The Hundred Names of Darkness

by Nilanjana Roy

  He and Southpaw spread their whiskers out, and the evening breeze confirmed what they smelled: not a dozen runs, not a few large burrows. There were more than a hundred bandicoot runs already on Mulligan’s old territory, and they smelled the fresh-turned scent of newly dug-up earth. The bandicoots were taking over.

  The night was muggy, the heat of summer making the air oppressive, and Mara’s dreams were uneasy, flitting from one blurred image to another.

  The bats chittered past, brushing her fur the wrong way with the edge of their wings. “Everything must go,” said Theda, her snout sniffing at the hot winds of summer, her pearly fangs bared in a snarl. “I smell heat and dust and blood and sadness. Leave, Mara, leave.”

  Southpaw scrabbled under a pile of dried leaves and earth, emerging from a deep burrow marked by the telltale tracks of bandicoots. “Couldn’t you find me? I’ve been here all the time, such a long time.” He reached towards her to caress her neck, mewing, but the leaves made a dry sound, like twigs or bones scraping together, and the pile flew up to cover him. She heard his paws scrabble desperately, under the leaves, but no matter how much he flailed, his paws and then his beseeching brown eyes slowly disappeared as he sank back into the tunnel, and all she could hear was the sound of his claws, scratching under the uncaring earth.

  Kirri’s giant shadow loomed over her, the mongoose’s obsidian eyes flaring as she displayed her long, sharp claws. “When the trees bleed, it’s time for you to go,” said the mongoose. “Hurry, but remember the hunt price.”

  “The blood price?” said Mara. In her dream, Kirri was three times her size, so that the cat could see each silver bristle, the scimitar curve of her claws. Kirri slashed, and Mara felt blood well up on her flank. There were three gashes, deep and painful.

  “We all bleed, Sender. Blood is easy to spill,” said Kirri, “The hunt price will be higher.” Her voice was fading, her fur rippled into the dust.

  Perhaps it was the intensity of the dreams, or perhaps it was just the heat. But when Mara woke up, the Sender’s whiskers had taken her elsewhere.

  Her whiskers caught the scent of clouds pregnant with rain, the musk rising from damp earth, the subtle silver-and-blood fragrance of fish and frogs. Mara blinked, but the world she had woken into refused to shift back into the solid outlines of her room, the Bigfeet’s house, Nizamuddin. Light and water, the water iridescent with the last of the twilight glow from the sky; clouds rolling across the horizon, backlit by crimson and gold rays as the sun sank down over emerald fields, and beyond it, the sweetly black, fragrant river. Her paws were damp; she lay on rough, unpainted boards, and overhead, a pair of kingfishers flashed by, stabs of blue and gold in the monsoon downpour.

  There was the lightest of touches on her whiskers and the Sender flinched, her own claws extending in instinctive response.

  “Something told me I hadn’t seen the last of your fur,” said a familiar purr. Magnificat stretched, shifting so that she moved back under the shelter of a wooden ledge—just as battered as the boards, its cheery blue paint cracked and peeling—closer to Mara. The two Senders, one’s fur still bleary from sleep, the other’s vivid green eyes flashing as they caught the reflection from the lightning, were far back enough to stay dry as the early monsoon clouds rolled across Paolim. The rain drummed on the waters of the Chorize, and the narrow fishing boats moored to the buoys in mid-river bucked and spun, like flying fish.

  Mara used her paw to smoothen her fur, realizing that she hadn’t groomed since that morning. “My whiskers seem to like your village, Sender,” she said. The smell of the fatigue she’d felt earlier clung to her fur, but she could feel some of her alertness returning. On the other side of the river bank, Mara saw the undergrowth darken and become an even more vivid green as the rains sluiced down. She straightened her whiskers, enjoying the fresh, clean bite to the breeze, so different from the Delhi air, and scrabbled as she turned towards Magnificat, meaning to apologize.

  “No need,” said the Sender of Paolim, her fat, fluffy tail flicking away a few stray raindrops, “you were sleeping when you landed—smacked down from the sky in a perfect landing, I noticed. Quite impressive, but it doesn’t explain why you keep coming back. It’s like having a kitten following me around in a year when I didn’t plan on having a litter, except that no normal kitten would insert itself into my best fighting and fishing moments.”

