BROWNIE & COOKIE

 

It had been an unusually lazy afternoon and waking up towards the evening due to a persistently rung doorbell was not quite pleasurable. Nevertheless the visitor had come to deliver a few letters and had departed after making another few queries. Wanting to snooze again I had just scrambled on to my bed when the mobile phone started ringing and picking it up I heard my mom's voice from the other side asking me     what I had been doing at home alone. Well that was the beginning of a          question and answer session with my mom which dispelled the last ounce of sleep from my body. That conversation led to a sleepless long night which ended early in the morning at about 4.30 the next day. After assuring her about my well being and of having taken sufficient precautions against the hot summers I had managed to get the water boiling for brewing tea. Then that unusual craving for munching something took over and before I could get to the tin of cookies I heard a soft thud. The thud gave way to a peculiar sound like something was running amuck within a closed room. Though I dismissed it from my mind, the next day the thud and the running sounds only increased. This continued typically for another day or so and after that there was only left the sound of the thud. For another few days precisely twice a day the thud could be heard and afterwards when my mother returned from her trip she also confirmed hearing it. Then about a week later my mother opened the store room adjacent to our kitchen and to her alarm found some movements from within a glass cover placed on a spoiled tyre kept in the store room. Upon closer inspection we found a 2 week old kitten with partially opened eyes moving within the circular hollow of the Tyre. It was a white kitten with brown stripes and a white face. Before we could arrive at a conclusion about how it reached inside the tyre we heard the soft thud again (only this time it was louder and clearer) and to our surprise discovered a female cat jump from the ventilation near the ceiling into the storeroom. She glared at us and walked straight to the flat lying tyre and sneaked into its hollow by shoving the glass cover aside. She was a white cat with grey stripes, slender in body and with eyes that looked kohl lined!  She did not seem to be bothered by our presence. That 's when we realized that it had been this cat and kitten duo which had made all those sounds these past few weeks. But, it was not possible that this kitten could run and play around with its mother, so what had given rise to the running amuck like sounds? We searched through the storeroom trying to find another cat or kitten and to our dismay found a patch of rotting flesh and some brown cat hair right below the ceiling on the ground where the ventilation opened. That's when, the female cat walked upto my mother and pressed her body to my mother's legs and and walked up to the patch and sat down silently looking at her and the tyre alternatively.

As I tried to clean the spot it stuck me that perhaps this was the spot where the female cat had let go off the twin kitten which had fallen down and got injured in the process and had died consequent to the queen's  jump from atop the ventilation en route to the place inside the hollow of the tyre, which she had chosen to keep her kittens in safety. And true to canine nature she must have eaten the carcass later on and the initial running amuck like sound could have been her running to and fro between the two kittens trying to save the dying one and trying to feed the other. In the meanwhile the cat had left the same way she had entered the room and my mother had decided to move the kitten into our house.

A cardboard box was prepared with soft clothing to serve as a bed for the kitten and its mother and since then Brownie and Cookie (that's what my mother called the female cat since we had found her when she had gone fetching for cookies in the storeroom) have become our family pets. And Brownie returns twice a day through the main door to feed her growing kitten Cookie, as before. 

P.S. Brownie and Cookie keep me company nowadays when am home alone and my Mom calls and usually enquires about them to know if they are fine.