The Hundred Names of Darkness

by Nilanjana Roy

  “Of course, of course,” said Moonch, and Chamcha snuffled his assent, too. “You are in charge here. We are but your humble servants.” He rubbed his paws together again and turned, lowering his belly and tail to the ground. “All of us,” he added, “every last bandicoot here is most conscious of who is in charge.” Southpaw started; his whiskers had received the smallest of stings, and he thought he had heard Moonch add as he scuttled away, “For now.” But Mulligan didn’t seem to have heard; the Bengal cat lay stretched out over the roots, his eyes fastened on the burrows in the distance.

  The bandicoots snuffled and grunted as they left. The scurrying of their paws faded, but the thick scent trails lingered in the air.

  Southpaw stood up, meaning to thank the Bengal cat.

  “Sorry,” said Mulligan, stretching and sitting up. “Terrible way to meet us, you know, being at the mercy of those thugs. Yes, I heard what Moonch said, but your whiskers are very, shall we say, expressive, and indignation quivered at the tips of them. Oh well, the fur hasn’t flown, and it’s only this part of the course that’s infested with the beasts. You have these outbreaks every so often—one year it was the peachicks, running around and leaving claw-marks all over the tees, one year the club cats had six or seven kittens per litter, and this year seems to be blessed with a barrage of bandicoots. Up to each clan to curb its numbers, spread out so that they don’t inconvenience the rest. But look at me, rattling on and on. You must be hungry, Southpaw. Shall we head off and join the others? Mashie and Niblick had just begun hunting when I came here to find you—Thomas got the news across to us via Major Mynah a little late, he’s been busy these days. You’ll like Mashie, and you’ll find Niblick’s part of the course rather smashing. He has most of the sand traps, lucky fellow, and access to the clubhouse too. Would you prefer rats, mice or bird’s eggs for your chhota hazri—your morning repast?”

  Before Southpaw could say a word, his stomach sent out a hopeful rumble; it had been a while since the rat he’d offered to share with Dippy.

  “That’s a yes, then!” said Mulligan, his mew rather pleased. “Follow me!”

  The two cats set off, heading towards the far end of the course, where a cluster of Bigfeet monuments beckoned to Southpaw enticingly, their vast empty stone interiors promising good hunting. The tom turned once, pausing when Mulligan stopped to comb some burrs out of his tail, to look back at the banyan tree, but the grounds were tranquil and hushed. A keelback snake slithered past, its vivid green scales matching the colour of the grass in the rough. If the bandicoots stirred, they did so underground, hidden from view. As the toms walked towards Mulligan’s friends, Southpaw took the memories of their glowing eyes, their grasping paws, that insidious, menacing smell, and set them to rest.

  The Bigfeet were fast asleep when Mara slipped away, in the early hours of the morning. They were used to her sojourns by now, and let her go in and out of the house without fuss. But they smelled of relief when she came back home, and she tried to thank them by spending some of the night on their bed, curling up on the pillow until they had gone to sleep. It was one of the many curious aspects of the lives of Bigfeet that they chose to waste the time between moonrise and moonset, sleeping the night away instead of resting during the day, as more sensible creatures did.

  In her kittenhood, Mara had patiently attempted to train the Bigfeet into playing with her during the choice, sweet hours just before dawn, but they had not seemed to appreciate the gifts she had bestowed on them, the songs she had sung as enticement. The Chief Bigfoot was as challenged on this front as the lesser Bigfeet, and often came into the house just when Mara was settling into a much-needed mid-morning nap. As the seasons passed, the Sender gave up on trying to change the Bigfeet. Instead, she sacrificed the early hours of the night, napping with the Bigfeet until the moon was at its zenith, or until the peaceful hours before dawn; and she slept in the afternoon instead of the morning, so that she could accompany the Chief Bigfoot and help her with household inspections.

  Before she left the house, Mara performed a small sending, one that had become a ritual over the last few moons. The Sender ignored the acrid stench from the Bigfeet’s bonfires, the sawdust and the dried, dead sap on the branches joining the ever-present smells of tar, cement and turned earth.

