Authors: Nilanjana Roy
“Bad, very bad,” his mate, Claw, had said, quoting the old saw. “The sparrow may be small/ But when it leaves/ So will we all.”
A flashing line of movement triggered his predator’s brain, and he automatically flexed his wings in preparation for a possible SD&K. “Target: kitten,” his mind registered. “Terrain: open, but riddled with boltholes. Prey mindset: young, inexperienced, unaware. Obstacles: cars, ledges, brickpile, foliage. Kill probability: 46 percent.”
Southpaw felt rather than saw the approach of the cheel—a momentary coolness on his fur as the shadow overhead blotted out the afternoon sun—and reacted instantaneously.
“To the hedges!” he thought, sprinting, his short paws covering the distance at surprising speed. There was more than enough time, and he risked an upward look.
The cheel was coming down fast, and even at this distance, Southpaw shivered when he saw how large its talons seemed,
curved like grappling hooks. The predator was terrifying, but also mesmerizing.
He didn’t realize he’d taken his eyes off the ground entirely until he slammed into an abandoned plastic bucket. Southpaw miaowed in distress as its green edge caught him hard across the stomach, knocking the wind out of him, and then he scrambled to stand up again. The hedge that had seemed just a paw’s length away loomed up in the distance, the thorny roots of the lantana grim and forbidding. The kitten tried to run but could only limp along. Fear knotted his small stomach when he realized how close the dark and rapidly growing dot spiralling out of the sky was to him. He felt the fur on the vulnerable back of his neck stand up, and he urged his paws to move faster, but they were still shaking from the collision.
“Kill probability: 87 pe cent … 89 percent … 91 percent,” Tooth was in the last arc of his dive and sure of his kill now. He refined his aim, flexing his talons as he prepared to sink them into the spot on the kitten’s neck so helpfully defined by a band of white fur. If he got it right, the neck would break in an instant and he would take off with a limp body instead of having to cope with a wriggler on the line.
The bushes rustled; a streak of muscle and fur erupted forth and rolled Southpaw over and away. Katar was on his feet before the kitten knew what had happened; with a swipe of his sheathed paw, the tom batted the brown kitten off the ground and into a pile of dried, dusty leaves near the lantana hedge.
“Kill probability: 71 percent … 24 percent … 9 percent … PULL OUT!” signalled Tooth’s brain as he attempted to pull up, rise and avoid Katar’s scything paws simultaneously. From
his vantage point, Southpaw had a brief but unforgettable view of a glaring yellow eye, a confused impression of gleaming, rushing brown-and-gold wings and polished beak; Tooth executed a neat three-point-turn in mid-air and within seconds, the predator had soared back up into the sky, a shrinking dot in the distance.
Katar stared up at the sky until he was sure that the cheel wouldn’t return. Then he nudged Southpaw roughly with his head, checking to see that the kitten hadn’t broken or bruised anything serious. When Southpaw sat up, his whiskers vibrating an abject apology, Katar cuffed him, but with his claws retracted to show that this was just a token reprimand. This was the fourth time that week he’d had to smack the kitten; Southpaw and trouble had a natural affinity.
“If you’re old enough to go exploring on your own, Southpaw, you’re old enough to know that you never look up at predators,” Katar said, watching the kitten dust bits of leaves and ants out of his light brown fur, which had chocolate stripes running through it. “Where were you off to anyway? Shouldn’t you have been learning paw-washing and whisker-cleaning with Miao today?”
“Miao was busy,” said Southpaw, reflecting that this was the truth. The Siamese had been very busy looking all over the park for him after he’d run away from the day’s lessons—it wasn’t his fault, whisker-cleaning was for the little four-weekers, not for a nearly adult kitten at the ripe old age of two months. “And I wanted to see the Shuttered House. Ow! Katar, that hurts! Ow! Ow! Stoppit! Put me down!”
Katar was growling slightly as he shook the kitten back and forth, holding Southpaw by the loose folds of skin around his
neck. “The Shuttered House! Haven’t we told you it’s forbidden? Didn’t Miao and I tell you time and time again not to go there? And if you were fool enough to explore forbidden territory, why were you heading off on your own?”
“Because,” said the kitten, “you said it was forbidden, so I didn’t think it was safe to take any of the other kittens with me.”
Katar’s tail was lashing back and forth, but hearing this, he dropped the kitten back onto the ground. “You were on your own because you didn’t think it was safe to take any of the other kittens with you,” he said slowly.
