The Wildings (5 page)

Mara was scampering around the room now. Beraal shot after her and found herself scooting under the sofa in hot pursuit. The kitten’s bottom wiggled in front of her nose, as Mara tried to find cover.

“Gotcha!” said Beraal, and triumphantly sank her teeth into a mass of orange fur. The pain made her reckless; instead of taking a second bite to make sure she’d snapped the kitten’s neck, Beraal shook the furry bundle as hard as she could, slamming it against the wall twice. It hung limply from her jaws as she backed out from under the sofa, the bloodlust fading from her eyes. It was a pity, she thought, the kitten had seemed friendly enough; but the job was done, and perhaps her killing bite had delivered a swift and relatively merciful death.

She dropped the pathetic, limp heap onto the carpet and poked at it with a claw, feeling unaccountably sad inside.

“If you do that,” said a voice above her head, “you’d better be careful because he has very long woolly fur and your claw might get stuck.”

Beraal spun on her haunches and looked up.

Mara was sprawled out on a cushion washing her paws.

“That was fun, wasn’t it? Have you ever tried playing with a ball? It’s much nicer if there’s two of us, if it’s only me then I
have to bat it against the wall. I like him, too, but he’s only a soft toy. He doesn’t bounce very well.”

Beraal patted the heap of orange fur gingerly. The scent should have told her what it was—it smelled of Bigfeet, but then, so did Mara. The taste—come to think of it, she’d mentally noted the absence of blood and flesh—was dry and woolly rather than furry. She had expended one of her best killing manouevres on a tattered orange toy monkey with one brown glass eye.

The huntress struggled with a strong sense of discouragement. So far, nothing she had tried with Mara had gone right. And there was something about the kitten that Beraal, against her will, found beguiling.

Mara was patting something small and round, rolling it off the bed and in Beraal’s direction. Instinctively, the cat batted at it, and her attention was caught when the ball hit the wall and rolled back at her. She padded after it and gave it a good, hard swat. Mara stretched, hopped off the bed and ran after the ball, nosing it back to Beraal. In just a few minutes, the cat was playing happily, her tongue sticking out as she tried to get the ball past the orange kitten.

“You’re good!” she said, as Mara skillfully dribbled the ball behind the chair legs, using her paws to keep it just out of Beraal’s reach.

“So are you!” said Mara, and abandoning the ball, the kitten reached up on her hind legs, rubbing her face against Beraal’s whiskers lovingly.

Beraal hesitated, looking at the kitten. Mara’s eyes were shut and as she rubbed, she purred, just as she had before. The young queen looked at the kitten’s exposed neck. It would be so easy, she
thought, to end this now. And then she sighed, her flanks heaving outwards, and flopping down, she began to wash Mara, the way she had once washed her own kittens—starting from the tip of the ears all the way down to the back and belly, to the orange-and-white circles that ringed the kitten’s tail. Presently, the sound of two cats purring filled the room.

SOME TIME LATER
, Mara showed Beraal the milk bowl, which she liked very much, and the litter box, which the older cat thought was usable, but nowhere near as nice as the soft earth of the flowerbeds or as comfortable as the sand from the construction heaps. Politely, she looked the other way when it was Mara’s turn to go, and she used the time to consider the situation, mulling it over carefully.

“Mara,” she said when the kitten was done, “what do I smell like to you?”

The kitten, having cleaned herself, came up to Beraal and inhaled the scent of the other cat’s fur. “You smell good, like the outside,” she said. “Like leaves, and bark from the tree, and you smell keen, like a hunter should, and alert, but also kind.”

Beraal looked thoughtfully at the kitten. “I don’t smell alien to you? Different from your clan?”

Mara was patting one of her toys around as she considered the question. “You don’t smell like my mother,” she said, “but I suppose all cats smell different from each other.”

“What about your family, Mara?” said Beraal. “Don’t I smell different from your family? Didn’t your clan cats have their own particular scent?”

