Kitty litterateurs: on Suniti Namjoshi's Suki and other cat books

[Did this for the magazine Democratic World]

There was an email forward doing the rounds recently, a comparison of hypothetical one-page diary entries written by two house pets – a dog and a cat. The dog’s entry was short, semi-literate and full of sunshine and cheer, with such exclamations as “Oh boy! A car ride! My favourite!” and “Oh boy! Tummy rubs on the couch!” while the cat’s was written in full, elegant sentences and was sardonic and world-weary: the very heading read “Day 183 of my captivity”.

Anyone who knows the two species well should agree that this is a good summary of their broad personality types. And anyone who knows professional writers – at least the ones who brood for hours over the construction of a paragraph or sentence – will agree that temperamentally they tend to be cat-like: mostly reserved, unsocial and irritable, but willing to purr for a short time if a satisfying turn of phrase has been achieved, or a deadline more or less met. There are also practical reasons why writers are more often “cat people” than “dog people”. Dogs are dependent on human attention, needing to be regularly spoken to and taken down for walks, but cats are more self-sufficient, and hence suitable companions for people who spend much of their time in fierce concentration.

In this light, it is interesting to consider the difference in tone between books about dogs and books about cats. The former – especially the ones about life with a pet – tend to be sentimental and emotionally demonstrative, whereas cat books have a certain coolness built into them. And this can be the case even when they belong to the Motivational or Self-Help category. Take David Michie’s very engaging The Dalai Lama’s Cat, told in the voice of a kitten who is rescued by the Dalai Lama at a traffic signal near Delhi and brought to Mcleodganj, where she soon settles into the temple complex and becomes known as His Holiness’s Cat (HHC).

HHC – alternately known as Snow Lion and, to her dismay, “Mousie-Tung” – spends much of her time in the company of the Buddhist leader, soaking in his presence (“had he recognised in me a kindred spirit – a sentient being on the same spiritual wavelength as he?”) and listening in as he discusses the conundrums of existence. Each chapter follows a broad format where a human character discovers the need to rethink his attitude to things, and the cat then applies some of these teachings to her own situation, with varying degrees of success. Thus, an insight about how self-absorption can make one sick and unhappy (a valuable lesson for writers, as it happens!) is linked to our narrator coughing up fur balls after spending an inordinate amount of time grooming herself. She realises that a period of self-pity combined with fear of exploring a new setting cost her precious time that she might have spent getting to know a new friend; and she is even inspired to deal with her gluttony, a by-product of being pampered silly.

As an old cynic wary of quick-fix advice and pat life lessons, I am not really a fan of this genre. But The Dalai Lama’s Cat worked for me because even in times of emotional epiphany, the cat nature retains a certain distance. At one point HHC overcomes her feelings of distaste for a new arrival, a dog named Kyi Kyi, when she learns about his sad back-story. “We reached an understanding of sorts,” she says, but then she quickly adds: “I did not, however, climb into his basket and let him lick my face. I’m not that kind of cat. And this is not that kind of book.”

Such emotional reticence can make brief, unexpected flashes of sentimentality very effective. Suniti Namjoshi’s recently published Suki, a tribute to her deceased cat, takes the form of conversations between human and feline. They talk about such things as morality, social injustice and hypocrisy, and the tone is mostly droll, faux-philosophical and chatty (or catty). But there are deeply affecting moments too. At one point in the middle of a casual conversation, the ghost-cat remarks that towards the end of her life it had been painful for her to open the cat-flap to go outside, and the author responds with a spontaneous cry of “Oh, Suki!” And another exchange, where the cat mentions that she would have liked to meet the author’s family (who were not animal lovers), should cut deep for anyone who has ever had a special, intense relationship with an animal and been unable to share it with their human world.

At the same time, one knows that these conversations are fictional, that Namjoshi is imagining things about the cat’s inner life and rendering them into human language. And so, the book becomes as much about the author herself – it is a form of therapy, a way of examining her deepest feelings, including love, grief and regret. This is also a reminder that there are many types of cat books. Cats can be used to examine a particular milieu as in Pallavi Aiyar’s novel Chinese Whiskers, in which the adventures of two Beijing cats give us a window into aspects of Chinese society including insularity, city-dwellers’ prejudices against migrant workers and the materialism of the young. Or they can serve purely representative or symbolic purposes: Art Spiegelman’s brilliant graphic novel Maus depicts the Holocaust by drawing Jews as mice and their Nazi oppressors as cats, but there is no pretence that the book is about animals.

Even overtly cat-centric books like The Dalai Lama’s Cat don’t always try to provide a detailed picture of the feline world and its tactile sensations, which is why Nilanjana S Roy’s delightful The Wildings, and its sequel The Hundred Names of Darkness, are such unusual additions to the kitty-lit corpus. These novels try to imagine what the world might feel like to a cat, from the furniture and carpets inside a house to the smells and textures of the outdoors, or the visceral knowledge that a predator is stalking you in the darkness. And an important plot device is the concept of “linking”: the feral cats of Nizamuddin, Delhi, can transmit whisker signals to each other across vast distances, allowing them to form a network that humans around them are oblivious to. 

