A concise summary of the affairs of our neighbourhood cats, part I

An abridged version, but it had to be put down in history as a chronicle of catitude. It started before our time, and will continue for eight lives more than ours. But I can safely say the story can begin when we moved to this house a few years ago. The cats were our neighbours, our co inhabitants. In the alley of our house, a gorgeous cat lived and had given birth to kittens. We used to peek at her cuddled bundle of kittens and herself from our window. She would snare. We even tossed food at her but she continued to snare and then proceeded to eat the food. We were dumbstruck at her confidence and callosity. She was decidedly the matriarch, and due to a scarcity of queens in the area, we called her Female.

Eventually, painfully, over months, I managed to earn only a little bit of her trust. She was a cautious mother, too anxious for her own good, and would turn skinny after a litter from overexertion and excessive worry. Any sound would make her eyes slits and she’d jump and run to her kit-kiddens. She would sit at our small kitchen window and meow for food. She was beautiful. And she had a unique motherhood style: we didn’t hear a peep out of the kittens. They’d rarely speak, were so silent it was incredible. She’d sit and coo at them and give them what my mom called a loving lecture on proper cathoodedness.

Then one day, while we were always welcoming and readjusting to new kittens who came and went and broke my heart by growing in front of me and then leaving without me, there was an incessant meowing. It was so unbelievable. What was it. It was 10 pm, and there was a cat at our door, in our garden, meowing relentlessly. I went out and gave the cat some food. Tomorrow, from the moment the cat (later we found out, a he) would see we had woken up, he’d start it. A constant, uninterrupted meowing. Meow, meow, meow, meow. Occasionalyl a mauw. So it couldn’t even be tuned out. It demanded attention in its changing.

It was the volume. The sheer volume. He was so loud and so high pitched. He found a way to come to every window of our house. Even the ones we thought he couldn’t access. I guess he was a cat. But the similarities ended there. And why? The other cats didn’t do it. The other cats just meowed at our door like normal people.

We are already hypersensitive people. Tempers were flying from the noise. Whenever the door opened, he’d dash in, uninvited, unapologetic. We never gave him food inside. We occasionally left something outside for him so we could have some seconds of quiet. But he’d maw maw through the food. A critic. But he was quiet (relatively) when he was inside. We are also pushovers, clearly. We let him in. He was one of us now.

He was the nicest man I ever met. He’d sit on our stairs and slow blink at me, and since an article my mom had read about this slow blinking, which I responded to without even knowing the cat-lingo, released oxytocin in both the cat and her now estranged daughter, she started calling him Oxytocin.

Oxy for short. He’d bat his eyelashes into my life. He was a gentleman, cooing at the kittens, looking at them lovingly from the window and not killing or attacking them. They sometimes ran to him for milk and he’d big step and lunge away worriedly. He’d give his food to Female when she was pregnant but that wasn’t the benchmark for chivalry because every tomcat did that. She really ruled the region. Oxy came and went because he’d figured out how to push open the windows. He got a UTI and blood and a kidney stone, for which we hurriedly got him a carrier and had a rescue operation to take him to the vet without telling my parents. He got better. He was even a kind partner, looking patiently and waiting for me to open the door, trotting calmly when Female was rolling and purring in invitation.

The kittens that were a part of our lives for a small time are many and a big part of my life story. I’ll mention two here because even their life stories are constricted here for brevity. Einstein, who was a gentle giant and super smart. He learnt things without me showing him. So basically I learnt tricks. His brother, Dog, was a dog. He would sit on my lap more, claw away, purr, and, of course, lick. A lot. Any skin he’d see he would start grooming. The two brothers were very close. And Oxy’s parenting had left this into a prime example of psychology.

Einstein was the gene pool of Hitler, the neighbourhood cat who had a black stash and he was the alpha male. Einstein was just as strong, you could see it. Dog was less strong, he was the gene pool of a blurry black male cat who remained unnamed in the human world. Hilter wasn’t even afraid of us and was very smart. The black male cat still had the decency of scurrying off when we threatened him. We wanted them to clear off our property so that our Oxy could pee all over it and mark it his property.

With maturity, Einstein remained kind and a great person to be with. Dog became a dominant terror. He really got hostile with Einstein and eventually the two could not coexist. Einstein would take the blows though he was clearly more brawny, but he didn;t like to fight much. Nature versus nurture.

Oxy would be gone for days because of the fights with the two competing alphas. He’d come back bruised and battered, spots of blood everywhere, which instigated my parents to turn him out. In his time of need! He also had a compulsion to pull his scabs out prematurely. Him and me, we had bleeding paws all the time. Once, by a psychological phenomenon we could not place, Hilter went up the ladder to our otherwise inaccessible roof. He stayed there for days, meowing in dominance or despair or libido, we could not tell. We tried to get him down but he’d jump up the ladder. He left after days. I don’t know what this was and if you do, please tell me.

Only Female could scratch them off. One pounce and the giant males would run off. Her kittens went unharmed.

Oxy, one day by more widely recognised feline psychology, peed on some clothes. Some new clothes and somehow that made it worse because clothes already worn once would have been ignored? We scolded him in spite of ourselves. He left and didn’t show up for days. Once we saw him far off on a lower rooftop and we tried calling him but he looked and turned away. He gave us agony for days. I deserved it. But eventually, the alpha made life so much worse than massive scratches and bleeding wounds that Oxy left.

After years, five years to be exact, the alpha was killed. I saw his body in the park next door. I happened to see it. I had seen a fight spark yesterday, with dogs running after him. It worries me how much of my time I spent looking out the window. What he did to agitate them is a mystery. Maybe he was just a cat and they had had enough of those. They killed him. I had mixed feelings overpowered by grief. And that same day, my Oxy came back. He sat at the window. But I wasn’t allowed to let him in.

I still have him as my profile picture on all my social media accounts. I’ll always love him. He still visits me, a few months in, and I love that he still comes here. Welcoming me with a meow.