  She raised her whiskers, sweeping them back and forth slowly and deliberately. She stood at the open window, and she closed her eyes, giving her sense of smell and touch full play. In the Sender’s mind, the roads that led from Nizamuddin to the home of the vet took slow shape, until she had the layout firmly fixed between her ears. Then she opened her eyes and deepened the scan, her whiskers reaching out and probing for any signs of her quarry. She had done this every morning, and every night since the Bigfeet had come back with the scent of tears on their skin, and an empty cage. It might take her all of summer to find him, but until she had located Southpaw on the grid, the Sender would raise her whiskers and search every last inch of Delhi, if that was what was required. She moved lightly among the pigeons and crows, the mice and the sleeping cats of Khan Market and Lodhi Gardens, sending so discreetly that none but the most alert sensed her presence. The bats in the Lodhi tombs stirred uneasily, their radar picking up the light probing of the Sender’s whiskers, but when nothing appeared in the doorways of the ancient tombs, they relaxed their leathery wings and went back to their slumbers.

  It was some time later, as the morning heat warmed the window sill where Mara sat, that she gave up on her search for Southpaw. There was no despair in her whiskers; only patience as she straightened them and padded down the stairs to meet Beraal.

  —

  FOR A MOMENT, WHEN she saw the black-and-white queen, Mara almost snarled. The slender warrior cat sprang so lithely from parapet to parapet, intent on her hunting, that the Sender recognized her only when she drew close enough to catch Beraal’s scent.

  Beraal moved so fast that she seemed like a ghost shadow, her fur melting into the dim light of dawn. The shrew she was stalking fled, dodging to left and right, trying to use the gaps in the bricks as cover, but Mara saw a paw shoot out, stabbing once, twice. Then Beraal dropped down, growling an instinctive warning as she held her kill in her mouth. The shrew’s head lolled to one side; only the fur on its neck had been touched.

  “That was a fine, clean kill!” said Mara, with some respect in her mew. Though Beraal had taught her the basics of hunting, from opening gambits and endgames to the five classic paw-and-claw strikes, the Sender’s knowledge of the Double Slash or the art of YowlClaw was mostly theoretical.

  Beraal stopped snarling, and she dropped the shrew on the ground, patting it once to make sure it wasn’t playing dead.

  “Enough for both of us,” she said, and her purr was satisfied. “I picked up a fine, fat rat right near the taxi stand, and carried it back for Hulo and those two before coming out to hunt.”

  Mara thanked Beraal, but refused to do more than nibble daintily at the shrew. Her Bigfeet had fed her well, and she would not have taken the warrior’s kill in any case; she remembered her night of hunger, out in the park, and she knew how little the other cats had to eat. Her whiskers touched Beraal’s lightly, in thanks, and she settled back on her haunches, happy to know that her mentor would have a full belly. “My Bigfeet would feed you all,” she had said wistfully to Beraal, on one of her first night patrols. But Beraal had said:

  “If it reaches the point where our ribs and our backbones stick together, we will come. Katar said your Bigfeet fed him well; but we are not house cats, and our paws stop at the threshold of the Bigfeet’s houses, no matter how kind they are to us.”

  Watching Beraal eat, Mara thought she understood. The relish with which the warrior queen supped was not just because of the tenderness and sweetness of the shrew’s flesh. The meat tasted sweeter for the pleasure of tracking and then besting your prey. Mara’s whiskers quivered in memory of her own kills, though these had been humble—a few moths, the odd cricket, and winged beetle
s that she had learned not to eat since they gave her hairballs.

  “Is it hard to find enough prey for you and the kittens?” Mara asked.

  “Harder now,” said Beraal, her tail swishing sadly as the two queens padded down the silent back alleys, past the iron grills and the small patches of green that linked the Bigfeet’s homes. “But when I was in my first few years as a young warrior, learning the hunt from Miao, that life was as rare and rich as any of us could want.”

  “If it weren’t for the Bigfeet, even now, we would have happy hunting,” said Beraal. “But the crows have become aggressive, and driven off many of the pigeons; we kill the latter for meat, not so often the former. The rats and mice have fattened on the Bigfeet’s garbage heaps, but we must hunt with the Bigfeet’s eyes on us, with the Bigfeet taking over our old hunting grounds—and so the rats thrive, and we grow lean. But making one, two, three kills a night was common enough in the old days, and besides, how else would we know our terrain unless we hunted and quested through it?”