She stepped back in surprise as the kitten sent out involuntary distress signals. “I don’t have family,” said Mara.

Beraal’s tail whisked from side to side in confusion. The kitten considered the older cat, and then came up to her, linking whiskers. “This is how it all happened,” she said, and Beraal was silent as Mara shared her memories of the drainpipe and the dogs, her mother’s disappearance. It explained a lot, Beraal realized; it explained why there was something strange about Mara.

“You don’t know what a clan is, do you?” said Beraal.

Mara concentrated very hard on tearing up the carpet.

“Mara, do you know what the difference between inside and outside cats is?”

Mara refused to say anything, though her ears twitched a little. “Do you understand why I was stalking you a little while ago, why any cat from the Nizamuddin clan would try to kill you, Mara?”

The kitten’s ears folded back. “No,” she said. “It wasn’t very nice of you, was it?”

Beraal’s whiskers crackled with frustration. How was she supposed to explain basics like the killing instinct to a cat who didn’t know the first thing about outsiders and insiders, who hadn’t even met her clan, who had no idea about the importance of scent-marks?

“It just doesn’t make sense to me,” Mara said, curling up on Beraal’s paws. “But it would be wonderful if you did explain.”

“Yes,” said Beraal, “though that might take some time—Mara, were you reading my mind?”

“Yes,” said the kitten. “But I can only do that when you’re right next to me and if you’re relaxed and off guard.”

Beraal licked the top of Mara’s head absently. This, she thought, was going to be a very long conversation. First they’d have to talk about cat laws, and then she had some questions of her own about Mara’s sending abilities, and then—she let out a worried exhalation—she would have to discuss matters with the Nizamuddin wildings.

“We have as much time as you like,” said Mara. “My Bigfeet probably won’t come in till morning, and if they do, you can hide under the cupboard.”

Beraal thought it over. She was stuck in the house for the night, and as uneasy as that made her, she assumed she would be safe unless the Bigfeet found her. Her belly was pleasantly full of milk and egg, and Mara was washing her forelegs in an extremely soothing way.

“All right, Mara,” she said. “Now, where shall we start?”

And so the black-and-white cat and the little orange kitten sat there, trading memories and questions, for a long, long time, until sleep overtook both of them. If the Bigfeet had come in then, they would have found it hard to disentangle one cat from another. Tired from the conversation, Mara had curled into Beraal’s paws, and her orange fur was inextricably mixed up with the older cat’s fur. But the Bigfeet didn’t come in, and no sound disturbed the silence except for the very small, barely discernible sounds of two cats snoring.

B
eraal padded along the road that ran parallel to the canal, pausing once to duck the muddy spray from a Bigfoot cyclist who was speeding through a puddle. At this early hour, it was hard to see the black-and-white cat; she blended into the dappled shadows, and found the camouflage useful when she was hunting rats. The call to worship from the Nizamuddin dargah floated in the air; the first prayers of the day would soon begin at the shrine of Nizamuddin Auliya, the much-loved Sufi saint who had lent his name to the colony.

Beraal had her ears cocked, she was listening to the neighbourhood in general, to the rumble and clatter of the morning sounds. She ignored the stink from the canal’s fetid waters and the grunting of the many pigs who had made their homes on the banks. She paused a second time, waiting until two rambunctious puppies had run past, their high, excitable yaps fading into the distance.

The cat’s progress through the back lanes of Nizamuddin was rapid but cautious. The Bigfeet were unpredictable, and in her younger years, she had once been caught by a pack of Bigfeet boys who had locked her in an empty plastic crate for the length of an afternoon.

They had teased her and poked sticks into the crate to make her jump. One of them had tied plastic bottles to her tail, the string knotted so tightly that it had taken her hours to gnaw her tail free, and the cuts had taken many moons to heal. She had no wish to repeat the experience, and her whiskers, ears and tail were extended and on high alert as she trotted through the butchers’ lane, past the fragrance shops, beyond the crowds of petitioners and rose-petal sellers at the saint’s shrine.

