The Hundred Names of Darkness

by Nilanjana Roy

  They heard a last round of cheerful yelling, a clatter, and then the last of the Bigfeet left the park. There was only one Bigfoot remaining, a man who lay stretched out on a bench like an untidy heap of clothes. Every now and then, he snored in a rising, loud arc, with a question mark hanging at the end of the snore; it seemed unlikely that they would have to worry about him.

  Doginder felt Mara shiver again, and thought that the cold would bite as deep into the little cat’s bones as any predator. She needed shelter, better harbour than the park could provide; she needed, he thought, the shelter of her own kind.

  “Mara,” he said, “Kirri mentioned that you were the Sender, and all that talk of whiskers—can’t you let the other cats know you’re here?”

  “The other cats?” said Mara. He could feel her whiskers twitch in incredulity.

  “Why not?” he said. “Your sending earlier in the day was loud enough—I’m sure they would hear you—good heavens, I’m sure they heard you all the way across the canal in Jangpura, for that matter! And no Nizamuddin cat would refuse the Sender shelter, surely.”

  “No!” said Mara. “I couldn’t. They don’t like me, Doginder! They’ve always thought I was a freak—no, I couldn’t ask them.”

  Doginder put his ears back and looked at her questioningly. “But it would only be for a night,” he said. “And you are the Sender, Mara—their Sender.”

  “Oh, you don’t understand!” Mara cried. “They don’t trust inside cats, Doginder, and then my whiskers and my sendings make me strange in their eyes—do you think I haven’t heard them? I stopped sending in Nizamuddin because Southpaw and Beraal were the only ones I could talk to. And Beraal can’t move around, she’s just had her litter, I haven’t seen her in weeks, and Southpaw’s been badly hurt, I won’t send to him.”

  Doginder listened, and there was something in the depth of his brown eyes that Mara couldn’t read, even though they were well illuminated by the lamp that stood directly over the hedge.

  “Beraal is your friend?” he said.

  “You know her?” Mara said.

  “Yes, we all do,” he said. “She’s one of the finest warriors and most respected of the queens in the neighbourhood, second only to Miao—but you never knew the Siamese, she died last year in the great battle.”

  “I met Miao before she died,” Mara said quietly. “And Beraal was my teacher, before she had to go away and have her kittens.”

  “The world is not a sending,” Miao had told her. “The world is real, and it is more than the four walls of your house.” She had thought often of the Siamese cat’s words, and more than once, she had sat on the windowsill, letting the world come to her, wondering whether she should heed Miao’s advice and go to it instead. Fear had held her paws back at the sill, at the doorway, at the top of the stairs, for many moons now. Perhaps, thought the Sender, too many moons.

  Doginder looked at her steadily. “You puzzle me, Sender,” he said. “You have power of your own, you have much politeness, and yet you know so little of your own world. You say Beraal was your teacher, but you have not visited her or her kittens?”

  Mara sat back and washed her fur hurriedly, not wanting to meet Doginder’s gaze. She kept her attention on her paws, and on the circles of yellow light cast by the lamps in the darkness, and the rustles and squeaks from the small prey in the park.

  “No,” she said, her voice muffled as she combed out her tail. “I don’t go out much.”

  She was afraid of what Doginder might say, but he surprised her. The dog lowered his head and blew air out of his nostrils, a soft, resigned gesture.

  “There was a time when I grew so used to the Bigfeet and their beatings,” he said, “that I stopped caring about what happened to me.” Imperceptibly, his voice changed, his bark shifting to mimic the timbre of his puppy days. “Days went by, and I would barely look up when the door was left open; instead of watching the animals who went by, the cows and the rat packs, I spent the hours slumped on my blanket, waiting to fill the time between one meal and the next, one kick or cuff and the next.”

  It seemed to Mara that the tendrils of winter wrapped closer around them as the dog spoke, the night chill seeping into her bones. Doginder’s scent had grown heavier, thicker, so different from the sunny, cheerful smell his fur had carried all day. She could see it in her mind—not Doginder as he was now, a great bouncing fellow who carried his plume of a tail as a banner. Instead, the Sender saw a young pup, his ribs thin and bruised from the rough treatment he’d received; she could smell the sadness seeping out of his fur, see the wariness leach the trust out of the young dog’s brown eyes as he rested his head on his thin blankets.

