The Wildings

N
izamuddin was asleep when the first sendings came, in the pitch-black hours just before dawn. They were so faint that only the bats heard them, as they swooped in their lonely arcs between the canal and the dargah, the ancient Sufi shrine around which the colony’s brick-walled homes were tightly coiled. One of the bats chittered nervously as the soft, frightened words reached him, echoing in his head:
Dark. Want my mother. Why are the dogs growling? Why aren’t you saying anything? It’s so dark in here
.

Then there was nothing else, and the bat soon forgot what he had heard, though when he hung upside down from the ruins near the baoli,—one of Delhi’s few stepwells still fed from the depths of an underground spring—slumbering in the pearly light of day, he dreamt of being a hunted creature in a dark, cramped space, helpless against his predators.

It was long after when the second set of sendings came, stirring the post-monsoon air and startling a pariah cheel that was making sorties over the large park in the centre of Nizamuddin West.
“Mara is scared, put me down! Where did my mother go? Who are you? Where are you taking me? Don’t want to leave the drainpipe! You’re frightening Mara, you horrid Bigfoot!”
Tooth’s wings dipped, taking him into a perilously low dive over the rooftops as he shook his head, trying to get rid of the sense that a cat was mewing at him in mid-air—softly, but enough to ruffle the delicate feathers that covered his inner ear. He felt unsettled until his sharp eyes spotted a bandicoot scuttling along the ground, larger and fatter than the local rats, its long snout twitching nervously as the predator’s shadow fell over the creature, and the day’s hunting began in earnest. By the time he had made his kill, the cheel had forgotten the strange encounter.

The Sender stayed silent after that. There were no cats or dogs in the area at that hour, and the only other creature in Nizamuddin to hear the second sending was a small brown mouse, who sat back on his haunches, cast a worried eye around, and seeing no cats or kittens, continued along his way.

THE DAYS PASSED PEACEFULLY
. It was the happiest time of the year for the residents of Nizamuddin and Delhi’s other colonies. Summer had gone and Diwali, the annual festival of lights with its menacing fireworks and thunderstorms of noise, wouldn’t begin until the middle of autumn. Freed from the summer heat, the cats of Nizamuddin could start hunting again.

Beraal was pleased at the change in the air. She had spent most of the summer in the baoli, liking the tranquility of the disused stepwell, and in the abandoned construction lot where the cats found shelter among heaps of rubble. The heat had been intense that year, shrivelling the flame tree leaves, drying out the red flowers of the silk cotton trees, and the young cat had missed being able to go on long pilgrimages. Perhaps, she thought, stretching and yawning and shaking out her paws, it was time to make the trek to Humayun’s Tomb and see what the cats who lived in the quieter parts of its sprawling gardens, undisturbed by the crowds who visited the ancient monument, were doing.

The park was noisy, what with the neighbourhood Bigfeet boys fighting over a game of cricket, and the pariah cheels echoing their quarrel in a treetop battle far above. Beraal ambled off towards the cowshed that sat in the middle of the Bigfeet’s houses, settling on the broken brick wall to do her grooming in peace. This was more extensive than normal feline ablutions required: Beraal had long, black-and-white fur that curled silkily down to her paws when it was clean, but it was a magnet for dry leaves, dirt and other rubbish.

She was perched on top of the wall, licking industriously at a clingy spider’s web that had attached itself to her paw, when the air around her ears seemed to shimmer and part.
“Woe!”
said a small clear voice right into her ear,
“Mara is worried! Mara is all alone with the Bigfeet! They are scary and they talk all the time, and I do not like being picked up and turned upside down!”

Beraal almost overbalanced, and had to somersault back onto the wall, an act that did nothing for her dignity. Wild-eyed, her
whiskers bristling, her tail fluffing up to twice its normal size, she whirled around on the wall, searching for a cat that was nowhere to be seen. She ignored the small brown mouse who scurried out of his hole, equally startled. The quiet whisper that the mouse, whose name was Jethro, had heard almost a moon ago was much louder, far more powerful than the first time.

Beraal paid little attention to the mouse’s squeaks, twitching her silky ears. That voice had sounded so close—could it be in the neem tree? Down near the ground beside the cows? But there was nothing there, and the cat was truly stumped. She stiffened as the dry leaves on the creepers rustled, then relaxed. It was only Hulo, hopping down from the neem tree onto the wall beside her. “What the hell was that?” he asked.