The Cats’ Tale – Chapter 1

 – Get up! Get up, it’s six AM already! I need to pray.

 

Vishnu was screaming at the top of his lungs. In between his screams, he was also nudging my face with his nose. I did fall asleep quite early on the previous night. Still I retorted, “So go and pray! Who’s stopping you?”

 

 – C’mon, you know I can only pray over my food. How can I pray without food in front of me?

 

As a matter of fact, I was duly told about that commandment by Vishnu on the day he reached his puberty at the age of six months. That was almost two months ago. It goes something like, “Thou shall pray to Us, when We, thy Lord Goddess, bringeth food to thee!” He was very adamant that I use capital letters for the noun and pronouns referring to his Goddess. I could not help but ask him, “Why the plurals, isn’t She a singular entity?” I remember he shook his head in dejection, as if his pride was critically wounded by the stupidity of his owner, and told me to study history and theology. If I do, he said, I would know that the plural forms are used for honoring entities that are either divine or royal in origin.

 

I got up and opened a can of cat food for Vishnu. Before starting to gorge on it, he looked up at the ceiling and closed his eyes for a while. Right then I felt a mild headbutt on my left shin. It was Vishnu’s younger brother, named Shiva because of his extremely playful and often destructive nature. Vishnu on the other hand is more docile, except when he needs to pray. Shiva too wanted some breakfast, and being a nonbeliever he started eating without any further ado.

 

“You don’t need to pray to Felidae?” I asked Shiva in jest. He turned his adorable head around, looked at me and rolled his eyes. Vishnu too turned his head towards me, but his eyes were filled with silent scorns. To take Her proper name without any epithet is blasphemous in his religion. I am lucky, Vishnu keeps reminding me almost regularly that he is a member of the Felis clan. Had he been a member of the Panthera clan, the first time I blasphemed would have been my last. Despite our differences I had to agree with Vishnu on that. Even my ancestors, originating in the East African savannah some hundred thousand years ago, knew too well about the fate of those who crossed paths with a member of the Panthera clan, especially if the latter happened to be hungry or in a bad mood. No wonder, one of the first Gods my ancestors had carved out was the sculpture of a Panthera spelaea, or an Eurasian cave lion in layman’s term. I apologized to Vishnu and was subjected to yet another shaking of his cute little head.

 

After breakfast both Vishnu and Shiva visited their respective litter boxes. As I was cleaning after them, Vishnu came to me and said,

 

 – Good man! I will pray to our Goddess, the most merciful and benevolent, to let you live on Mount Praeda after you have served your purpose in this transient life.

 

“I am humbled by your kind gesture, my lord.” I tried extra hard to filter out any traces of irony from my voice as I said those words. But it was in vain, Vishnu’s auditory prowess seems phenomenal when compared to that of my fellow human apes. 

 

 – Do I hear a note of irony in your voice, Mister?

 

Vishnu always calls me ‘Mister’ when he is on the edge. If I pushed him any further, he would retaliate. I had to de-escalate the situation. “Come now, you do realize that on Mount Praeda there will be members of the Panthera clan as well. And what am I but meat on slow legs to most of them?” Vishnu cocked his head slightly to one side, which he tends to do while thinking. Soon he had his answer,

 

 – I said, to let you live there. As long as you are not a part of Mount Praeda, you will not be eaten by its inhabitants. When they want to eat, parts of the mountain will be turned into prey animals. After the feast those parts will regenerate and the mountain will return to its normal stage. Just like the liver of Prometheus. Understood?

 

Vishnu is a top class apologist, I have to give him that much. But I only said yes to his question and finished my work. By then Vishnu was on his back on the floor, expecting someone to rub his forehead and throat for a little while. Not too much, only for a few seconds at a stretch. Shiva too had sensed the plea and in his adolescent overenthusiasm started advancing toward Vishnu when the older brother let out a muted growl.

 

 – Stay away! I don’t want your filthy, hellbound tongue on me.  

 

Of late Vishnu has started hating Shiva with a vengeance, often biting and clawing at his younger brother, if he ventures too close. And Shiva does have the habit of approaching everyone from their blindsides. I thought the aggression was due to two male cats coming of age in close proximity but the word ‘hellbound’ made me think otherwise. I decided not to press Vishnu any more and talk to Shiva about it at a later time. So I rubbed Vishnu on his forehead and throat for a while. Soon he was in a sound sleep. By then Shiva has climbed up on top of the large steel almirah in the other room, his favorite place for sleeping. With both of them at rest, I was free at last to attend to my morning chores.

