The Wildings (22 page)

“Tell me about the jungles and the ravines,” she said. “Why did you love them so much?”

“Where shall I start?” said Ozzy, his eyes flashing into life.

When Rani came to the mouth of the cave a while later, what she saw made her growl softly in relief. Her mate was
resting on the rocks, his whiskers and ears radiating enthusiasm, and he seemed to be telling Mara one story after another. Rani’s beautiful eyes softened as she watched the kitten, but the white tigress’s tail stayed low to the ground. She sorely missed the play and chatter of her cub, and the kitten’s tiny presence made her ache with sadness. It was not the right age for Rudra to have left her side; another turn of the earth, another season, a few more moons, and the white tigress would have pushed him away herself. He had left so bravely, walking with a cub’s swagger into the cages the Bigfeet keepers brought. His courage made Rani see again how very small he was to face a separation.

It could have been worse, she told Ozzy often. If they had been in the jungles, Rudra would have faced poachers, and predators; the fires from the nearby villages often took the lives of cubs, who couldn’t breathe in the thick smoke, and Rani remembered the hyaenas who had wounded her first cub so grievously.

But their enclosure had seemed lonely and empty after Rudra left, and the white tigress felt his absence more grievously than she would ever let her mate know. As she watched Ozzy and Mara, her belly warmed at the pleasure her mate was taking in the conversation, and Rani felt some of the emptiness in her heart ease.

Mara spent much of the day with the tigers. She wondered whether she should go and visit Rudra, but when she noticed the sad downwards curve of Rani’s whiskers, she decided to see her friend on another day, rather than risk making the two adults sad at the thought that they couldn’t go with her to see their cub. Instead, she drew Ozzy out, letting him share all of
his memories, and for a pleasurable afternoon the jungle invaded the cage, and the bars and the zoo faded from the tiger’s mind.

“Perhaps you should come for a walk with me one of these days,” the kitten said to Ozzy in jest when she left, as the rain started to pour down again.

The tiger rose to his great height, the orange-and-black stripes rippling, his bulk silhouetted majestically against the sunset.

“If I did, what do you think the Bigfeet would say?” he asked.

Mara imagined a tiger strolling through Nizamuddin, scattering the babblers and the mynah birds left and right. Then she tried to imagine Ozzy pacing menacingly through her house.

“Ozzy,” she said seriously, “I don’t think you’d fit in their kitchen.”

Ozzy thought that was very funny. The tiger’s enormous chuffs filled the air, a happy, explosive sound that the animals in the zoo heard with relief. It had been a long time since Ozzy had done anything except sulk or roar.

K
atar felt the first questioning touch of rain on his fur and lingered, liking the way the drops felt as they soaked through to his skin. He was unusual among the Nizamuddin cats in his love for the rain; while the rest of them shivered and sought shelter, the tom would stay out in anything short of a heavy downpour, spreading his paw pads in pleasure as the rain washed his whiskers and fur clean.

Beraal had once watched from the shelter of a park bench, astonished, as he chased water insects through puddles. She agreed with Miao, who had narrowed her eyes one monsoon and pronounced that Katar must have been descended from the river cats of the North, or perhaps from even further away in Bengal, that was famous for its swimming cats of the Sunderbans forest.

It was only when the sound of the rain deepened, from a light percussive rumble to a heavy, steady drumming and his
fur stood in danger of waterlogging that Katar reluctantly leapt down from the roof, taking the road to the Bigfoot fakir’s shelter through the inner lanes. The tom took one look at Nizamuddin before he left: the maze of rooftops that announced the dargah to one side, the dark sprawl of the Shuttered House like a sullen blot near the part where Nizamuddin proper began in serried rows of neat, often green rooftops. To his left ran the great, muddy sludge-filled waters of the canal, which the rains had transformed into a fat, silver snake.

Miao and Beraal were crouched under the spreading branches of a ficus, lapping at bowls of warm milk that the fakir had thoughtfully placed outside for them. Katar bounded in, stopping to shake the water off his fur. He lapped greedily at the milk, looking up once to see Qawwali slumbering inside the shrine, drowsing by the fakir’s side as the evening prayers started.

