Poocha-paathi Or What the Cat Left Behind

My husband just left home for a script reading. That means he is at that stage of writing where anything as mundane as daily life goes over his head. And yet, he stopped to send me this picture on his way out. That shows the importance this cat has in our world right now. Meet Chakki the cat.

I am no cat lover. In fact, I would most decidedly call myself cat-agnostic. I am more of a dog lover. Which means I can tolerate them in small doses especially when they are really really small. And yet the most important person (yes, to the point of calling 'it' a 'person') in my life right now is this cat. She came into our lives about a month ago - a tiny, mewling, scrawny little prototype of feline persuasion. My husband, hailing from a family of cat lovers, excitedly dragged the kids down to see the kitten and bade me bring some milk and bread for the clearly hungry little creature. My motherly instincts kicked in from all directions - for one, here was a tiny life crying out to be fed! And then there was the possibility of my kids getting to have the closest thing to actually having a pet - a kitten that they could interact with at close quarters without the responsibility of actually taking care of it! Besides it would give my flat-bound bundles of energy a reason to be outdoors (meaning the concrete paved grounds of the building we live in) for at least a short while in the day. Let's just say my mommy-book of expectations was in overdrive as I fetched that milk and bread. The kitten hungrily lapped up the milk and coyly hid under one of the parked cars as the kids tried to get too close. That too was a cause of satisfaction for me - I was not too comfortable with them actually touching the stray. Day 1 ended happily enough.

Day 2 dawned to reveal three bowls of milk in three different corners of the parking lot and bread strewn about liberally all around the place. Clearly, my children were not the only ones who had discovered 'Chakki'. She was playing with the security guard, curling up in the shoes in front of the ground floor neighbour's flat and evidently full and spoilt for choice! 

Day 3 saw Chakki right at the doorstep of our second floor flat! Ours was in fact the only door where a bowl of milk was NOT laid out for her. Suddenly my next door neighbour opened her door and Chakki was like one possessed! The magical aroma of freshly cut fish was calling out to all her primal cat instincts and she dashed into the neighbour's flat before any of us could react! We had a tough time getting her out and that is when it dawned on us: cats and fish! We could probably never leave our doors open again without fear of the cat sneaking in! Other issues were also beginning to arise - Chakki was liberally leaving behind cat droppings everywhere - also knocking down the flower pots with delicate table roses that had been daintily placed along the edges of the staircase. In just three days Chakki's likeability graph had taken a major hit! 

Soon the old lady who cleaned the common areas of the building started loudly protesting the additional tasks entailed by the kitten's presence. The bowls of milk and bread started disappearing. There was tacit approval when the old lady declared that she was going to get rid of the cat. Chakki was trapped in a cloth bag and let out at some distance from our building. But the old lady obviously did not know much about cats. In two days, Chakki was back in residence - tougher, meaner and much more self-reliant than before. She did not wander around the building looking for food anymore. And though she still curled up among the shoes, she was equally at home atop the parked bikes, under the cool metal of the gate and perched on top of the boundary wall when the fishmonger was on his rounds. Chakki had, of her own accord, established herself as a permanent feature in our building - but not yet in our lives. How that came about is what I am getting into now.

