Does a cat have nine lives or curiosity kills it, asks Mohsin Maqbool Elahi
AS YOU are headed to school or office or the bazaar, you are bound to come across not one, not two but several cats, mostly stray. If you are walking, you might come across a feline which brushes itself against your legs or if you happen to be driving, it might scurry past your car, giving you a scare.
The best spot to find at least half a dozen cats and kittens lurking around for morsels of food is at the poultry or butcher’s shop or even a fish-seller. Few shoppers are kind enough to give a piece of chicken or meat or fish to some cat. Well, they can hardly afford any for themselves in these days of ever-rising prices of edibles and steep inflation. So how do you expect them to give something to an animal however small it might happen to be?
If you visit a dhaba or a canteen, you are unlikely to see a chewable piece thrown at them. Some people either shoo them away out of annoyance or do throw them a chicken leg so as not to be bothered further.
Cats can be the most innocent creatures on earth at times, especially if you happen to have one as a pet. When they feel hungry or want a bite, they will round up their eyes and look towards you while mewing in a soft and bizarre way that automatically makes you want to open your fridge for them. They know exactly how to melt your heart. If there is a certain spot where you feed them, they will have reached it before you while continuously mewing. And if you are a second too late in putting the food in their bowl, they will start jumping towards it.
Red or white meat isn’t the only edible that a cat would eat or milk isn’t the only drink that it would sip. Cats love eating desserts like custard and pudding. They find chocolates and coffee cakes to be most scrumptious, and would like nothing more than licking it out of your hands. Like homo-sapiens, they love chocolate milk and strawberry shake. At times, they even go for buttered-toast with all their heart and soul.
When it is time for your pet to show its affection towards you, it will either climb or jump on your lap and start moving its head towards your face so as to rub it. At other times, it will find your lap to be the coziest spot on earth to lie down and start purring out of ecstasy. If you are a moment too late in picking it up, it might start scratching its claws against your jeans out of impatience. You almost get the feeling that it was using your Levi’s as a scratching board to sharpen its claws.
By the way, both cats and their larger jungle/mountain cousins are the only species on earth that have retractable claws. Cats’ claws are retractable because of their anatomy. The claws come out of retraction when the cat spreads out its paw to scratch or knead. Besides, the claws do not get worn down by constant abrasion on a walking surface. Stealth is also another reason when it is out on a hunting spree.
Even while reading a book or newspaper or magazine, cats won’t leave you alone, seeking your attention. Strangely they somehow creep into literary pages also, as the author might mention “a cat among pigeons” or “look what the cat dragged in”. You often find the anti-hero of a Hollywood film inquiring, “Cat got your tongue?”
There is hardly anybody who hasn’t been hooked by the strains of “Stray-cat strut”. However, the skin-headed lead singer of Right Said Fred took things a bit too far when he crooned, “I am too sexy for my cat!”
I, for one, have never been able to understand the logic behind “billi sher ki khala hoti hai kyonke uss ne usko sab kuch sikhlaya hai siwaye pedd chadhne ke”. Nothing could be further from the truth, as the larger species is an expert at climbing trees and mountains – be it a lioness or a leopard or a cougar or jaguar or a lynx or tiger.
I have always wondered whether a cat has nine lives or curiosity actually kills it, wasting the other eight. If you have been separated from your cat for more than a day or two, it has an extremely strange way of showing how much it has missed you! If you rub your palm against its back, it will keep raising its back skywards each and every time you do so. Let me allude to the feline which flexes its back muscles just before the fight-to-the-death between Bruce Lee and Chuck Norris in ‘The Way of the Dragon’. Lee is shown emulating the furry creature as a warming exercise.
So the next time you come across a cat, show it some kindness, as mountaineers, commandos, spies, kung-fu fighters – even burglars – learn so much from cats from scaling walls to jumping from roof-to-roof, and from growling to playing cat-and-mouse games.
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