Cats live in our building. They live in the spaces that have no definition, in the shadowy corners of the garage. Sometimes, deep in the night, you hear them quarrelling; as Durga, in Pather Panchali, half-asleep when Apu was born, thought she heard a kitten mewling, we can sometimes mistake the sound for a newborn crying inconsolably, and, looking at our sleeping daughter, be thankful that the trauma and bewilderment of those months, which seem not so long ago, have passed. By morning, that nocturnal passion is spent; when they are visible in daytime, or you are present, the cats will never give you the benefit of losing their self-possession. Strife and hysteria are their domestic affair; for the public – and you are the public – only an icy stare and an indifferent composedness are appropriate. Cats cultivate privacy and escape the human gaze in a way that celebrities no longer can.
     The cat is an enigma. It often inspires distrust and dislike; but, unlike the serpent, occupies no transcendental position in the judaeo-christian tradition. It is neither good nor evil; it existed before that historical moment when, in many parts of the world, the human consciousness bifurcated into heaven and hell. Since then, the cat’s eluded almost everything, including theology; its home is the folk-tale and the proverb. The Bengali saying, ‘The cat is the tiger’s maternal aunt,’ suggests that – if the tiger represents Nature, in its energy and splendour – the cat is older than Nature, if related to it. The cat is not quite of Nature, then: is it, then, partly construct? But whose construct, and in which language? The great human inventions – gods, demons, angels, devils – have outlived their uses; they have had their day. But the cat continues to puzzle: we still haven’t accounted for its appearance and disappearance in our lives.
     The cat, on the whole, is seen to be a feminine enthusiasm; and the enthusiasm is one of the reasons why women are slightly unfathomable to men. Passion for cats gives, among other things, women their oddity – not in a comforting, but in a disquieting way. It’s this sense of disquiet that moved Arun Kolatkar to write a poem called Woman, which begins with the observation: 'a woman may collect cats read thrillers/ Her insomnia may seep through the great walls of history.' (The poem’s itself a perpetration of feline deception and hide-and-seek: when it was first anthologised by Dilip Chitre in an anthology of Marathi poetry in translation, it was noted it had been translated into English by the poet. The second time it was anthologised, in a selection of Indian verse in English, the editor, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, pointed out 'the Marathi version has never been committed to paper.')
     In the second stanza, Kolatkar returns to the disturbing obsession: 'a woman may name her cats/ the circulating library/ may lend her new thrillers'. It’s women’s nebulous private culture that’s being speculated upon here, as it is in the disjunctive litany that ends the poem: 'a woman may shave her legs regularly/ a woman may take up landscape painting/ a woman may poison/ twenty three cockroaches…' Men play and watch cricket; they drink beer; they preach religion; they kill each other. What do women do? There is fear and curiosity in this question, the ancient uncertainty of being cuckolded; and the cat is part of the woman’s dream-life, of the perpetual possibility of sexual betrayal, that the man can’t quite encompass.

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