  Mara jerked as the thundering roar of the ferry’s engines started up, cutting in over the drumming and hammering of the rains, but she recovered herself quickly, curling her tail around so that she could groom the mud out of it.

  “Magnificat,” she said, letting her mew stay as meek as possible, “my sendings are not in my control, my whiskers often lead me into trouble. I don’t know why they keep bringing me here, but we are both Senders; perhaps they want me to learn something from you.”

  Magnificat’s green eyes gleamed. “I teach no one,” she said, and her purr had menace in it. “None of my kittens have been Senders, Mara, and I had to learn how to handle my whiskers on my own.”

  Mara asked, “Didn’t your mother teach you?”

  Magnificat watched the ferry push away from the far bank, turning in an ungainly arc, the rain spattering its cheerful blue decks.

  “I was born near the sea as the gales raged and the ships sent their anchors down fathoms deep, as the waves lashed the shore, or so I was told,” she said. “My mother was too frail for childbirth, perhaps she had caught some illness; she did not survive, and my whiskers recall not even the faintest trace of her scent. A fisherman found me, and took me back to his boat. He had a cat, an old sea salt who loved riding out with him when he took his nets out, and she was kind enough to me. It is from her that I know the story. He was caring, as Bigfeet went, but careless, absent-minded. When I was not yet old enough to say more than a few meeps, he took me to the fish market as a treat, and haggling over a fine kingfish, he forgot he had brought me there.”

  The ferry bucked as it cut through the waves; the rain had swelled the river’s waters, and the tide came almost to the jetty, where the two cats sat, the white fur and the orange fur close together.

  Mara listened, her eyes intent. “Come,” said Magnificat, strolling closer to the edge of the jetty. “We’ll cross, I have business on the other bank.”

  They stepped on to the ferry, walking past the pilot, who gave Magnificat a friendly if respectful pat. “Here,” said the Sender of Paolim, settling herself comfortably on a fat coil of rope, “this is my place.” Mara’s paws were curling, despite herself; the orange cat had never had to walk on a surface that rocked gently (and sometimes not-so-gently) underneath, and she felt most unsettled. But she found a comfortable spot, in the centre of a discarded lifebelt. The Senders watched as a few Bigfeet trickled on to the ferry, the rain streaming off their umbrellas.

  “They’ll take some time,” said Magnificat. “The Bigfeet never seem to listen to the tides; they have to see and hear the ferry before they come out, and I often wonder why they don’t listen to the water instead of waiting for the boat.”

  “My friend Southpaw says it’s because they don’t have whiskers,” said Mara.

  “That would explain a lot,” said Magnificat, cleaning her own, fine set with some pride. “Poor creatures; they have no fur, either, and that can’t be comfortable in any season, going around like cats who have the mange. So now you know my story.”

  “But you hadn’t finished!” said Mara, her green eyes hoping for more. “When did you know you were a Sender? How did you learn to manage your whiskers?”

  Magnificat stopped washing her whiskers and started on her paws. “I had no idea that I was a Sender!” she said. “The fish market was welcoming, to kittens as well as to cats, and you could grow fat on the scraps from just the morning’s work—sup lightly on scales, snack on bones, feast on discarded fish heads. The Bigfeet threw away the best bits, but then they’re like that, there’s no telling which way they’ll jump next. I often
woke up and found that I’d sent myself from one fishmonger’s stall to another and had to twitch my whiskers to come back. As I grew older, my sendings grew more ambitious, and sometimes I’d wake up on a fishing boat, sometimes I’d wake to find that I was hovering above the fishing nets. But I had no mother, no siblings; I thought this happened to every kitten.”

  “Me too,” said Mara quietly, but the ferry engine sputtered into life just then, and her mew was lost. The river stretched out on either side, its shining, rain-fattened waters slapping against the stern of the boat, like a marine lullaby.

  “As my whiskers grew, so did my journeys, and some of them were rich and strange indeed,” said Magnificat. She had gone back into the past, and her whiskers raised, she shared her stories with Mara. There was the time when she’d interrupted the quiet evensong of a cluster of dignified Portuguese church cats with her loud wails, and the time she had inadvertently tumbled into the middle of a merry party of market cats. On one memorable occasion, she had been chasing a mouse, and found herself sending in mid-pounce, arriving in the middle of Carnival to hover over a giant papier-mâché lobster. Often, she had discovered herself sailing with the fishing fleet, her whiskers yearning for the sea as much as her paws yearned for the river. But she had little control over her whiskers; they were as wayward as the wind.

