As if 2020 was not bad enough, 2021 is turning out to be incredibly bad. I can actually feel myself stuck in quicksand. Cat haters are making my life miserable. Cries of “Get rid of them!”, “Throw them out!”, “Send them to a shelter!”, “Give all of them to someone (???)”, and permutations and combinations of these reverberate in my head. My entire neighbourhood hates cats. And I am the most hated person in the neighbourhood. Of late, I have been getting calls from across the seven seas asking me to get rid of my fur buddies. Why? Amidst all the brouhaha, my favourite cat Shobith has gone missing. Another cat, Simple, went missing in January. She was only six months old, a baby. Shobith is four years old, pushing five. I find his disappearance hard to believe. It has been five days now. Did he get killed by stray dogs? I asked the BBMP workers. They say they found a body of a cat resembling Shobith a week back. The body was decomposed. When I spoke to the BBMP workers, Shobith had been gone for only two days. That cat they found dead could not have been Shobith. There was still a faint hope that he would come back. Sadly, he still hasn’t. Maybe, he found another home? Hopefully, he is still alive and happy wherever he is. I miss him a lot. He was the alpha male among the brotherhood of cats at home, a lovable and good-looking ‘goonda’ whose presence lit up my house save for those brawls he had with Roller and Jhooma. Shobith got adopted twice, the first time when he was only two months old. He refused to let go of the young lady who adopted him. She dropped him back. He then got adopted again when he was six months old, a tad late for kittens to be given away. Not surprisingly, he came back again. The inmates of the house found him too vocal. The lovable ‘goonda’ then became part of my family. He was great friends with Biscuit and was his partner in crime. They were like the Boss and ‘chamcha’. Biscuit would often slap him. It was fun to watch the two. It goes without saying that Biscuit has started missing his dear friend.
I am hoping against hope that Shobith comes back. I can’t wait to carry him.
Update: Yay! He is back. Looking scared and disoriented. I think he had lost his way!
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