“Yes, Katar,” said Southpaw meekly.
“It didn’t occur to you that if it was unsafe to take any of the other kittens with you, it might be unsafe for you to go to the Shuttered House because—you’re still a kitten yourself, you fluff-brained idiot!”
“Yes, Katar,” said Southpaw. “Um—no, Katar. Um—yes, Katar. Anything you say, Katar.”
Katar stared at the young cat suspiciously. “I mean that, Southpaw. The Shuttered House is out of bounds for very, very good reason.”
“Yes, Katar,” said Southpaw. “Umm … what are the reasons?”
Katar exhaled—a short, exasperated sound not unlike a dog’s wuff, at the other end of the spectrum from the cat snuffle used to indicate pleasure. “It’s a fair question, Katar,” said a voice from behind his ear. “I told you he’d be the first in this year’s batch to start getting curious.”
“Well, maybe you’d like to explain, Miao,” said Katar. He’d never gotten used to the venerable Siamese cat’s ability to sneak
up silently behind him, and harboured an uneasy suspicion that she did it just to keep him from getting too big for his paws. Miao left almost no scent trails behind her, unlike the other cats—it was a gift of her Siamese blood.
Miao’s eyes looked deep into Southpaw’s. “Perhaps we should show rather than tell,” said the Siamese, curling her tail out gracefully. “Follow me, Southpaw, and if Katar and I tell you to do something, do it, don’t argue with us, is that understood? Have you got all the ants out of your fur? Are your paws back to normal or are they still stinging? Can you move fast? Have you done a whisker check for dogs, or other predators? Right, then, come along.”
Southpaw’s head was buzzing with the barrage of instructions. “Where are we going?” he said, confused.
“To the Shuttered House,” said Miao. Katar and she touched muzzles, and then the cream-coloured Siamese and the tom led the way through the lantana bushes, as the kitten scrambled behind them as fast as he could.
THE ROOTS OF THE BANYAN TREE
had grown in thick tangles, and getting through them was a fight, even for the cats. Southpaw watched in admiration as Miao flattened herself, seeming to flow past the thick creepers; Katar hacked his way through, using his shoulders to push, his tail flicking back and forth in unease.
It seemed to the kitten that they had left Nizamuddin behind. The banyan towered above this abandoned plot of land. The ground was dark, cool and clammy under his paws. He felt his
claws come out involuntarily, and had to retract them so that they wouldn’t catch on stray roots. He followed Miao’s example, staying flat to the ground, but he almost mewed in terror when a spider dropped down onto his ear, scurrying off rapidly when he twitched it loose. Southpaw could feel thick cobwebs on his fur, and as they moved further into the grounds, he had to duck and weave past the banyan roots.
He was so intent on keeping up with the two elder cats that it took a while before the kitten realized what had been bothering him ever since they crossed over the broken stone wall into the grounds of the Shuttered House. The sounds of Nizamuddin, the cacophony of the Bigfeet’s cars and their voices, the barking of dogs, the clutter and bustle of a busy neighbourhood—all of these were muffled by the undergrowth, and by the banyan tree whose offshoots shrouded the place.
Instead, the quiet clicking of beetles built up in his mind, making his whiskers twitch with their steady, unbearably regular beat. Every now and then, the clicking would stop, and Southpaw found his fur tingling as he waited for it to start again.
They were advancing through a tangle of undergrowth and scrub now, Miao cautiously scanning the ground for predators. “Watch out for snakes,” she linked quietly, using her whiskers to transmit rather than risking a mew. Southpaw felt his paws freeze in place. He had seen a cobra take a crow’s eggs once, and had watched its black hood with mixed fear and bloodlust, unsure whether he wanted to kill it, or run until his paws would carry him no further.
Katar turned his head. “We can go back if you’re afraid,” the
tom signalled. Southpaw twitched his whiskers in the negative, hoping neither cat would sense just how scared he was. The kitten had prowled along the perimeter of the Shuttered House before, unable to stay away, but being inside its grounds, with the sound of the beetles and the dread that rose up in his small stomach, was different.
They were still in the thick of the scrub, manouevring carefully through the prickly acacia bushes, when Southpaw smelled it. His teeth bared and his lips drew back
“That dry scent, like the heart of a rotting tree branch, is woodworm,” said Katar. It was a dusty, insidious stink that made Southpaw’s nostrils curl, but far worse was what was beyond it: a sour stench, heavy as a cloud. “This is a Bigfoot smell, Southpaw,” said Miao’s gentle voice. “Mark it well: it’s the smell of age, and decay, and sadness.”