Beraal shrank back once, as a crowd of Bigfeet children ran laughing through the streets, but she had moved too slowly, and one of them kicked her in passing. The cat miaowed sharply but hurried on; the kick hadn’t broken any of her ribs, though the pain was still there as she entered the graveyard.

Beraal allowed herself to rest for a few seconds inside the entrance. The Bigfoot fakir who lived here was fond of cats, and Abol and Tabol would be somewhere inside with the canal wildings—they started the day here, spent every evening patrolling the graves at his side, and often spent the afternoons napping on the gravestones.

The fakir was the only Bigfoot that all the cats of Nizamuddin trusted. His home and the small shrine that he tended was neutral ground. Wildings from all of the clans—the dargah cats, the market cats, even visitors from far-flung Humayun’s Tomb or Jangpura—often came here, or went to the nearby
baoli, the abandoned, ancient stepwell that only a few Bigfeet ever visited.

Miao, who knew more about the history of Delhi’s wildings than any of the Nizamuddin cats, even Qawwali, once said that the dargah had welcomed cats for centuries. The Nizamuddin clan and its allied branches were one of the oldest of Delhi’s many clans—older even than the wildings of Mehrauli or the Purani Dilli cats. Beraal couldn’t quite wrap her whiskers around the idea of generations and generations of cats living in Nizamuddin through the centuries. But like the other cats, she knew that she felt welcomed and safe at the shrine, sheltered against the occasional cruelties of the Bigfeet.

“Didn’t see you last night, Beraal,” said Katar, dropping down silently from a giant fig tree. “We had good hunting on the canal banks—found an entire colony of rats.”

“Did you get them all?” Beraal asked. Like Katar, she nursed a special dislike for rats: prey was prey, but there was something about the viciousness of rats coupled with the uncleanliness of their surroundings that set her whiskers on edge.

“Most of them,” said Katar, reaching across to give her a quick headrub. “One bit Hulo rather badly, but you know what Hulo’s like—he took its head off with a swipe of his paw.”

The two cats turned; the fakir had come out of his room and was calling to them, a smile on his face.

Beraal ran towards him, her tail up, the pain in her ribs all but forgotten, and Katar followed just behind. The fakir fussed over the two cats. Beraal enjoyed the way he scratched her ears and gently petted her fur just as much as she appreciated the food he set out for them whenever he could. She reached up to
thank him, purring as she put her paws on his lap, rubbing her head and whiskers against his tangled locks.

Some time later, the two cats made their way to the cemetery, to find that Miao had already arrived. She lay stretched out on a gravestone. Far above her head, the parrots squawked and scolded, chattering to each other, their conversation loaded with fresh gossip. From the dargah, a slow caterwauling rose into the morning: Qawwali and his brood were clearing their throats. Beraal listened absently, as they issued a rousing set of challenges to the local dogs, who must have wandered into the butchers’ lane. Qawwali was adept at the ancient Nizamuddin cat tradition of trading insults.

“So was the famous Sender a very large cat?” Miao asked.

“She’s a very small kitten,” said Beraal, “and I have something to share with all of you.”

Katar linked his tail round hers. “A kitten?” he said. “That’s surprising. I really hadn’t believed a kitten could send with such intensity. Are you sure you killed the right cat?”

Beraal flicked her whiskers. “I’m sure I found the right cat,” she said. “And it—she’s a kitten, a very young one with no clan of her own.”

Katar’s back curved into an arc, his whiskers springing to life. “You didn’t kill it, did you, Beraal?” he said.

Miao and Katar looked at her, and Miao’s tail started to move slowly back and forth.

Beraal washed her whiskers with great deliberation. “No,” she said, “I didn’t kill Mara, and I’m not going to. Wait—” she raised her head before the other cats could interrupt. “I know she’s an outsider, and she’s really loud, but there’s something
special about her. It’s not just that she’s a kitten, all of you know I’ve done my share of culls, but her abilities are unusual, and I think with the right kind of training, we could get her to turn the volume down.”