  “It used to be that they led, and my paws followed, even if I didn’t mean to go on a sending,” said Mara, and Magnificat, startled, brought herself back into the present. The fine vibrissae over her eyes stood up as she surveyed Mara. The ferryboat’s pilot went down into the engine room, starting up the ferry.

  “A Sender who drops in without willing it, her whiskers longer than most,” said Magnificat, “needs something, even if she doesn’t know what it is. Your fur smelled of understanding, also recognition, when I was telling my tale. Who trained you, Mara, or were you untrained as well?”

  “I never knew my mother, though she was the Sender of Nizamuddin before me. Tigris and I parted ways when the dogs attacked her under the canal,” said Mara. Her scent changed as she thought of the past, of that terrifying time before the Bigfeet gave her a home. “Beraal taught me what she knew of sending and helped me with whisker control; but she is not a Sender, though she and the old Siamese warrior, Miao, understood what it meant to be one.”

  “Solantulem told me what it meant to be a Sender,” Magnificat said, her purr tender as she talked of the friendly tomcat who had strolled out from a smart cafe in Susegad one day and shown her the sights. For Magnificat, accustomed to a life split between hunting on the red roofs of Paolim and fishing off the banks of the Chorize, or sailing further down where the fishermen put their boats out to sea, the lives of the cafe and restaurant cats were a revelation. Most of them struck deals with the cafe owners, bartering their services as rat catchers for scraps and leftovers; they lived well and partied hard, their voices often raised in raucous song along the balcaos and rooftops of Susegad. “Solly,” she said, as they stepped off the ferry, “had been something of a jazz aficionado himself, scatting with the best of the Bigfeet. He’d known Saudade, the legendary Sender of Goa, and Solly put it so well, one night when we were hanging out with the boys on the roof of the local bar. He said, “What do you think, Green Eyes, your whiskers send you places just because it’s fun? You’re a Sender; when your whiskers send you somewhere, it’s for a reason, or because the clan needs you to roam further than the cats can on their own four paws.”

  —

  BACK ON SHORE, THEY strolled back, chatting amicably.

  “When did you know what it meant to be a Sender?” asked Magnificat, bounding up the stairs that wound up the low hill towards a church. She stopped when she reached the red stone porch, settling in under the eaves as though she belonged there. Mara checked when some Bigfeet tramped up the stairs, wondering whether they should leave, but Magnificat offered her head to be scratched, and kneaded her paws in pleasure when the Bigfeet obliged. “Most of the ones here are friendly,” she told Mara, who was watching in astonishment. “You need to watch out for a few, but many of them like our kind.”

  Mara let the calm of the place seep into her fur; the cool evening breeze, fragrant from the rain, the emerald fields that stretched out as far as the eye could see, buffalos moving placidly across the muddy earth, the ferry’s low reassuring honk in the distance, the egrets circling like friendly winged spirits overhead.

  “Begum explained what it meant to be a Sender,” she said, combing her whiskers out, “but it was only after I stepped out into Nizamuddin, and felt what they felt, hid with them from the Bigfeet—ours are not as gentle as yours—and learned what it was to hunt for prey that I became their Sender. But a Sender is supposed to help the clan, and I cannot help them out of the trouble they face this summer.”

  Magnificat, who was licking her white fur and repairing some of the damage done by the rain, looked out across Paolim.

  “A Sender cannot prevent trouble, especially the kind that drags along, bumping in the dust behind the Bigfeet,” she said, her whiskers gleaming as they caught a few raindrops. “I learned early on that I could not stop kittens from falling into the river, or from being hunted by little banded goshawks. I could not stop toms from brawling too freely in Panjim and having the Bigfeet chase them out with brooms or worse; there is nothing Senders can do to help cats who squander their lives by stepping onto the highway without looking left and right, or those who fall from the palm trees, who slip on the tiles of the roofs.”