  “Days went by before I realized that the Bigfeet were growing careless,” Doginder said. “They didn’t bother to tie me up most days, only slipping the chain around my neck at night—sometimes, if the man doing that was in a bad mood, he would slip it tight, so tight that—oh well, what’s the point returning to the stink of yesterday’s sadness? But most afternoons, I would be unleashed; and do you know what I did when one day I realized I was free of that hateful leash?”

  Mara brightened. “You ran,” she said, her whiskers rising as she thought of the pup’s gladness, his joy at being able to finally escape.

  Doginder sighed, and his breath came out in a puff of white fog, hanging in the cold air.

  “No, Mara, I didn’t run,” he said. “I didn’t even think of running. It had been so long that I had stopped wondering what the air would smell like on the other side of the wall, whether the street would feel different under my paws when I could walk freely, without someone shoving a stick under my belly or jerking my head back if I tried to follow my nose. I had forgotten how to want to be free.”

  He turned his head and cocked his ears as a bandicoot hurried by, but then he returned to the past. “One day, a pair of parrots swooped over the wall. They called to one another: ‘Can you come? Can’t you come?’—and they made bright green flashes against the red bricks. One flew over my head, so close that I could see the barbs of its feathers on its undercoat, and she called: ‘Can you? Can’t you?’ I stood up and walked a few steps. It felt odd, not to feel the restraining tug of the leash, the dour bite of the chain. ‘You can’t? You can!’ her mate urged me, and slowly, my paws wobbly, I found myself walking away from the house, the Bigfeet and everything I had known. The door was open, and I stepped out into the world, and after many moons my nose started to twitch again.”

  Mara could see it so clearly as Doginder shared his memories. It was early spring; the new leaves were coming out on the trees, soft clouds of silk cotton whirled and played in the breeze, tangling themselves in the fur of the young pup’s legs and tail. He had padded faster and faster, breaking into a run when he realized he didn’t want to go back to his Bigfeet any more. The welcoming smell of the pigs foraging at the canal, the scurrying trails of the rat pack along the lanes, the promising aroma of food wafting out of the Bigfeet homes—all of these whispered to the young Doginder in greeting. In the far distance, he had heard the joyous barks of a pack of street dogs, and Doginder knew that he had found his kind.

  Mara went over to the dog and rubbed her flank along his. Instinct told her not to lick his face—no matter how friendly they had become, he was still a dog, and her blood warned her not to test his automatic responses. But she purred as she brushed past him, and touched, Doginder bent down to press his cold, friendly nose lightly against her orange fur.

  “All right, all right,” he said hurriedly, “enough with the sappy stuff.”

  “I wish your Bigfeet had been more like mine,” said Mara, “but I’m glad you left yours. They sound awful.”

  “Mara,” said Doginder, “I’m going to go off now and find some food for both of us. Look, I didn’t tell you my story because I wanted you to feel sorry for me. I told you about my life because chains and leashes are strange things—sometimes you don’t know when they’ve slipped off, leaving you free. A
nyway, time to get down to some of the old hunting-foraging business, cat, I’ll be back soon. Stay right here, mind. Don’t budge. Don’t go for a walk, don’t try to chat up stray predators, don’t run off with a strange mongoose or three. Okay?”

  “Yes, Doginder,” said Mara. She heard him bark as he bounded off into the night, loud, joyous woofs that expressed how happy he was to stretch his legs after the last few hours.

  Now that the dog had gone, Mara let her whiskers stretch out, tasting the night air. She felt them tremble at the light silken tug from far above, where the bats had come out for their sorties. Their intelligent chirrups wafted down to her, transforming the blackness of the sky into a more friendly place. The earth under her stomach was damp and crumbly, but despite the cold, Mara felt a kind of contentment seep through her limbs. It was comfortable enough under the hedge, and her whiskers and nose brought her news of the park: a posse of stray dogs patrolling the canal roads well into the distance, the thump of Bigfeet machinery as a concrete mixer rumbled into life for some late-night construction work, the purposeful, stealthy scurry of the bandicoots in the far corners of the park.