The three cats lay curled up afterwards, letting their combined warmth combat the sudden chill and damp of the rains. Katar stretched out luxuriously, burying his paws under Beraal’s belly to keep them warm. He barely flinched when a few Bigfeet hurried by. “You’re getting more comfortable around the Bigfeet these days,” said Miao.

“Only when the fakir’s here,” said Katar sleepily. “He understands us. Perhaps it’s his whiskers.” The fakir had a fine beard and moustache, and it was Katar’s private belief that if the Bigfoot tried hard enough, he might be able to communicate like cats some day, but this had never been tested. “But other Bigfeet are treacherous. All Two-Feet are dangerous.”

There was an edge to his mew. Katar’s father had gone hunting in a Bigfeet home and never come back again; his mother
had met her end on the roads. The tomcat had little love of the Bigfeet, staying away from their houses even if he loved exploring the rooftops.

Beraal watched as visitors to the shrine petted Qawwali. “But not all Bigfeet are bad, are they?” she asked. “Mara seems to love her own Bigfeet—she treats them as though they were fellow cats.” She thought of the way the Bigfeet carried the kitten around in their arms, the bowls of food that were so carefully replenished, their patience with her pounces and leaps.

Katar whiffled contemptuously. “Your Mara is hardly a cat, is she? We’ve seen her sendings, but she hasn’t stepped out of her Bigfeet cave. Except for Southpaw and you, we don’t know the scent of her fur, and our whiskers haven’t touched, for all that she’s our Sender,” he said.

“Perhaps it’s a Sender thing,” said Beraal, her nose questing as she turned to Miao.

The Siamese lay on her side, half-asleep. Her blue eyes opened at Beraal’s question. “Tigris was born in the hedge behind the Shuttered House and grew up playing on the canal road,” she said. “She was an outside kitten through-and-through, part of a large litter.”

“Perhaps your Mara’s just weird,” said Katar. The tomcat’s tail rapped lightly on the ground. He had accepted the result of the battle between Hulo and Beraal as all the other cats had—whiskers didn’t turn backwards, as the ancient saying went. But as time went by and the Sender remained indoors, the tom’s view that inside cats were strange creatures was only reinforced.

Miao stirred before Beraal could reply. “I knew Tigris well,” she said. “She grew up like every other wilding in Nizamuddin, learning to dodge the Bigfeet and stay out of their way. Mara had no mother or litter-mates to teach her the freedom of the canal road, or help her make her first kill in the wild. All she’s known from the time her eyes opened is the four walls of her Bigfeet’s home. And besides—”

The Siamese’s sleek ears went up, the black patches of fur on her face standing up too as a muffled thud sounded in the distance. At the entrance of the shrine, the fakir looked around, puzzled, but turned back when he saw that there was no immediate cause for concern.

“That sounded as though it came from the Shuttered House,” said Katar, his nostrils flaring as he scanned the rain and the wind for further information. The cats were alert, their ears swivelling around in the direction of the Shuttered House, but there was silence, and after a few moments, Miao and Katar let their hackles down.

“—Tigris learned that she was a Sender when she was much older than Mara,” continued Miao. Beraal’s nose whiffled in interest. “It was only after she had seen her first summers and monsoons that her whiskers grew longer, and even then, her first sendings were pallid, faint glimpses, weak affairs compared to what your young pupil can do. It took Tigris three seasons to learn what Mara’s shown us in three moons. And in that time, Tigris changed.” The blue of Miao’s eyes deepened as she recollected the past.

“Was Tigris still the Sender when I was born?” asked Katar. The tom’s tail was twitching in uncertainty. He didn’t remember
Tigris at all, and felt that he should have remembered meeting the Sender, even if he’d been a youngling at the time.

