Rustum

My introduction to Rustum was dramatic.

The day after the Patels had moved in to the first floor of our walk-up Apartment block( we occupied the flat on the second floor directly above), my wife and I were standing at the door of our flat bidding good-bye to departing guests when a half-grown cat confidently walked up the stairs, squeezed past my wife and the door frame, walked into our drawing room and hid behind the sofa.Bewildered, we tried to look at our unexpected guest, but if a small cat decides to hide that is not so easy as it sounds.In a short while we heard a shout of “Rustum” and Mr. Patel walked up.In a flah the cat jumped into his arms.

I looked at the cat.He looked at me with a steady, unblinkig gaze that bespoke equanimity and self-cofidence in equal measure. I was reminded of Kipling’s tale of “The Cat that Walked by Hinself.”Apparently that fictional character was Rustum’s feline ancestor.

Mr.Patel felt he owed me an explanation.

“I think he was confused.He is new here, you see.”

“So this is your cat.”

Mr. Patel was a trifle embarrassed by this somewhat accusing statement.He explined his cat.

The Patels had lived in another part of Kolkata as tenants. The previous year, a stray cat had littered under a tree growing in ther back yard.As cats do, the mother moved the kittens every day by picking them up one by one in her mouth and changing the hideaway. One night she was interrupted by stray dogs, and this one was left behind. Mrs.Patel picked up the tiny animal and brought it in, to save it from the dogs.From that day the cat became a pet of the Patels.

Or maybe, the cat chose the Patels to be his protectors. Because you know the saying,”Take dog,care for him and feed him; he thinks you are God. Take a cat,care for him and feed him, he thimks he is God.” I don’t know about the divine element, but there was something incrediblyely majestic and inperious about this little creature, who weighed a couple of kilograms at the most.I think the Patel kids recognized this when they had named him “Rustm”.

Rustum never used the door to our flat again, but he would walk in to our drawing room from time to time all the same.His pathway was a flowering creeper which ran along the line of our drawing room windows.A creature as small as him easily squeezed through the windo grill, and he climbed along the slender creeper with the nonchalnce of a skilled acrobat.And into our drawing room through the grill on our open window. This way, closed doors were irrelevent. After a few days he grew tired of this; maybe our reception to him was distinctly cold.So he took to jumping a few feet from the creeper to land on the concrete window sunshade, fifteen inches wide and fifteen feet from the ground,That is where he loved to bask in the sun.Later he took to jumping from sun-shade to sun-shade so we could see him all around the flat.And he never failed to make it safely back.

A few months after our first encounter,while walking up to my flat I saw Rustum intensely absorbed in something just outside the Patel’s front door. The Patel’s front door was closed, but as I have already explained, this was a matter of no impediment to Rustum’s activities.He had cornered a little field lizard, not the familiar gecko on our walls but of the type found in the scrub , and was examining it intently.Any attempt made by the lizard to move would be countered by a firm paw on its tail. The classic cat-and mouse game, played with a lizard.Fearing bloodshed in my Apartment Block.I shooed Rustum away.He withdrew,with the hauteur and condescension of a pre-Revlutionary French nobleman interrupted in his sport.

I picked the lizard up in my hands.This tiny creature, who had just experienced the exchange of a pedator sixty times his weight by one who outweighed him a thousand times was terrified; his heart was beating against my fingers two hundred times a minute, I walkde down the stairs and gently released him among the bushes.He scampered away.

Early spring came around.This is the season where many deciduous trees shed all their leaves, only to cover themselves in a fresh and luxurious grreen growh a few days later.The sheesham tree in our front yard was now bare, and a pair of crows had built a nest in its branches,working to raise a crop of young ones soon from the eggs that had been laid.One morning I heard a raucuous clamour from the tree.Looking out, I saw Rustum calmly sitting in the nest, completely unfazed by the desperate crows who subjected him to aerial buzzing.What had happened to the eggs?Rustum was not a vegearian.

I looked at the scene in disbelief. The trunk expanded into branches ten feet above the ground.Rustum had made his way to this height by climbing these ten feet by holding on to the near-vertical, rough trunk with his prehensile claws.What attraced him to the crows’ nest I do not know, but all cats are hunters.He saw the crows as fair game,identified the nest as a target, and there he was.For me the qustion was: he had climbed up all tight, but how was he going to get back?

But get back he did.I had not witnessed his ascent, and did not see his descent either.But when I returned in the afternoon Rustum was back in his familair haunts, as confident as before.None of this”Kitten stuck in trees rescued by Fire Brigade” headlines for him.He was Rustum.

A few weeks later I swa Rustum in an entirely new light. He had company of a tabby about his own size and age. If ever a pair of teenage lovers had eyes only for each other, this was it.They frisked,gambolled and preened in each other’s company.When the walked into the bushes, I discreetly withdrew.Even cats need privacy.

Events like this rarely have a happy ending.One day I met Mr.Patel.I enquired afte Rustum whom I had not seen for a few days.Mr.Patel told me the pitiful story.

Rustum had not returned home three nights ago.This was the first time he had stayed out, and a somewhat anxious Mr. Patel had set out next mornig to look for him. He had not far to look.Half a mile away he saw Rustum’s lifeless body flung into the bushes with a string around his neck. Lulled by an unjustified trust in human beings that was a result of his stay with the Patels,he had obviuously invaded someone’s household.The householder, with the savagery that we human feel for weak and unruly creatures who dare to cross our paths , had caught him, hanged him and disdainfully flung his body out to rot. Mr.Patel carefully buried Rustum’s body.

Is this the end of the chapter?I hope not.Remebring his dalliance, I like to think that Rustum has left his genes behind; the ones that typify the fearless nature of cats.If in the midst of life we are surrounded by death, so also in the midst of death we see the evidence of life.This is nature.This is the way of the world.