The book “Cat Lovers”, edited by Devapriya Roy, is a collection of short stories, personal essays, lists, original art and photographs, not just for cat lovers everywhere, but for all who love a story well-told – and, on occasion, a theory well-spun.
The book consists of essays on cats, big and small, reflective and sombre, cheerful and wonderful.
Capturing the many moods of felines and their humans, in many forms and voices, this book is a timely celebration of the most memed creature today: the cat.
Read an excerpt from the book below.
Editor’s Note: The following excerpt has been taken from ‘Weather Forecast’ by Aditi Sriram, from the book “Cat People”, edited by Devapriya Roy.
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Thursday
Saras wakes up with her sketchbook next to her. Animals in various poses stare back, but somehow they feel lackluster. Children’s book illustrations are most alluring, most successful when they are bright and bold and vivid. Think Hungry Caterpillar. Karadi Tales books. Any Tinkle magazine cover. Cows don’t have to be black-and-white. Dogs don’t have to be brown. Fish don’t have to be grey.
In fact, marine life is so much fun to work with, there are so many techniques to create a fish’s shimmering scales, or a coral reef’s rainbow. Saras’s mind starts racing. The ocean. The beach is ten minutes from here. She could focus on contemporary rural coastal life: fisher families and their daily expeditions. Maybe that’s my edge. Why do farm animals all over again? That is every children’s book all over the world.
The idea is thrilling. There are so many components. The men off on their early morning catches—or the late-night ones. Their wives waiting with their empty baskets. The tides, the sand, the boats, the net. All the different materials and tools. The risks, the weather. The scale of it all. Saras jots down some words as she thinks. She knows where she’ll be spending the rest of her day.
She avoids the kitchen completely—there is a small shop near the beach where she can order breakfast—and drives straight to the nearest beach. She prays that it doesn’t rain, so that she can photograph and draw undisturbed. The weather gods acquiesce.
The fishermen’s boats are not completely made of wood, as she expected. Styrofoam cubes cover the entire surface and form an additional floatation layer between boat and sea. The wood is worn and weathered, and matches the fishermen’s faces.
There are no women on the beach. They could be in the market, but Saras is too bashful to clarify this with the fishermen. One takes her on a short trip into the water, and she is impressed by his strength to row against the current. The boat seems much larger once she is sitting in it. He rarely fishes during the monsoon, the man says, but he can show her a little bit of the sea. It is too murky to see anything below the surface; Saras thinks she has spotted a jellyfish, but it is just a plastic bag. Hearing the water slapping against the Styrofoam and thirst scratching at her throat, she is unsettled by how endless, bottomless and relentless the sea is. After a couple of hours in the blazing sun, Saras feels fully desiccated. Her morning omelette is also long digested and now she is hungry.
Back at home Saras prepares an elaborate lunch. She half-expects feline company when she brings her plate to the verandah to eat. Will it be the grey one or the sunset one today?
So when she does hear a meow, she doesn’t do what her mother does and blame it on exposure to the sun. I’ve been expecting you, I think? A head sticks out from around the corner: triangular ears and whiskers and unblinking eyes. Then a body and legs and a tail. And a cat walks up to her, confident and grand, and sits by her chair as if this is what the two of them do together every day. This visitor is lustrous, its fur a glossy steel that is almost navy. Saras remembers a set of colour pencils her parents gifted her one year, 74 distinct shades, each pencil the exact same height and pointiness, with the colour names printed along the side of each pencil. This cat’s coat is in that set, she can recall it instantly: “Russian Blue.”
Russian Blue’s gaze doesn’t leave Saras’ plate for even an instant. Saras doesn’t take her eyes off the cat either—partly a professional habit, partly because she has to keep reminding herself that these cats are corporeal. She soaks up the daal and subji in her roti and chews slowly. She sits up, adopting her own regal posture. She waits. The cat scrunches its eyes closed and reopens them, and Saras notices that the right eye is blue, the left one green. Or is it the other way around? Each time Russian Blue blinks, its eyes seem to switch colours, the aquamarine flowing back and forth. First grey, then striped, now tidal. Have I been alone too long?
She makes no attempt to touch the cat, and as her plate empties, the animal’s interest wanes. Eventually Russian Blue recedes into the trees behind the kitchen. But Saras leaves a cup of milk on the stairs before she turns in for the night.
Excerpted with permission from Cat People, edited by Devapriya Roy, Simon & Schuster India. Read more about the book here and buy it here.
