The Wildings (36 page)

“Not everything can be unknotted by sending, little one,” said Beraal patiently. “Aren’t you curious about the other wildings, Mara? You remember what Miao told you—she hoped you would go outside one day and meet the other cats.”

The kitten surprised Beraal by going over and stretching up to rub her whiskers gently against the older queen’s face.

“It’s too early,” she said quietly. “I’m still scared of the outside, Beraal. It seems so big and so unsafe. Give me time, please.”

For just a second, as she looked into Mara’s solemn green eyes, Beraal thought of the small orange kitten who had gone tumbling down the stairs, and who had stared out at the world with such frightened fascination. Her mew was gentle in return, and instead of starting with lessons, she asked the Sender to tell her exactly what it had felt like when she had gone for a walk and come back with a tiger in tow. Mara’s furry face brightened. “I didn’t think I’d be able to pull it off—and neither did Ozzy until we got the hang of it,” she began, and Beraal settled down contentedly to listen to Mara’s tale, one wary ear cocked for the Bigfeet.

On the moss-overgrown wall that girdled the Shuttered House, a grey tom limped slowly along the perimeter, watching the activity with keen eyes. The day after the battle, some of the Bigfeet had arrived and exclaimed at the carnage in the wilderness, just as he, Beraal and the others had feared they would. The next day, there were even more of them, pointing at the
bodies of the mice and birds and chattering about them in their big booming voices, as they cleaned up the grounds.

Katar had watched with growing alarm, sitting quietly on the wall. The Bigfeet seemed to be sad about the small, pathetic corpses that littered the grounds, and the tomcat stirred uncomfortably when they pointed at him. He had jumped down from the wall and left quietly, but his whiskers tingled with an unpleasant thought: the Bigfeet couldn’t smell the difference between the ferals and the wildings. To them, all cats were the same. He didn’t like the idea that the Bigfeet might think the wildings had killed the little creatures, but he let it rest in his mind.

Since then, the grey tom had come back every day, curious about what the Bigfeet were going to do. Today, Bigfeet trucks took up all the path, but despite the thumping rumble of their machinery, and though they had cleaned out the fetid Shuttered House, Katar felt that the Bigfeet were still tense. There were fewer of them, though, and he approached the Shuttered House out of curiosity, wondering whether the ferals had left their evil shadows behind. But it smelled clean, of paint and soap, and Katar padded away from the place, relieved that it carried no memories of Datura.

He had almost got to the wall when he heard a Bigfeet shout go up. The grey tom turned, puzzled. A knot of Bigfeet approached him, and when his whiskers tasted the air, it smelled hostile. The cat stared at the Bigfeet, wondering why they had noticed him. Most of the Nizamuddin Bigfeet walked past the cats, only grumbling or cursing at them if they were underfoot.

One of the Bigfeet stooped to pick up a stone, and Katar tensed, his ears pricking all the way back. His instincts told him to run; he turned, and felt a sudden, dull pain on his flank. The Bigfoot had thrown the stone at him, he realized, his tail dropping all the way down. He put his ears back and fled for the safety of the wall. From its height, he stared at the Bigfeet, wondering why they had tried to hurt him. He could see the hostility on their faces, and it worried him.

He took his worries to Hulo later that evening. The black tom listened, his unkempt head alert. “It happened to me, too,” he said when Katar had finished. “A Bigfoot ran yelling at me, flapping his hands like a cheel. They think we’re part of Datura’s bunch.”

It was what Katar had wondered, but hearing Hulo say it made it real. The toms lay on the tin roof, watching the yelling, playing Bigfeet in the park. Katar felt a sharp pang go through him; Miao would have known what this meant, and what to do about it.

“Shall we tell the others?” he asked. Hulo turned the question over in his head. Raising an alarm without a strong, obvious cause might be the wrong thing to do, when the wildings were already nervous and battle-fatigued.

“No,” he said. “Not now. Just tell the wildings to stay away from the Shuttered House for a while. I’ll tell Southpaw myself, make sure that brown imp obeys this time. Did you know he tried to cross the canal bridge on his own yesterday? I dusted his backside for him until he squeaked like a mouse, but we’ll have to find some other way to keep him out of trouble. He’ll soon be too old to be spanked.”

“Southpaw will never be too old to be spanked, as far as I’m concerned,” said Katar firmly. As their whiskers rose in shared laughter, the two toms set aside their fears. For a brief moment, as the evening sun warmed them all in the park, as the squirrels chattered and the birds sang their evening melodies over the roof of the Sender’s house, it seemed to the tom that all would be well. Whatever winter had in store for them, the wildings would see it through.

Cats: Mara, Tiglath, Pantha, Bathsheba; Torty, Rival, Patience Waddle, Tweeter, Woofer, Phash, Phoosh, the Sillies and all the strays whose lives were raided for this book.

Vets: Dr. Ramandeep Chaggar, Dr. Ms Chaggar and Dr. Rupali, who gave our cats a few of their nine lives back; the animal shelter team at Friendicoes, Delhi.

Humans: My parents, Tarun and Sunanda Roy, Tara, JT, Neel, Mia and family, especially Rudra, Antara and Arun; Tini, Baba, Peter Griffin, always; Kamini, Malavika and Hironmay Karlekar for the love and for Mara; Yusuf Merchant, Raj Mathur, Kriti, Keshav, Arjun Nath and the gang.

Samit and Sayoni Basu, Ruchir Joshi, Jeet Thayil, Mitali Saran, Anita Roy, Namita Devidayal, Rajni George and Manjula Padmanabhan for telling me to get on with it. Arshia Sattar and DW Gibson, for the priceless gift of space at the Sangam Residency in Tranquebar; TN Ninan, AK Bhattacharya, Kanika Datta and
the Business Standard for their extraordinary kindness. Karthika, Thomas, Chiki, Meru, Gautam—thank you for your goodwill and friendship.

Every debut author should be lucky enough to have an agent as wise and generous as David Godwin, and an editor as acute and wonderfully enthusiastic as David Davidar. They took a scruffy, scrawny draft, and turned it into an actual novel. (Any errors are my fault, not theirs.) Prabha Mallya—thank you for breathing life into the wildings and their world with your artwork.

My thanks to Amanda Betts for the care and feeding of the international edition, to Louise Dennys and Anne Collins for their encouragement, to Kelly Hill for the exquisite book design, and to the team at Random House Canada.

And gratitude to Simar Puneet for all the enthusiasm and her perfectionism, to Aienla, Bena, Aruna, Varun, Ankit, Shekhar, Hina, Hohoi and the rest of the crack team at Aleph for making the business of publishing such a pleasure; Anna Watkins and the team at DGA; Kavi Bhansali for the author pictures; my Twitter feed for giving Kirri her name.

Nilanjana Roy is the author of
The Wildings
, winner of the Shakti Bhatt First Book Award. She is the editor of
A Matter of Taste: The Penguin Book of Indian Writing On Food
and is working on a collection of essays called
The Girl Who Ate Books
. Nilanjana lives in Delhi with three independent cats and her partner.