  The warm, glowing squares that lit the Bigfeet homes caught her attention. In one of the houses, a Bigfoot came out onto the balcony and stood there for a moment, looking down into the park. It was not one of her own, the smell told Mara that much. But there was something about the way the Bigfoot stood that reminded her of her own Bigfeet, and a pang of longing took her unawares. She would have been curled up on the sofa next to them at this hour, batting at the pages of the books they insisted on reading when they could have been doing the sensible thing and cuddling their cat.

  Her stomach would have been full, instead of rumbling and empty. Perhaps there would have been a set of war games—battles where Mara’s duty was to stalk the feathers, balls of wool and other objects that represented, had they but known it, deadly threats to the Bigfeet. They seemed to think these objects were innocuous, but Mara knew better; she had watched their shadows grow and lengthen on the walls, and knew they were not what they seemed, even if the Bigfeet refused to take her wars seriously.

  It felt to her that the lights in the windows made the darkness under the hedge in the park even thicker. She wondered whether her Bigfeet missed her as much as she missed them. And for the first time since she’d left her home that afternoon, she wondered if she would ever find her way back to them. The thought made her mew softly and sadly to herself; it was unimaginable. They were her clan, even if they were lacking in the whisker department.

  Her ears swivelled at the sound of a familiar voice. Doginder was still some distance away, but his bark was excited, carrying far in the cool night air. Mara’s nose whiffled as she scented something else: who was it? A fully grown tom with a swagger, exuding confidence and something else, the alertness of the practiced warrior.

  “…So you heard the Sender calling for Southpaw and Beraal?” Doginder was saying.

  “Heard it? Everyone in the blasted neighbourhood heard it, my eardrums felt like a Diwali firecracker had gone off in it—but she’s always been a noisy nuisance of a beast.” The tom’s voice carried clearly over the park to Mara.

  “I guess she totally nails ‘loud,’ ” said Doginder. “But poor thing, she was scared. First time she’s been outside, as you know, and she’s feeling lost without her Bigfeet.”

  The tom made a dismissive mew, as the dog and the cat turned into the road at the head of the park. Even at this distance, from her position under the hedge, Mara caught the contempt in his hiss.

  “If you ask me, a Sender that never pokes her precious nose out of her stinking Bigfeet house isn’t much of a Sender. We don’t think much of her around these parts—what kind of scaredy cat stays shivering inside her own house, choosing to consort with our enemies instead of spending time with us? She’s a disgrace, this so-called Sender of ours, leading her pampered, soft, cushioned life, never getting her paws dirty with the mud and soil of our world. She’s a disgrace to Senders and a disgrace to cats—hanh? What’s that you’re saying? She can hear us? She’s right there? All right, all right, I’ll save it for later, let’s see what we can do for her. If this is the first time she’s come out on her own, she’ll be cold and in need of feeding, Sender or no Sender.”

  Doginder leaped gracefully over a wandering bandicoot, startling the rodent, and ran down the path, Hulo keeping up with him effortlessly despite the dog’s longer strides.

  “Hey, Mara!” he called. “Brought you a relative. Come on out and say hello to Hulo.”

  There was only silence.

  “Hello to Hulo,” said Doginder cheerfully. “I thought that was pretty good, didn’t you? Come on, little one, there’s no Bigfeet around, don’t be shy.”

  Hulo was prowling around the roots, cautiously sniffing at the air.

  “She’s not here,” he said. “She was, until a moment ago, but there—in the earth—her paw marks.”

  Doginder cocked his head.

  “But I told her not to leave,” he said, puzzled. “I said I’d come back with food for her, and help.”

  The light caught Hulo’s grim, scarred visage. There was an unhappy gleam in the old fighter’s eyes, and he brushed a few tangles out of his thick, unkempt fur.

  “You realize what happened, don’t you?” he said.