  Mara felt her whiskers fall, her tail droop. From the time she had first seen Magnificat, whirling as she fought a cobra on the roof of a Paolim house, there had been something about the Sender’s fierce spirit that had drawn her strongly. Magnificat swaggered through her territory, as though the roofs, the ferry, the fields, the walls and even the Bigfeet belonged to her. Until she felt the disappointment in her whiskers, Mara had not realized how worried she was about the Nizamuddin clan. What had drawn her back to Magnificat again and again was the feeling, deep down inside, that Goa’s fierce Sender, this fearless white cat, would know what to do.

  “But if you are any kind of Sender, then you will also learn that there is more you can do for the clan than you suspect. Not long after my whiskers had turned white, there was the incident of the fishing cats further off, by the sea. The Bigfeet had stopped going out with their boats, and the cats were growing thin, their ribs beginning to show, for lack of their usual fare. They asked me to wave my whiskers at the Bigfeet, and make everything go back to the old ways.”

  Mara widened her green eyes, staring at Magnificat’s impressive whiskers. “But even I can’t make my whiskers get through to the Bigfeet!” she said. There was awe in her mew.

  “Neither can I,” said Magnificat. “But there was little point telling the fishing cats this—since I was friends with the fishermen, purring at the Bigfeet when they talked to me in their loud booming voices, the clan would not have believed me. Instead, I sat out on the seashore with my whiskers stretched wide for an entire night, and in the morning, I said to them that the sea had whispered its secrets to me. The sea had said that it was tired of the fishermen’s boats, and it was sending them back to shore; the Bigfeet would go back, since the waves had rejected them, and the seafaring cats must keep the Bigfeet company in their hour of need.”

  The rain had slowed to a drizzle, and the faint trembling of her fur told Mara that her sending would end soon. The Senders watched a group of children run laughing up the road, splashing through the mud and spinning round and round in the last of the showers.

  “They believed you?” said Mara.

  “They did indeed,” said Magnificat, yawning and stretching her forepaws, “and it worked out very well for them. As the Bigfeet shifted inland, the cats became foragers and hunters in their villages, chasing palm rats and shrews over the thatched houses, settling into the lanes near the marketplace. The ones who had fishing in their blood, and whose fur could not settle wi
thout the sound of the sea, they stayed with the fishermen, or became ship’s cats, but the rest settled without fuss elsewhere. They did not need my whiskers, or any sendings; all they needed was for the Sender to tell them what they already knew, deep in their hearts and their tails, had to be done.”

  “My clan has to leave Nizamuddin,” said Mara, and a sudden shiver ran the length of her fur; this was the first time, in any of her mews or purrs, that she had claimed the Nizamuddin clan as her own. “The Bigfeet have built their houses over the old hunting grounds, and there is neither food nor water, nor room for the next generation of kittens. They cannot roam the roofs the way they used to, nor can they live on the ground in peace. They have to go, and they look to my whiskers to tell them when and where. But though I walk through the streets and neighbourhoods of Delhi every day, in my sendings, how shall I know which is the right place for the clan? And how shall I take them there? What clan moves out of its territory?”

  Magnificat’s eyes took on a ferocious gleam as she eyed the sudden emergence of clouds of insects, dancing over the puddles that the rain had left behind. “The prey will be fat and juicy after these rains,” she said. “I wish you could come hunting with me, but even the most real of sendings has its limits. Mara, I have never wished to be any Sender’s teacher or mentor, and you cannot follow where my paws have taken me as a Sender anyway. But I smell your caring for the clan on your fur as you tell your tale, and that is all that matters.”

  Mara stretched her own paws, and stood up, preparing to end the sending. She felt a little disappointed, but also soothed, as though Magnificat had washed her fur and untangled the knots that had been bothering her.

  “I cannot give you advice,” said Magnificat, her tail swishing from side to side, “but if your whiskers have brought you this far, then they will know where your clan should go next. Trust them; let them lead you, and when you reach the right place, your blood will sing yes, your fur will settle itself, your paws will relax and let you rest. As for the clan, perhaps your Delhi cats are not used to moving, but in Goa, our clans let the winds take them where they will. Some cats have lived in one village all their lives, and we say that they cannot bear to lap the water from other wells, but many shift like the sand on the beach, becoming a shack cat in one season, a ferryboat cat in another. The clan will move, never fear; they have paws, all they need is for your whiskers to show them the way.”