Since Chakki was now wild and free, she was not seen as often as before. So any time she chose to make an appearance, the children would be excited to see her. She still did not let anyone get too close to her and the children were happy enough seeing her from a distance. Then one day last week, my little girl spotted Chakki in the garden on our way back from playschool and I resigned myself to ten minutes in the hot sun as she enjoyed pointing out Chakki to me. The cat was sipping water from a freshly watered flower pot, eyes half closed, in the languid manner that cats have. My little girl squatted down at about a meter's distance from her, gurgling on in excitement. All of a sudden, Chakki leaped towards her and I saw the little paw make contact with my baby's cheek. Horrified, I scooped her up in my arms just as she started wailing in disbelief: 'Chakki scratched me, Chakki scratched me!' I could see she was more shocked than hurt. I searched her face for the tell tale angry, red marks but could not find any. To be sure, I dabbed Dettol on a tissue and wiped the entire area - the cheek, the ears, even her scalp at that side in case I had missed the exact point of contact. Any second I anticipated she would howl as the scratch smarted under contact with the undiluted antiseptic. But there was nothing. I heaved a sigh of relief. However, being the over-anxious parents our friends have certified us to be, we decided to take her to a paediatrician, just in case. Once he said it was fine, we could truly relax and focus on the task of keeping Chakki away from the kids - away from the building itself, if possible. The doctor took out his torch and spotted a tiny red mark on her cheek under her ear - an area I had possibly missed in my Dettol therapy. 'Better not take a risk,' he said, 'she needs to get anti-rabies vaccination'. My heart dropped several inches inside my chest. I watched in horror as he took out his prescription pad and wrote down the dates when she would need to get the shots - one, two, three, four, five of them - the first one to be taken right away at the nearest hospital or clinic, two more in the space of a week, the fourth one on the fourteenth day and the final shot of the series in mid-December! I was in shock as we headed home. 5 injections! And this was when we had been putting off the final set in her inoculation chart because we knew how scared she was of the needle! But this was not a matter of choice. There is nothing that makes you more helpless than when a doctor says 'better not take a risk' in relation to your child! With heavy hearts and luring her with all kinds of promises, my husband and I took our child to the hospital for her first shot of anti-rabies vaccination. She cried bitter, angry, hurt tears. First the terror of the cat unexpectedly springing at her and then her parents carting her off for an injection! My baby slept fitfully for the next couple of days. She would cry in her sleep and mumble about appa and amma leaving her alone somewhere. Awake she was cranky and defiant. And then came the second shot. And the third. 

Obviously we were not too kindly disposed to Chakki after this incident. But right now it is of utmost importance that she be alive and well and within our sights. Why? Because the fourth shot that comes up on the 14th day of the incident can be avoided if the cat is fine. Any parent who is reading this can relate to how vital it becomes to our existences if we are told there is an option that can take some of the pain out of our child's life. One shot. That can be avoided if the cat is fine. Which gives us two precious weeks before she needs to get that final shot in the series. Which means she gets some time to forget this whole incident. And we get that crucial interval of time in which to reassure her that everytime we take her out she is not going to be pricked with a needle. Which is why Chakki is central to our lives right now. But Chakki is growing up. Turning more feral with each passing day. She sometimes wanders off. Does not show up for a day or two or even three. Which is why Sanjay was moved enough to stop the car and take a picture of the cat on his way to an all-important script reading. He knows what difference it makes to my life to be assured that the cat is alive and healthy and around. Till the 30th of this month. After which we can go back to our cat-agnostic existence.

In a tumultous couple of weeks when the world was going hoarse discussing Donald Trump's ascension and Modi's demonitisation, we were busy keeping tabs on a stray kitten. Because life has this tendency to get reduced to the most recent upset in our carefully laid plans. Because unshattered glass ceilings and winding queues in front of banks don't pull on your heartstrings quite as much as a baby's quivering lips. Life goes on.

What exactly is a stray kitten capable of, really? Well, it got all the kids in the building excited, got all the adults thinking about the pets they raised and lost as children, made the cleaning lady yell at the residents' association, got the old security guard to quit after a fracas involving an angry father and his over-enthusiastic son with regard to the cat, drove us to the hospital for three rounds of anti-rabies injections for our little girl and finally got the sometimes-bickering, sometimes-indifferent residents of the building to come together to agree not to drive Chakki away till the 30th. It also brought in  a new term to our family lexicon - "poocha-paathi" (Poocha=cat; paathi=half). 

Poet Balachandran Chullikkad, in his autobiographical musings titled Chidambarasmarana talks about a woman in  his village they called thee-paathi (Thee=fire; paathi=half) - a woman who survived a fire with half her body disfigured. I was intrigued by the usage - half-fire. Did they mean the half the fire took away? Or the half that lived to tell the tale? I like to think of it as a salute to the resilience of human life - thee-paathi - the woman who continued to encapsulate the whole of human existence with the half of her body left intact by the fire. If I had not read this book I would not have got it when my friend's father sympathetically called my little one poocha-paathi referring to her losing weight after the incident. Poocha-paathi - or what the cat left behind! It has become a joke in the family, now that the trauma of the incident is almost behind us.  Parenting is made up of so many such stories and I realise how fortunate we are that this one ended with a lingering family anecdote. Will Chakki still be around on the morning of the 30th? That is the question that rules our minds right now.

