It was over in a matter of minutes, and I saw Neferkitty and some of the toms slump to the ground, grateful for the rest. Jao and Ao chittered behind us in celebration. “Incredible,” wuffed Tommy—he and the stray dogs had watched the crows retreat in wonder. I knew what he meant; it had all happened so fast, and now the cheel squadrons were reforming into a large, neat arrowhead. It was a stately, soaring group of cheels that came to roost in the rooftops of Nizamuddin—this very roof, Tooth.
Stoop arced overhead as Conquer watched her proudly. “Little ones,” she called, streaking down so low between the trees that she almost brushed our heads, “I kept my promise, little ones! What a day, Miao! Did you like the show?”
And then she was off again, soaring, rolling and diving, a beautiful black streak across the sky, hitchhiking the winds and gliding along. Up on the roof, I saw her Wing Commander, Slash, spread his feathers out in sudden alarm. He gave a loud startled call. “Stoop! Watch out!”
She was doing her aerobatics between the edges of the roofs of the dargah and the long black power cables, and she was, not for the first time, too close, far too close. She heard Slash’s alarm call, flicked her tail feathers into a closed fan and dived smoothly downwards, easily avoiding the ominous dark line of the cables, streaking far above its deadly width, towards us. I saw Slash shift his claws back on his perch, riffing his feathers back into shape in relief.
She looked so beautiful in that moment, Tooth. Your mother had a knack of cutting through the air cleanly, her wings held back just an inch more than the other cheels. The sun glinted off the brown feathers on her back, turning them gold. And then: “Slash! Have you ever seen an upwards triple roll?” she called as she plummeted all the way back down, hovering in the air like a hummingbird rather than a cheel, near a first-floor parapet. Slash tensed: “Stoop! No, it’s too dangerous!” he said, and his voice shrilled with alarm. “Come back!” called Ao. “Come down!” squeaked Jao.
But she had already risen into the air, spinning like a golden top, doing a perfect roll upwards into the clear blue sky, then a second, skating higher on a sudden tug from a sharp breeze, and then the third, spectacular, looping roll. There she was, a golden-brown streak of light, and we saw her rise higher, higher, upside down now. And then Slash called out again, his hoarse voice urgent and harsh, as a smoking power cable, damaged from the battle, erupted in a shower of sparks.
We couldn’t tell her golden feathers from the flames.
FOR A LONG WHILE, there was no conversation—only silence and the rain. Miao said nothing, just sat next to the cheel, both of them gazing out and down into the park, and if they saw a slim, graceful golden-brown phantom skimming the trees and the rooftops, neither of them said so.
Finally, Tooth turned back to Miao. “I’ll have to speak to Conquer and to Claw, but this is what we can offer. We won’t start your fight for you, Miao. We won’t attack first. We won’t take orders from any cat but you or Katar. But when you need our help, we’ll be there.”
Miao let her whiskers relax, wanting to give Tooth another head-rub, but knowing from the stiffness in his maxillary feathers and the way his talons tightly gripped the edge of the roof that the cheel wouldn’t welcome a touch at this moment. “Thank you, Tooth,” she said and began to make her descent. As she went down the stairs in brief hops, Tooth called out to her. “Miao?” he said.
“Yes, Tooth?”
“Just tell the little ones in Nizamuddin, the mice and the shrews and the sparrows … tell the little ones it’ll be all right.” And then the raptor turned his head back to the rain, which was falling in a steady torrent.
Crouched behind the tattered velvet curtains, Datura silently observed the Bigfeet who tramped through the house. “Hide!” he had growled to the others. “Spread out in groups, stay away from the line of feeding bowls, don’t attack the Bigfeet. Yet.”
But as the night and day wore on, the flood of Bigfeet had only grown. The night watchmen had raised the alarm, peering into the Shuttered House when the cats began to yowl their great lament, as was custom. Datura had started the dirge for the dead, and had cuffed or bitten the throats of the few who hadn’t joined in. The white cat retreated when the police came in, watching from the stairs, sure that other Bigfeet would follow. He felt no sadness as they carried the body of the old Bigfoot out; instead, he sniffed the air, smelling the vans and cars drawing up outside, tasting what came in through the windows.
“We could stay here,” Ratsbane had said defiantly. “We could hide from the Bigfeet and live in the back, couldn’t we?”