  “Oh no,” said Doginder. “You think…?”

  “Yes,” said Hulo grimly, his tail plunging downwards. “She must have heard what I said, smelled my dislike. The pawmarks are widely spaced—she ran out of here, ran as fast as she could. The Sender’s gone into the darkness, into a neighbourhood she doesn’t know, and it’s all my fault.”

  The tom’s fur was ruffled, his sense of balance upset. He had no love for the Sender, and had considered her a nuisance from the time her infant yowls had interrupted his peace, his long hunting nights and Nizamuddin’s most promising catfights. He had argued that the Sender was just another outsider, and should be culled as was the practice with unwanted kittens who didn’t belong to the clan—it was Beraal who had fought him and won his promise that he would let the little stranger live. Before this night, Mara had always been the Sender to him, the unwanted stranger who set his beloved Nizamuddin by the ears.

  Until now, he had never seen her as a kitten, or thought of her as a young cat—she would be, he guessed, only a few moons younger than Southpaw, whom he and Katar had steered through that orphan’s often-turbulent childhood. Disliking Mara from a distance was one thing. Scenting the fear and sadness of this small, lost, sharply unhappy young queen, so much like the many Nizamuddin kittens he had gruffly helped to bring up, was another.

  The fog touched the tips of his crooked whiskers, and the light reflected in his eyes burnished them to a golden sheen. He lowered his head, sniffing at Mara’s tracks.

  “Doginder,” he said, “how many of your kind are out in Nizamuddin tonight?”

  The dog’s ears folded forward.

  “Too many,” he said. “We’ve had a few rough beasts slouching in from the animal shelter. Some of them are rogues who don’t belong to any pack, and who’ll snap and snarl at the world because they don’t like it. Not like the local strays at all.”

  Hulo’s great head with the torn ears, scarred from far too many brawls, was lowered as he listened.

  “You should go and get yourself some dinner before the dhabas shut down,” he said.

  “I can’t,” said Doginder. “I’m sorry, she’s from your clan, not mine, but smelling the trail of the Sender’s sadness—I can’t go off knowing she’s all on her own in this darkness.”

  “You go on,” said Hulo firmly, his whiskers alert, his tread brisk. “I’ll handle this.”

  Doginder hesitated. He wasn’t sure what Hulo meant by “handle this.”

  “I only met her today,” he said, “but I have to tell you, I liked Mara. If you mean her any harm…”

  His words trailed off into a growl. He wasn’t quite sure wh
at he would have threatened Hulo with, since his definition of being a Ferocious Attack Dog focused on the “ferocious growling” much more than the “vicious attacking” side of things, but he felt strongly about the subject.

  Hulo was padding off, out of the park, towards the roads that led to the front of Nizamuddin.

  “No harm,” he said as he left, “I’ll find her and keep her safe until we can take her to her Bigfeet. You needn’t worry, Doginder. It was my doing that she ran off; but from this day on, the little one will come to no harm at my paws or claws or teeth.”

  Doginder found the words comforting; they had the ring of an oath to them. He watched Hulo disappear into the darkness, the tomcat’s black fur merging with the night, and the park fell into silence again. The only creature that moved was a brown mouse, almost invisible among the roots. Jethro had spent a relaxed day in the company of his friends, a group of genial beetles, until their chatter had been interrupted by the arrival of Doginder and Mara. The beetles had been alarmed, waving their mandibles in agitation, but then they had quietened down when Jethro pointed out that neither the dog nor the cat appeared to be interested in hunting. He had heard Hulo’s loud approach, too, and seen Mara’s distress just before she had run away.

  The mouse looked in the direction that the orange queen had taken, but he didn’t go after her. Instead, he considered the matter, nibbling on the end of his tail, and then he scurried off, following the path the black tomcat had taken.

  The words had struck her like stones, each one leaving its hurtful mark. “…a Sender that never pokes her precious nose out of her stinking Bigfeet house isn’t much of a Sender….choosing to consort with our enemies instead of spending time with us…never getting her paws dirty with the mud and soil of our world…”