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Ponderings on Cats and Their Elusive Lives

by Arvind Sundararajan

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I want to start with this Edgar Allan Poe quote “I wish my writing was as mysterious as a cat”.

 

My relationship with cats started in an unfortunate way: with one biting me when I was a child. After that I never went near cats. However, some years later, when I was living in the United States, all my friends had cats for pets. I slowly got accustomed to being around cats and also began liking them to the point that when I moved back to India I adopted a kitten “Agnes”. Unfortunately, Agnes died very young. This made me wonder if I was a bad pet parent and made me reluctant about adoption. 

 

This changed, when a few months after a close friend of mine, who was moving back to her hometown, left her kitten Pepper under my care.

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Now, Pepper lives with me as the loving daughter of my house. I often joke to friends that all my inheritance would go only to Pepper. She is a fur ball of happiness. She is very calm and understanding. She can gauge my emotional status and whenever I feel low, she comes and lies down next to me. 

 

I kiss her goodnight everyday before sleeping.

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After she became comfortable in the house I thought  it was time to get another kitten--“Nizhal”. As the name suggests Nizhal is a pitch black kitten. She hides in the darkness like the shadow. Nizhal is a hyperactive cat unlike Pepper, who acts like a zen sage. Now I am a happy parent of two cats.

 

 

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Once I saw an art exhibition in the US about the depiction of cats in the history of art and I was intrigued by how they have been glorified in art starting right from the ancient art of Egypt to the Talking Tom in android apps. 

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Cats started appearing in my art after the death of my first kitten Agnes. I wanted to make a portrait for the passing away of that little soul. After that I got interested in the mysterious behaviour of the cats and I was making a lot of cat illustrations.

 

Most of the cats that feature in my work are the ones I see on my weekly trip to fish markets.  

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I started writing poetry on cats too. At one point I started combining the illustrations and the poetry. I am an abstract painter by profession. Grids and geometry are my subject matter. I wanted to abstract cats and so, cats started appearing on my grids and I saw cats being the mysterious creatures roaming across the predictable mundane grid spaces. 

 

Cats live an abstracted life. Despite having a flexible, acrobatic physique they spend one-third of it sleeping. Science couldn’t explain the mystery behind their purring yet. They don’t have an odour. They live a seemingly quiet, austere life. There are so many instances where I have used this sentence: "I wish I was a cat”. 

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But this one fundamental question keeps lingering on my mind: 

 

As humans we tend to domesticate things and we call that civilisation but with cats, did we domesticate them or were we domesticated by them?

Arvind is a Painter with a capital P and a full time cat dad who also makes amazing fish curry.

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