“By the time you were born, the Sender had retreated from the rest of us wildings,” said Miao, sadness lightly touching her whiskers. “After Tigris learned to send, she spent most of her time in the courtyard of a Bigfeet house—one of the old mansions on the canal road, it’s empty now. She wasn’t unfriendly, but she spent more and more time in her own world, and she had less and less time for us. Besides, you were born after the neighbourhood had quietened down.”

“Quietened down?” said Beraal. Her mew was surprised: Nizamuddin bustled with the constant clamour of the Bigfeet, the cheerful chatter of the babblers and the predatory sorties of the cheels, besides regular upheavals among the canal pigs who were always fighting interporcine wars.

Miao let her whiskers ripple in the rain and the wind. “Stretch your whiskers out,” she said. “Tell me what you feel.”

The three cats raised their whiskers, and Katar felt his eyebrows tingle as they linked simultaneously. The link was calm, unruffled by turbulence or disaster; none of the cats they checked with had much to report. On the canal roads, Tabol had found shelter under a parked car and was trading stories with some of the older kittens. The market cats had retreated under blue tarpaulins, or curled up in the dry spaces behind stalls. Qawwali, who also didn’t mind the rain, was waiting patiently at the butcher’s shop in the dargah for a few scraps; the other dargah cats were curled up at the back of the fragrance seller’s stall, soothed by the vetiver and rose that scented the breeze.

Katar’s tail rose questioningly as they left the link.

“It’s all so normal,” said Miao. “But there was a time when there were only a handful of wildings in Nizamuddin—two or three families, not the many we have now. We lived in fear of the dogs, and the Bigfeet in those days were not friendly: we had to be prepared for them to hunt us out of our hiding places, or to pick cats up in their trucks and shift them elsewhere, entire families made to move away from the scents of their childhood years.”

Beraal’s green eyes flashed with understanding. “That was when you needed the Sender,” she said. “The Sender could scent further than any of you, and understood the Bigfeet better—was that it?”

“Yes, and more,” said Miao. “Tigris could smell danger long before it came to us, though it took time before the wildings learned to trust her nose.”

Katar turned, yawning. “There is no danger in Nizamuddin now,” he said. “All we have to do is stay away from the Bigfeet, and every kitten learns to be careful—even rascals like Southpaw. No offence to you, Beraal, but the time you’re spending with Mara, training her as though she were from your own litter—what do we need a Sender for?”

The fakir came out with a few scraps for the cats. Katar retreated cautiously behind the trunk of a graceful flame tree, though Miao and Beraal rubbed their heads happily against the fakir’s ankles, purring as they weaved through his legs so that he could accept their thanks. When he went back to the shrine, the three cats ate, Miao generously letting Katar have an equal share from her saucer.

The Siamese was turning over Katar’s question, but it was only when they were done, and washing their whiskers, that she responded. “When you two linked, did you feel anything else in the air?” she asked.

Beraal thought about it, her ears angled. “No,” she said. “Or wait—there was something rising in the air, but it was no more than a ripple. A hint of change to come, perhaps, but that happens with every season, Miao.”

The Siamese was still, and her eyes hooded. “There was change in the air,
and
something darker,” she said. “I am no Sender, but my paws have been prickling ever since we went to the Shuttered House. We have had seven good seasons, Katar; you were born in the first of them.”

Katar licked the last of the meal off his whiskers. “Seven mild winters, seven fat summers,” he said, thinking of the mice and rats, the abundant game that allowed most of the wildings of Nizamuddin to live well without needing to raid the Bigfeet’s garbage dumps.

“Perhaps we will have seven more, but my bones tell me the winds are changing,” said Miao quietly. “It is just as well that we have hunters like Beraal and Hulo; perhaps we will need them. And as I reminded you once, the old saying about Senders, here and everywhere else I’ve travelled, is that they appear when the need is strong.”

Katar caught Beraal’s unblinking eyes. He knew what the other cat was thinking, and though he raised his whiskers instinctively to test the air, neither of them understood why Miao was worried. They had full bellies, and so did most of the wildings; there was peace between the clans, a reasonable state
of truce between the stray dogs and the cats, and the Bigfeet by and large left them alone.