God Save My Children!

Nisha, my driving instructor (long story that I will talk about another time) talks non-stop while we are out on the road. That's her way of keeping me distracted from anxiety.To keep the conversation going, considering we are not exactly bosom buddies, Nisha grabs at any topic she can. That is how we started talking religion. We were stuck in the traffic outside a Church when she asked me if I visit temples frequently - her area of interest being how I would manage the parking in such crowded places. I told her that was one location we need not worry about since I never went to temples. 'So church, then?', she asked, since we had already talked about the fact that my husband and I are in an inter-faith marriage. "No," I replied, "we don't go there either." 'So what about the children?', she prodded. 'Don't they need to be acquainted with their religion?'. "Considering they don't belong to any religion, I think they are going to be fine," I said. And waited for the inevitable barrage of questions that followed. And they did: How is that even possible? What do you put in the column on forms where they ask for religion? What do you tell them when they are scared and you need to reassure them that someone up there is looking out for them? Aren't you afraid they will grow up lawless and irresponsible when they grow up without fear of the after-life? And the grand finale to all these conversations: What happens when they are of marriageable age? See, Nisha was just trying to fill in another hour of the time I paid her to sit beside me in the car while I negotiate the madness that is Kochi traffic until the day I can stop reaching for my Uber app instead of the car keys. She is not really concerned about what prospects await my children when they grow up (though she was curious about that since she has, apparently not encountered other people who uphold this particular line of thought). So to her and all the people who have, in the past been genuinely concerned about the issue, I direct this piece.

My husband was born and raised a staunch Catholic. I grew up in a Nair household, used to rising early and going to the temple for 'nirmalyam' in the days leading up to exams. Both of us have mothers who find solace in leaving everything up to the Powers Above. We love them and respect every one of their deeply ingrained and solidly hewn beliefs. To us, there is nothing antithetical about this and the fact that somewhere in the process of growing up, our own definitions of faith changed. We stopped believing that it took Sunday mass and Monday fasts for our lives to be rooted in love, loyalty and the values passed on from our parents to us. And this was not a journey my husband and I undertook together either. His thought process, stemming from his creative spirit and his wonder about everything about the Universe took his spirituality in one direction while my stolidly rational thinking and sceptical worldviews took mine in another. There is one point on which we agree - that it does not take institutionalized religion to lead our lives in harmony with the rest of the Universe. That and the fact that religion and spirituality are, at the very core of it, extremely personal in nature and open to entirely subjective interpretations. It was therefore only natural for us to decide that our life together was going to be, in essence, faith-neutral. We don't identify as Christian and Hindu anymore. Religion does not play any significant role in our thought process. We keep it as non-interfering and non-consequential in our day-to-day lives. It was as a logical extension to that thinking that we decided that our children would be brought up without any religious label. 

And to answer the question that we have been asked time and again - NO, it does not affect ANY official documentation if you leave the column asking for religion (if such a column is present in the form) blank. The Government of India is really not that interested in getting you to declare your faith. Both our children attend reputed educational institutions and our leaving the 'religion' column blank in the application form did not become a factor in their admission process. They also possess birth certificates, Aadhar cards and passports, none of which required them to state their religion. They are proud citizens of India and despite their parents' faithlessness, have the papers to prove it.

As far as the 'someone to turn to' theory goes, we would like to instill in them a faith in humanity above a faith in that which they cannot see and comprehend. If chanting the various names of Arjuna was supposed to help me get over irrational fears as a child, the Fairy Godmothers and Ninja Hattoris who populate their world help my children achieve the same. But of course, there are the days when my elder one comes home full of doubts - Amma, how come I am not Christian like my cousins? How come I don't fast for Navarathri? Naturally, she is quite happy to be free of the ritual of Sunday School and temple visits. But she gets confused when her wise little classmates tell her it is 'not possible' that she does not belong to any religion and that her parents have probably got it wrong. She wonders about the God who created the Universe and whether He would like her if she does not pray to Him. She wonders about why He created bats to hang upside down when everything else seems fine being upright. Between my husband and me and our divergent views on the world and beyond and our families who have whole other belief systems to navigate, the child has a lot to learn and a lot to consider before she eventually arrives at her own conclusions on faith and belief. But in the meantime, we continue to put up a 'kani' on Vishu and a tree for Christmas. Mia and Aisha enjoy the ritual of 'pesaha' with their paternal grandparents and Shivarathri with their maternal grandmother. They understand these as cultural and family traditions. They also read the stories behind these observances from their Amar Chitra Kathas and hear about their significance from family members. We would not deny them those experiences that will shape their childhood memories. We just don't stress on the fact that these are to be associated with a religious identity. 