 

—

 

In the afternoon, I was getting ready to go out when Shiva came and started scratching at my trousers. Shiva often treats my legs as tree trunks in his habitat. He acquired the habit when he was around four weeks old. Back then both the cats lived with their mother. Living in a bachelors’ quarter they did not have a lot of space to run around or play, nor was their playful behaviors welcomed by the human inhabitants there. Whenever I visited the place, Shiva used to run to me and climb up one of my legs. He seemed to enjoy it, so I started enjoying it too. Now at eight months of age, he has grown too large to do that anymore. Instead, these days he just scratches at one of my trousered legs.

 

 – Where are you heading to? Seems you have stopped playing with me for a few days now.

 

He is right. I have been going out regularly in the afternoon for a few days now. Usually the afternoons are Shiva’s exclusive hours. Vishnu remains asleep during these hours, so his younger brother has the whole house to himself. When I am home, Shiva would visit me after every mischievous act to check out how I am reacting to it. If I am not scowling, he would go on doing his stuff. I guess Shiva does not know that being a cat person, I can never scowl at one. I was lost reminiscing about Shiva’s early childhood when his witty interjection brought me out of the reverie.

 

 – Hello! Are you receiving visions like his holiness, my elder brother? I hope not.  Even one is already one too many for the world, let alone this house!

 

I had to laugh, though silently lest Vishnu woke up. Kneeling down beside Shiva, I begged him to play alone until my return. Which would be very soon, I promised. He agreed, albeit with an evident lack of enthusiasm. As I was stepping out of the house I said to Shiva that I should have named him Hitchens instead. From inside the house came Shiva’s response,

 

 – Why? Had Dawkins been taken already?

 

By then I was out of the house, so I laughed aloud without worrying about Vishnu and his sleep.

An Elegy for the Sons of Abraham

Dedicated to the Lives sacrificed/slaughtered,
around the world everyday

Finally, I could look into the eyes
of someone I would soon kill and rejoice,
feasting on his flesh and bones, cooked and fried!
How hard it was, you really want to know?
How hard it was for Abraham, when he
looked into the eyes of his eldest son,
before dragging him to the holy mound?
Oh! How absurdly fortunate I am,
being the eldest son of a Semite too,
that God had replaced the boy with a ram!
Or surely, two billion people every year
would have been deprived of an eldest son,
and the proverbial blackest sheep to blame!
Woe! When will these bellowing deaths be gone?

---

An Open Letter to Female Homo Sapiens

Hello! Greetings from a halfbreed. I call myself a halfbreed because, biologically I am a male and socially, in many ways, a heterosexual man. However, I find literally (and I mean, literally) everything most men do, think, and preach or practice, objectionable to various degrees. If that is not the definition of a halfbreed in your book, I sincerely apologize, but please bear with me. I hope by the end of this letter, you may find my offenses forgivable. Before proceeding any further, I must make a disclaimer – I am from a third world country, so what I am about to describe might sound Victorian in its essence, and perhaps obsolete. Though I wonder, how many kilometers or nautical miles separate the modern world from mine, especially when connectivity is the middle name of our age. I have a hypothesis though, albeit, completely unsupported and unverified so far; perhaps, every developing nation needs a queen Victoria and a Victorian society to advance to the next stage!?

 

But I digress! My troubles began after I wrote a story about a woman, who was seduced, sexually abused and dumped by one of her male lecturers during her first year as an undergrad student. Later that lecturer (now a professor, but full, half or quarter, I do not care) did the same to quite a few other students too. There are also rumours that the protagonist of my story was not his first prey either. Anyways, due to a diminishing but still widespread practice of marrying off female children as soon as they reach the legally acceptable age of 16, by the time the protagonist got enrolled in her undergrad program, she had already been married once and five childless years later, divorced consequently. In my opinion, individuals with such turbulent background are often more susceptible to sexual predation. 

 

The story also has a male character (other than the serial rapist) as a foil to the protagonist. What this character propounded in the story was the view (quintessentially Victorian, in my opinion), that is harboured by most men around me at least; or that was what I thought while composing the story. He is a batchmate of the victim/protagonist. Once she tells him about the incident, albeit hiding a little in fear of the judgemental nature of men, he tells her that it must have been her fault, because she did not know how to behave like a “proper woman”. According to this view, God created men to be easily arousable, both in terms of sex and violence. So it is always a woman’s responsibility to resist men’s advances. In brief, if a man successfully seduces a woman, as long as the woman is older than 21, it is her fault. She has sinned twice in fact; once by arousing the man and then by failing to resist his advances.