This should resonate with anyone who has long-suspected that there is something otherworldly about cats; that they aren’t letting on everything they know; or that they are, like the cat in that diary entry, plotting something diabolical. “When my cats aren't happy, I’m not happy,” the poet Shelley said once, “because I know they’re just sitting there thinking up ways to get even.” Or to telepathically work themselves into the next book or poem.

[A post about Suniti Namjoshi's The Fabulous Feminist is here]

Notes on Suniti Namjoshi and The Fabulous Feminist

In her short Introduction to a section of the just-published The Fabulous Feminist: A Suniti Namjoshi Reader, Namjoshi writes:

It’s true the fable is a didactic form, but I don’t sit down and say, “I am now going to write a fable making this point or pointing to that moral.” More often than not – for me anyway – a fable starts with an image. The creature looking out is so eloquent that the fable begins to write itself. And once the creature starts to speak, the fable develops its own logic. The conventions of the traditional storytelling form and its powerful rhythm generate a momentum...

For a good example of what she means, consider her little story “Lost Species”, which was inspired by a Henri Rousseau painting of two unidentifiable beasts peering out of a jungle. They must be poets, Namjoshi thought when she saw the painting, and went on to write her piece about a naturalist coming across a tribe of exotic creatures (“they looked a bit like rabbits and a bit like piglets, but they might have been apes or possibly hyenas”) and wondering what they were good for. “Is your flesh good to eat?” he asks them, and “Is your fur warm?” and other such questions. Eventually they tell him that they are poets and do nothing useful, so he returns disappointed.

Not having read Namjoshi before, this collection has been a good introduction to her work, and I’ve particularly being enjoying the extracts from her 1981 book Feminist Fables and from Saint Suniti and the Dragon. These fables (most of them under a page long) are sharp inversions or re-workings of folktales and myths, done to emphasise the workings of social dominance and to sometimes facilitate small victories for underdogs. Inevitably, then, much of their content is didactic, but it is also very entertaining – Namjoshi compresses a lot of irony or sarcasm into a few pithy lines. In one fable a Brahmin who wanted a son is given a daughter instead. “Though only a woman, she was a Brahmin, so she learned very fast, and then they both sat down and meditated hard.” (Of course, the father’s purpose in meditating is to ask again for a son, and Vishnu grants him this wish but not quite in the way he had expected.) In another story a woman who is all Heart spends her life serving others wholeheartedly but when she goes to the government to ask for a pension she doesn’t get it. (“The problem was that she had no head and couldn’t ask.”) In a Beauty and the Beast retelling, the lovelorn Beast is not a nobleman but a lesbian; since the books she reads make it clear that men love women and women love men, she decides that she can’t be human. Questions of what is socially permissible are discussed elsewhere too. “A plant with feet is not natural,” says the mother of a plant (or a human girl?) that has had the temerity to pull out its roots and prance about, instead of remaining a docile little shrub.

Namjoshi’s original manuscript title for Feminist Fables was “The Monkey and the Crocodiles”, and I can see why; the story by that name is one of her most representative works. In it, a monkey who has grown up with two crocodile friends near a riverbank decides she wants to explore the world, or at least to follow the river to its source. The crocs try to warn her of malignant beasts that are “long and narrow with scaly hides and powerful jaws”, but the monkey goes anyway and returns years later, having lost her tail, six teeth and an eye. “Did you encounter the beasts?” her friends ask, “What did they look like?”

“They looked like you,” she answered slowly. “When you warned me long ago, did you know that?”

“Yes,” said her friends, and avoided her eye.

The story can be seen as a straightforward allegory for parents warning a daughter of a world populated by other humans who could turn out to be predators. (When the crocodiles describe the “dangerous beasts”, the monkey is bemused – understandably, for the only creatures she knows who look like that are her friends; to her there is nothing intrinsically threatening about the description.) But as Namjoshi has pointed out herself, most of her fables can be read not just as being about gender discrimination but in terms of any power imbalance. “It’s not possible to grow up in India without seeing the different kinds of disparities in power all around unless, of course, we choose to blind ourselves deliberately... But to vie with one another about which kind of oppression is the most oppressive is, in my opinion, a bad mistake.”

Incidentally the one-eyed monkey, having survived the world, reappears in some of Namjoshi’s subsequent writings, such as “The One-Eyed Monkey Goes into Print”, a droll account of her own experience of getting published. The monkey is variously told by publishers that her book needs more human interest, that it is lacking in clarity ("the vision is monocular") and could she help pay for the printing?

In the end the book achieved a moderate success under the title The Amorous Adventures of a One-Eyed Minx. “Is it autobiographical?” the reviewers wondered. “No,” declared the monkey quite truthfully, “I do not recognise myself in it.” But her publishers beamed. They patted her back. “Art transforms,” they murmured kindly.

Now doesn't that sound like a fable about the encouragement of bland homogeneity in a process that should open windows to new worlds?

(More on The Fabulous Feminist soon. Meanwhile do look out for the book, especially since much of Namjoshi’s earlier work appears to be out of print these days)