By now the kitten’s teeth were fully bared, his hackles up. He growled, a low, warning sound, as they approached the crumbling, ramshackle house.
Behind the festering woodworm and sadness, Southpaw could smell something else, and he flinched as they crept closer, hunter-fashion, bellies to the ground. There were tendrils of damp unfurling from the Shuttered House, and they carried in their wake a combined, rotting smell of unkempt cat fur, sickness, stale food, and dried blood many, many moons old. The kitten shivered as the breeze changed direction, amplifying the sweet stink of madness coming from the house. It felt like being swatted by a gangrenous paw.
Katar pressed his flank to the kitten’s shivering sides, and Southpaw felt the warmth of the tom, and took heart. The
rasping of the beetles was much louder now, but behind that, he heard something else. It was indistinct, and it took a while for him to place it: the faint clicking of claws across the floor.
Miao watched him with curiosity, the Siamese’s smoky tail twitching at the tip. The pilgrimage to the Shuttered House was a rite of passage for the Nizamuddin cats, who learned its dark history in their first year, but Southpaw was the youngest kitten in her memory to make the trip. “I think he’s old enough for this,” she said quietly to Katar, knowing that Southpaw wouldn’t catch the whisker transmission easily—he had just started his linking lessons, and wasn’t very good at receiving yet.
“Better he come with us than stray in here on his own,” Katar responded.
The clatter of Bigfeet rose up from the lane at the back of the House. The tom used his whiskers to signal to the other two that they should take cover, and by the time the Bigfoot—a clumsy, shambling fellow—rounded the corner, the three cats were shadows in the undergrowth, Southpaw to the right near the Shuttered House, the other two further to the left. The Bigfeet usually avoided the area, though they would have been hard pressed to explain what kept them away—something in the atmosphere made most of them take an instinctive detour around it. Though birds nested in the tangled hedges and made their homes in the trees, they were quieter here. The bulbul songbirds and sparrows called out occasionally, but the stillness was unbroken by the raucous squabbles of the babblers or the endless chatter of the mynahs.
This Bigfoot seemed in a hurry, and was probably taking a
shortcut. He passed within a foot of Southpaw, who looked up at his white pajamas, marvelling for the umpteenth time at the remarkable obliviousness of Bigfeet. The kitten thought it must be the lack of whiskers, or perhaps they just couldn’t smell very well.
Miao made them wait until she was certain that the Bigfoot wouldn’t return. She and Katar rested, cat-fashion, the tom letting his whiskers stay outstretched and alert, but allowing his eyes to close and his chin to drop as he drowsed for a few moments.
The kitten, at a slight distance from the two adults, was restless, far too excited to catnap, and from under her eyelids, Miao watched him, pleased that he managed to stay still. His pink nose twitched every few seconds, trying to make sense of the tangle of smells coming his way from the Shuttered House.
Far above their heads, a cheel shrieked, its cry breaking the silence. Southpaw looked up, wondering whether it was the same bird that had attacked him. The sound had made them all jump; but that was followed by another sound, an ominous rustling in the bushes on the other side of the house.
The attack came so swiftly it took them all by surprise. Miao’s whiskers crackled a warning: “Watch out! Dog!” and then the Siamese was springing up a tree, hissing as a massive black dog barked at her heels. Katar saw that the kitten was frozen in position, and began to run towards him; but the tomcat had to swerve when the dog abandoned Miao’s tree and bounded in his direction, growling and baring its teeth.
To Southpaw, the dog seemed as large as a cow—he had never seen one of the beasts at such close quarters, and as it
snapped at Katar’s tail, the kitten closed his eyes and shivered. But he had to look, and to his relief, Katar was in control.
The tom streaked away at a fast clip, but when the dog followed, Katar braked at the edge of a clump of acacia, turned, arched his back and hissed. Alarmed, the dog fell back, barking; the tomcat had fluffed his fur to twice his size, and Miao was joining in from her high perch, issuing blood-curdling screeches into the air.
The dog laid its ears flat, looking from one cat to another. Katar continued hissing, though Southpaw could see that the tomcat had an escape route in mind: at need, he could do a quick about-turn and climb up into the friendly branches of a large magnolia tree. It seemed as though they would be safe after all. The dog turned. It ignored Katar’s hisses and Miao’s fighting yowls, and Southpaw found himself looking into its menacing red eyes, at the flecks of foam on its glossy black jowls.