 

Being the naive fool I am, I had hoped that the woman readers of the story would find such beliefs abhorring and I was sincerely shocked when my eyes were pried open to the realities. I have lost friends for my socially unacceptable writing. I have been warned, with varying degrees of humility, not to make too much noise about the underlying issue, because a “teacher’s respect” and career is at stake. I can only gasp in shock! If a mere “teacher’s respect” provides one with immunity against such atrocities, I wonder, how much immunity does a celebrity’s or a political leader’s respect ensure! Then came this : “Since, a woman has more to lose from a sexual intercourse, if it does not end up in marriage, a woman must always be more careful than a man before committing to sexual intercourses.” I was completely blown away (not literally, though I wish I were!). Being a married mother of one, she has access to and knows about the existence of contraceptives. Before their invention and widespread availability (since 1960s), for hundreds of millennia, female Homo Sapiens have been fertile all year round, unless they are either pregnant already, or have one or more nurslings to care for. So, it was literally a female’s responsibility to choose the father of her children, very wisely and with extreme caution. Statistically, one out of every three intercourses could have resulted in a pregnancy. But the availability of contraceptives has finally freed the female from that biological burden.

 

The reason I have used the term “Female” instead of “Woman” in the preceding paragraph, is because I have learned and believe, Female/Male are biological categories, while Woman/Man are social constructs. One does not necessarily imply the other. Therefore, with the freedom of your own body and reproduction cycle, I believe a female Homo Sapiens can demolish the construed wall of differences between a man and a woman. However, I can only guess at how obscenely thick and rockhard that wall must be. The species, now with immodesty and incompleteness, named as Homo Sapiens (Wise Men), first evolved in East Africa around 300 thousand years ago. Since then we have eked out our living more or less like bands of chimpanzees, with weaker teeth and jaws for at least 75% of the time of our existence on Earth. So much so, that even now, “One on one, and even ten on ten, we are embarrassingly similar to chimpanzees…” (Harari, Y N : Sapiens)  Only in the last 70 thousand years, since and due to our cognitive revolution, we have been able to bypass our genome, and suppress biology with cultures and history.

 

Now, after 21 centuries since the advent of the largest organized religion in existence today, and 15 since the second one, how far have we come? I have no degrees in history, but from my reading I have realized that at least for the last 3,000 years – myths, legends, stories, fictions, collective imagination and imagined realities have been primarily the dominion of males. Unsurprisingly, they have constructed the social definitions of Manhood to suit their biological inclinations. The production of sperm cells is empirically cheaper and less cumbersome than eggs; so much so, that evolution has limited female Homo Sapiens to only 400 eggs for her entire fertile life. But males have bypassed their genome and some of them can even become a Pope to spiritually rule over more than two billion human souls, without ever having to contribute in the biological realm! Why must a female be limited to and judged by her capability to make as many or as little of her eggs as possible (depending on the prevailing socio-economic and political fictions of the time)? Unless of course you are freely choosing to do so. But, come on, do you, really?

 

Yes, Male and Female brains are different in some ways. For example, due to evolution male brains are usually more adept at registering sudden movements (to aid them in their hunting) and female brains are usually more adept at recognizing who is sleeping with who in a group (to aid them in their socializing). But at the same time female brains are more adept at caring and tolerance than male’s. Not only that, but your brains are also better wired to approach issues holistically, while my brothers’ ones are better equipped to solve the problems, one at a time, often without caring for the accumulated harm from their disjointed efforts. So I humbly beg you, can you not take over the world’s governments, religions, societies, corporations, markets, academies, courts, communities, families and let a handful of halfbreeds like myself, breathe in peace? If you believe in the existence of God, why must God be a masculine word, or referred to by the male pronoun, “He”?

 

What do you think, Almighty God cannot bless us with Her light?

 

Yours truly,
A Halfbreed.

On First Looking into Harari’s Sapiens

Dedicated to Prof. Jaharat Ara, for her precious and timely gift.

 

And now I drown into the abyss of my thoughts,
the color changing from light to a deeper blue,
and then to pitch black darkness, like a moonless night.
I drown past the scuttling crabs of my libido,
past the undulating kelps of my acquired words – 
trying to stop my descent into the Absolute,
with myths and fictions, construed thousands of years ago.
But I was taught by a Waterfall, so I am
always unbent, unbowed and untamed, falling down!
And I drown past the legends of laws, religions,
past the petty states, nations and empires and their
made up histories as well. I have seen many bands
of wise chimps, exuberant in their genocides.
Drowning past them all I am one with the pure Nothing now!

---

 

A Petition To Posterity

We live in a strange time,
when pigs are more obscene than mass murder and rape,
when cows are more precious than human life,
when the fire of compassion and nirvana burns
all the different ones alive!
    

Perhaps the world is worshiping one God at last,
after toiling and shedding both our sweat and blood
for more than thirteen thousand years,
a God that ought to thrive on spreading fear
about people on the other side!
     

Perhaps the posterity will
charge our dead bones one day and justly too,
for atrocities against humankind,
in the name of a God painted more like a scorned shrew!

.

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