Animal home

By Adarsh Madhavan

I don’t know what to call my home: a house for humans or a den for cats and dogs? Three humans – one more animal than human, and author of these chaotic words – reside here. 

Also, three cats in. Fifteen more outside the front door and gate.

One furry doggy boy in. Another stray ebony furry doggy girl a few buildings away. And, I thwart my intense desire to feed the other poor four-legged wadi breeds that desperately descend down from the mountains into our human space for any scraps they might find on the dusty road. I hold on, chiding myself to show discipline. No, I tell myself, you stupid moron, if you feed them, you are inviting trouble to the little neighbourhood furry black angel that depends on you. Soon the area would be crawling with starving four-legged ones and then you will destroy the tiny space she is struggling to hold onto in our world. I hide behind the front gate and achingly watch them as they desperately forage for some non-existent morsels.
My home-brownie rescue retriever shouts at me from the front window and I sigh and get back to him. He is furious. He feels I am disloyal when my heart bleeds for others of his ilk.

Here a smell, there a smell
Friends say your house smell of animals. Yes, cat poo in the garden. Cat poo inside the house. Yes. Sometimes cat poo on clothes. Sometimes in the jungle of tables, chairs, old stuff, which we unintentionally horde, wanting to throw away but yet keep. And the poo on this heap, is the cherry on top. The furry boy inside does his bit too: enveloping furniture with his hair, but that is another story. Friends say you smell too although I am clean and literally bathe in perfume. But I have nose blindness. And they detect the stink more than the aroma. Perfumed ammonia. Nobody walks into our space though. The ones that do say hey, is there some kind of smell when we enter your gate? Maybe some rat must have died next door, I lie, waving it off. Thankfully, the ones who visit never return. Friends say keep the cats out. Don’t feed them on the porch, in the living room, or in the kitchen. Take an injection, they say when the finicky meows add sharp needly scratches on my hands, legs, face et al.

Cat stains on new pants
Recently, I opened the door to the unoccupied bedroom upstairs and immediately sensed something amiss. Something in the air. I had let in a catintruder with a bad neck wound for a no-rent stay under the bed. But before it left, it ‘pooed’ me for its free stay by depositing on my new sets of pants. I had sworn that I won’t swear but I swear I had to. I screamed. I cried. I washed the pooedang pants, all two of them. Actually, I lifted them like some people lift stray cubs, by the scruff of their neck, one hand doing that and the other pinching the nose, and dropped them on a stand outside the house and hosed them down. After the hosing, l left them to dry on the garden shrubs. Once the sun dries them out, I will send it to the laundry for a final wash and then I will pull the ‘cat-dyed’ pants over my skinny legs and mums the word, I silently guffawed.

But then our driver help, who came back from leave the next evening, executed due diligence by picking and dumping them in the garbage bin outside our home. I am already viewed as someone with little or no sense, no dress sense and an accidental minimalist who wears the same attire daily. And now the new leg drapes that my wife bought me was mixing with food waste, empty bottles, old furniture, bricks, twigs, small branches et al in our locality waste skip.

Disillusioned, I sighed and dipped my hands into my pant pockets, only to snatch them out — one holding a powdering biscuit and the other a sticky, smelly hot dog piece.