, and then his entire belly began to shake as he contemplated the frustration of Nizamuddin’s most talented Sender attempting to chat with a lizard. Beraal and Miao found their whiskers rising as they saw the funny side of it. The three cats curled into each other, glad for the warmth and the company, and slept as the rain pattered down, ignoring the murmuring of the Bigfeet who went back and forth from the shrine.

  A little further away from where they slept, the rain beat down hard on the staircase outside the Shuttered House, rapping sharply on the metal rungs. The muffled thumping Katar had heard earlier started up again, but there was no one to hear it, except for a small brown mouse.

  The mouse wasn’t bothered by the stench from the Shuttered House—the stink of cat litter, mildewed walls and dry rot was like a signpost indicating that he would find food here. He had often raided the house for crumbs, keeping a cautious, beady eye out for the ferals, but tonight the atmosphere was different.

  When the mouse risked a peek through the door, the ground floor of the house seemed carpeted with cats. They crept around on the floor, fighting for scraps of food. Several sat on the stairs, hissing and yowling.

  He sniffed the air, and his sensitive nose recoiled at the odour of sickness. It was sharp enough to cut through the clean scents of the wind and the rain; it told the mouse that the Bigfoot who lived in the Shuttered House was seriously ill. When he saw a white cat with peculiar eyes pad down the stairs, the mouse trembled and skittered away. The cat had once almost trapped him under a broken chair when he’d been on a raid, and the mouse had never forgotten the malevolence in the yellow eye.

  As he scurried off, the mouse heard a terrible wailing break out, and he shivered even more in the cold. He didn’t turn to look back at the rain-darkened, windswept bulk of the Shuttered House—rich though the pickings there might be, he didn’t think he would visit the place for a while.

  The time of night Katar loved most were the hours just before dawn. To the tomcat, these were the hours of freedom. Except for the Bigfoot night guard, who did his rounds thumping his wooden staff slowly on the ground as he walked, the Bigfeet were mostly asleep. Sometimes their noisy cars went racing by, but cats could hear the racket they made a mile off, and it was much easier to avoid them at night than during the day, when few cats except for the most intrepid veterans would risk crossing the road.

  The few predators other than Bigfeet that Katar feared were asleep at this hour; even the most alert watchdogs had stopped their barking and were at rest, the canal pigs, who could be of uncertain temper, were wallowing in the stinking mud, and the cheels were slumbering on their high perches. Nizamuddin was his kingdom, then, and the tomcat enjoyed his dawn rounds.

  As usual he paid little heed to the rain, but when he got to a dry patch, he was glad for the chance to shake his coat dry. The branches of the great neem and the intertwined magnolia trees blocked out a lot of the rain, and the ground under the cat’s paws was damp, but not wet, except for a few patches here and there that were easy to avoid. He felt his spirits lift.

  He stopped at the magnolia tree, leaned back against the base and scratched his tail and flanks luxuriously on its bark. Then he turned around and scratched his tummy up and down. Then he stretched his front paws and his back paws and his tummy and his tail until all of the worry over bringing up Southpaw and the tiredness from his night of hunting bandicoot rats had been stretched away.

  A frog hopped down the path, and checking to make sure he wasn’t being observed, Katar gave in to the kittenish urge to hop after it. Hop, went the frog; hop, went Katar, all the way down the rough path that bisected the clearing. He was glad no other cats were there to see him. The tom was very conscious of his dignity, but sometimes he missed the fun of his kittenhood.

  It was only when the frog went “plop” instead of hop, into a fresh new puddle, that Katar realized he had moved out of the dargah and was almost at the grounds of the Shuttered House.

  He hesitated; after Southpaw’s experience, he and the other cats had given the place a wide berth. The tom was happiest when negotiating the maze-like networks of the roofs and balconies, endlessly curious about the very different lives of the creatures who lived in the empty lot and elsewhere, beyond the confines of the park. But something about the house made him uneasy, and set his fur to prickling at the best of times; and as he sniffed the air, his nose wrinkled. Drowning out the scent of rain was something dank and ugly—he smelled the restlessness of the cats inside and whiffled his nose at the high stink of Bigfeet illness.

  Now, sounds cut through the silence of the night: in the Shuttered House, an animal was moaning, calling out in low, guttural cries. “Waooww!” it said, and then other voices joined in. “Aaaoooww!” they called. The timbre sent cold shivers down Katar’s backbone—shivering, high-pitched, evocative of deep distress. The ferals were calling in lamentation, though the tomcat didn’t understand why.

  High in a tree behind the Shuttered House, a sleepy barbet raised an alarm. “Plink-plink!” it called into the night, and a startled mynah picked up the refrain: “Keek-keek-keek! Keek-keek!”

  Katar began to back away from the house. He was about to link to ask Hulo or any of the other cats in the area to join him and see what was going on, when a musky, furry scent hit his nostrils. The tom swung around, and placed his paw in the path of a mouse that was scurrying away towards the hedges.

  The cat turned and their gazes locked, predator and prey. But the mouse had its short, bristly fur up, and was agitated in a way that had nothing to do with being caught by Katar. “It smells wrong,” said the mouse. “Smells terrible wrong.”

  The tomcat was about to respond when the night air erupted into sound. From behind the door of the Shuttered House, the cats began to moan again, the low keening sound rasping along the tomcat’s nerves. He twitched, and the mouse used the opportunity to make a successful dash into the broad leaves of the cannas.

  The wails of the cats were making the birds restless, and Katar crouched near the cannas, his tail flicking wildly back and forth now. He sent a quick, all-cats alert to the link, letting them know that something was wrong at the Shuttered House, and then he froze as Bigfeet came running through the grounds. The cat pressed himself into the safe embrace of a clump of lilies, watching as the lights went on in the house, unable to get the high-pitched keening of the ferals out of his mind.

  More knots of Bigfeet were coming up the path. The Bigfeet found the path difficult going in the rain—it was disused, weed strewn and dangerously slippery—and Katar had to curl himself even deeper into the folia
ge when one of the Bigfeet slipped and almost fell into the lilies.

  There was the creaking of rusted hinges, and Katar’s whiskers went rigid as he watched the door of the Shuttered House, closed and barred for as long as he could remember, swinging open. For a terrifying moment, the tomcat wondered whether a flood of cats would come pouring out of the stinking depths of the house, but instead, the Bigfeet went in and out. Unbidden, his whiskers brought him a brief, fleeting image of many cats sullenly shrinking back into the corners and crevices of the house, as the Bigfeet swarmed in.

  There was a hiatus, and he could hear the Bigfeet chattering and exclaiming from inside the house. They seemed to be distressed, and there were now many of them stamping up and down the path. Katar wondered whether he could escape from the back, but there were so many Bigfeet milling around that it seemed more sensible to stay where he was.

  At his feet, the earth stirred a fraction, and a tiny, brown, whiskered head popped up.

  “This is a terrible business,” said the mouse. “For me, for you and all of us.”

  Katar was unsure of the etiquette of talking to prey—he had seldom done it in the past—but the mouse spoke in Junglee, and had addressed him directly. Besides, if he pounced on the mouse, he risked drawing Bigfeet attention to himself. The cat considered his options, and then his natural curiosity kicked in. “What’s a terrible business, mouse?” he said.

  “The ruckus at the Shuttered House,” said the mouse, eyeing the cat shrewdly and keeping a judicious distance between the two of them. “I could tell you, if you were willing to consider a truce, O Cat.”

  “Let there be a truce,” said Katar grandly. “Why are the Bigfeet getting their tails in a twist, mouse?”

  “Himself is dead, isn’t he?” said the mouse.