  Beraal’s nostrils and whiskers were vibrant as she shared her memories. “Your whiskers are never so much alive as when you hunt,” said the warrior, her emerald eyes gleaming. “Nor is your nose as keen at any other time; nor do you see so much so clearly.”

  It was true. Mara could feel her own nose twitching, and as they took the bends and curves of the alleys, pausing only to avoid a few early-rising Bigfeet, she felt her whiskers take in the neighbourhood that had sheltered her clan for so long.

  They were moving out towards the back of Nizamuddin, where the Bigfeet’s homes ran alongside the canal. Gradually, Mara felt her fur begin to rise, tugging sharply at her skin. She had not been this side before in her careful, brief patrols with Doginder, but there was something about the air, fetid as it was, that felt familiar.

  She heard water lapping along the banks, and her whiskers pulled taut as they neared the bridge. Far away, on the other side of the dargah, the dogs barked, and Mara shivered.

  Beraal pressed her nose against the Sender’s flank. “Is it too open for you, Mara?” she asked. “You’re used to the comfort of being inside four walls; shall we go back?”

  But Mara’s hackles were rising, and the Sender seemed unaware of Beraal as she walked, stiff-legged, up to the bridge. Beneath its flat grey concrete expanse, the black waters swirled.

  “It’s not that it’s too open,” she said. “But this is where…” She remembered dogs barking, and once again, she remembered her mother’s mews, frantic, the scrabbles as the older cat fought for her kitten’s life.

  The fine hairs inside Beraal’s ears rose, in surprise. “This is where the Bigfeet found you?”

  Mara was crouched on the stone parapet, shivering despite the warmth of the summer morning. The Sender’s whiskers pointed downwards, at the opening to a pipe embedded in the embankment. The pipe was made of stippled cement, and though the mouth gaped open, it was jammed with flotsam from the canal—bright pink plastic bags, smudged newspapers, faded biscuit packets, brown glass medicine bottles, discarded banana leaves and desiccated marigold garlands from the temple.

  A cheel swooped overhead, his wings skimming the high poles of the bridge; he somersaulted and looped upward, towards the rising sun. Far beneath Mara, the waters foamed and hissed, spewing grey foam up the banks.

  Beraal watched as Mara’s white whiskers curled outwards, searching for something that was long since lost. All that was left of the Sender’s kittenhood under the bridge was memories, and detritus. Beraal did not attempt to comfort the Sender. She washed her tail, grooming the long black fur, savouring the unexpected pleasure of hunting after so long, and kept an eye on the sky and the road in case any predators, Bigfeet or bird, threatened the Sender’s reverie.

  When Mara came back up the bank, picking her path carefully up the rough concrete and the dry mud, Beraal was pacing, her whiskers extended in the direction of the Bigfeet homes on the other side of the road.

  “If the Bigfeet had not found me that day,” said Mara, and her mew was low and thoughtful, “perhaps I would have been part of the clan; perhaps my scent would not have been strange to any of you.”

  Beraal rubbed heads with the Sender, and turned so that their whiskers entwined. Her deep emerald eyes met and held Mara’s gaze. “Without your mother, as tiny as you were when we first heard you cry across the airwaves of Nizamuddin from the Bigfeet’s house, you would have perished in a day, Mara,” she said gently. “Between the dogs and the cheels, the crows and the Bigfeet, between hunger and the hazards of living in the open, between predators and sickness, very few kittens survive the first few moons of their lives all alone. Never let sorrow settle on your whiskers for what never was.”

  A car rumbled by, and a line of dogs gambolled down the road, barking as they jostled one another. Beraal dropped to her belly, and Mara, following her cue, took cover behind a large dustbin. The dogs passed; a cow meandered by, and two Bigfeet pushed their brightly coloured ice-cream carts down the road, as the koels and bulbuls murmured overhead in the branches. Nizamuddin was almost awake.