And finally we get to the question of 'who will marry them?' This one is my favorite. So I guess the picture goes like this. Mia (being the elder one) completes her education and starts half-heartedly on one of those 'filling in the time' jobs while Sanjay and I send the word out to our family and friends that we are ready to 'start looking for a suitable boy' for her. Our dear and near ones spring to action and zero in on eligible 'boys' preferably engineers or MBAs working abroad. Horoscopes and photographs (one full length, one close up) are exchanged. The boy and his parents come over to 'see' the girl. Being the liberal, westernised parents that we are, we - both sets of parents - sit around and have tea while our children - our daughter and their son - are 'allowed' to step out to the nearest coffee shop for all of an hour in which they decide whether they are compatible for a lifetime together. They return after the designated hour having discovered their soulmates in each other. We, the parents, exchange stale jokes, unnatural laughs and a promise to 'take things forward'. My daughter's life is thus 'secured.' Now our deciding to bring up the girls minus a religious identity throws a major spanner in the works of this perfect little setting. Normally, the first step in this scenario is to spread the word among 'our' people - people who share our caste surnames or church denominations. In our case, who exactly would be 'our kind?' Even if we reach out to other 'mixed families' wouldn't they want the 'girl' to be officially denoted one kind or the other so they can decide on what ceremonies they can have for the grandchildren - baptism or noolukettu? Buffet with pork and tapioca or sadya with three kinds of payasam? This was the biggest mystery that caught Nisha's (and many others with whom we have had to have this conversation) imagination when I told her my children don't belong to any faith. Who will marry them? Who will give them 'respectability', 'security', an aspirational surname and hopefully, a Green Card?

My answer to that would be - if my girls hang around for my husband and me to 'fix them up' with 'suitable boys' once they reach the 'marriageable age' I would consider that our greatest failure as parents (no offence to anyone who got married that way - I am talking about a scenario at least twenty years into the future) I hope we would have instilled in them the lessons that (1) marriage is not the be all and end all of your aspirations (2) marriage is not something that you 'need' to get into at a particular age or stage in life (3) marriage is not something you enter into to live up to anyone's expectations (4) nothing is taken away from your achievements or your happiness if you choose not to be married. My husband and I got married to each other because the idea of spending our lives together gave us the greatest happiness we have ever experienced. Not because our family backgrounds matched. Not because our horoscopes matched. Not because our photographs matched. Not because our educational qualifications or place of work matched. And definitely not because 'we had reached the marriageable age.' That is what we hope for our daughters too. That they will get married because they have found someone worthy of spending their precious time and lives with. Their religion, or lack thereof should not matter. Who their parents are should not matter. All that matters should be that they are loved and valued above all else. That their aspirations are able to freely take wing in the life they choose to build for themselves. Then we will consider our job as parents well done. And that is when I hope the question 'what happens to children who have the religion column blank in their official documents' will be truly answered.

Back when Sanjay and I were about to get married, there was an opinion raised from both our families that ideally one of us should adopt the other's faith because it affects the unity of a family for the spouses to not share their beliefs and prayers. I understand that concern. Because we are so used to families grounded in religion that it is difficult to think of another model.  Therefore, if you must ask a question to an inter-faith couple, I think a relevant one would be this - does it affect our cohesiveness as a family? Maybe it would have if my husband insisted we thank the Lord before every meal and I started spouting sandhyanamam every evening in our household. We don't. Our children are not even aware of there being any dichotomy in their parents' identities or of anything being lacking in their lives because we chose the life we did. That is why my daughter thought nothing of making up a story about Santa Claus bringing a Christmas tree to a bored little Ganesha. That, my friends, is our answer.