  “This road will soon be so crowded that you’ll wonder how we ever crossed,” Beraal said to Mara as they trotted over to the row of Bigfeet houses that faced the canal. These houses carried an old-fashioned air about them; many were only one or two storeys high, unlike the more recently built homes, and despite the faded, peeling paint, there was something welcoming about their small courtyards and the wide balconies.

  They stopped in front of a cheerful, tiny plot, the brick walls scrubbed white and clean, the steps covered in chalk designs. The door was open, though there were no Bigfeet in evidence. An old dog, venerable and so advanced in years that she did no more than open her eyes once and blink in acknowledgement at Beraal, lay snoozing on the upstairs balcony. Downstairs, a pair of parakeets chattered in a cage; potted plants made up a small but pretty garden; and a wide earthenware birdbath with birdseed scattered on the earth outside its rim testified to the fact that the Bigfeet who lived there liked animals.

  “I wanted you to see this, Mara,” said Beraal. “Do you like the house?”

  She watched the young Sender curiously.

  Mara’s nose was twitching, and her eyes were wide as she took in everything. “It is very different from my Bigfeet’s home,” she said, “but it has a warm, welcoming feeling to it, as though many creatures have walked into it over the years.”

  Beraal settled down on the pavement, considerately moving some distance from the birdbath so as not to frighten the bulbuls and sparrows away. Mara found a spot near the wall, and they watched the world go by, the Bigfeet clattering over the canal bridge, the pigs grunting to one another as they woke up and began rooting through the garbage piles for breakfast.

  “I brought you here because this was where Tigris lived,” she said.

  Mara’s whiskers rose, and she peered with even more interest into the house.

  “The last Sender before me,” she said, her mew quiet. “The one who never went out.”

  Beraal turned so that her paws covered Mara’s smaller ones, and she began washing the little cat thoroughly.

  Mara let herself be washed; Beraal had often washed her when she’d been a tiny kitten, and she remembered the feel of her teacher’s rough tongue on her fur far more clearly than she remembered being groomed by her own mother.

  “We all thought that Tigris stopped going out,” said Beraal, in between washings. “Miao, who had grown up knowing her before she became Nizamuddin’s Sender, was terribly worried at the time. She said that sendings had become more real to Tigris than the world itself, and that for a few Senders, this could happen. Their whiskers could lead them into places so beguiling that the world around them seemed flat and dull in comparison. Or for some, though I didn’t entirely understand what Miao meant, sendings became safer than their ordinary lives.”

  Mara blinked. “Yes,” she said, “you can’t be hurt when you’re sending, it’s just your whi
skers taking you for a walk. But when you’re here, out in the world, you’re like every other cat. The dogs bark at us, the Bigfeet rush around, and crows and cheels can drop down any time from the skies. It isn’t easy.”

  Beraal was listening intently. “I see,” she said. “Now I understand—perhaps that is how it was for Tigris. She lived here, among Bigfeet who were kind to her, and she could visit the clan through her sendings, and over the years, she stopped visiting us in any other way. But it was not good for her.”

  “Miao said that as well,” said Mara, and her fur prickled with unease at the thought of how she had spent most of her first year indoors, content to watch the world from the safety and comfort of her home. In the cage in the courtyard, the parrot chattered, its intelligent eyes watching them as it attempted to imitate Beraal’s deep mews.

  “If I haven’t hunted for a while,” Beraal said, “my paws begin to itch and my flanks grow soft instead of taut. Once, I had to stop hunting to heal a battle wound, a bad one. I’d dealt with an insolent tom who strolled into our midst from Lodhi Gardens, acting as though he owned the place. Of course I sent him yelping back with very little fur on his tail, but he landed a few telling bites when we brawled. For many moons, I could not hunt, could barely even patrol Nizamuddin, and my whiskers began to get tangled. I started at small, insignificant noises; my teeth chattered at every least little thump and bump; and worst of all, I began to fear the dark, when I had once owned the night. Perhaps that was how it went with Tigris, for her whiskers twisted, and sometimes her sendings were so strange, so odd that it was as though she could no longer tell her dreams—or her nightmares—apart from her sendings.”