Datura didn’t think so. One look at the Bigfeet who came stumbling in, wincing at the darkness of the house, calling out to one another in horror at its squalor, was enough to tell the white cat that they had lost their privacy and their home. The air rushed in from the window and doorway, polluting the close, comfortable stench that spoke to him of family and home. When Ratsbane growled at a Bigfoot who was distastefully pushing the filthy food bowls around with an old Malacca cane, Datura didn’t stop the black cat, but he didn’t join in either, and he held the other cats back from attacking the Bigfoot with a single flick of his whiskers. Two of the Bigfeet stamped their feet menacingly at Ratsbane, and though the black tom hissed again, he had to fall back.
“But this is our house! Datura, we must fight them for it!” growled Ratsbane.
“This was our house,” said Datura. “Now it’s theirs.”
“And where will we go?” asked Aconite, sidling up to them. “Outside,” said Datura. “Leave me, Aconite.”
He would answer no further questions, and when Ratsbane tried to ask what his plans were, Datura spun around from behind the velvet curtains, his claws unsheathed, raking a bloody line across the black cat’s nose. “I said, leave me!”
Ratsbane went yelping away. Aconite watched Datura for a while, her golden eyes narrowed, and then she went off to find a hiding place away from the Bigfeet. They unsettled her. She had never paid attention to the few she saw from the windows, and didn’t know their harsh, guttural language. But as more of them marched through the rooms, opening the windows, pushing back the tattered drapes, letting the light and air in, she felt the invasion keenly.
Behind the velvet curtains, Datura let his mind drift outwards. The outside smelled rich to him, much to his surprise. He had hated the sky since he had tumbled out on to the roof as a kitten and looked up—it was such a long way away that it made him dizzy. Datura preferred close spaces where he knew exactly where each predator or prey was to be found; the sky made him uncomfortably aware that the outside was too vast for him to patrol on his own.
But when the windows were first thrown open after the death of the Bigfoot, the rusted catches squealing, the dead flies that hung off the cobwebs that encrusted the panes falling to the floor in thick clusters, Datura had been intensely fascinated. It was dark, and the rain blanketed the night so that he couldn’t see the sky. Without that high, arcing blue emptiness, the outside didn’t seem so menacing, and the hedges carried the rich scent of prey to his whiskers. From his spot behind the curtains the white cat stared out at the grounds. Both his eyes gleamed, the sane blue one and the mad yellow one, as he inhaled sharply. Datura tallied the bounty; the fat mice in the hedgerows, the juicy bandicoots bustling about in their tunnels, the grubs and beetles, the sleeping birds. It was a world of prey begging to be hunted.
A smoky, thin dawn had broken the morning. The rain had become a sulky drizzle. The cat shook out his ears and stretched his paws; absently, he listened to the screeching pleas of some poor unfortunate who had crossed Aconite’s path. She was clearly in a temper, he thought, though both cats subsided into silence when two Bigfeet came thumping down the stairs, talking loudly.
“Aconite,” he called. “Come here and tell me what you smell.”
The grey cat stopped what she was doing—smacking some of the smaller ferals, in an attempt to work off her irritation at the Bigfeet invasion—and joined Datura
. “Stretch your whiskers out,” he said. “What does the outside feel like to you?”
Aconite fluffed her fur along with her whiskers, trying to make sense of the dizzying world revealed outside their windows and doors. “It stinks of Bigfeet,” she said, “but they walk like ants, up and down, up and down, never exploring the gardens. Beyond that—” The cat extended her whiskers, and Datura saw her eyes open wide in delight.
“Meat,” she whispered. “Fresh meat, in the grass, in the trees, sleeping in the hedges.” Aconite’s whiskers were trembling in surprise. Like Datura, she had smelled only the sour whiff of bird droppings and old litter in the courtyard, while the front veranda reeked of dry woodworm. No one had opened the windows of the Shuttered House in years, and as she sniffed at the clean air, the winds and the rain brought to her a great longing to feel the earth under her paws, the brush of grass against her belly.
“Where are the cats?” Aconite asked Datura, looking puzzled. Her nose had the sharpness of a true hunter’s nose, but the winds carried only the scent of trails, not the strong, unmistakeable odour of clan markings. The air whispered to her that the wildings sometimes walked here; but none of them had claimed the territory or left scent markings around its perimeters. If the grounds were not claimed by the wildings, they weren’t claimed by the Bigfeet either. “The strongest trails are from the rats and mice,” Datura said. “And the birds weave skeins through the bushes. But this belongs to no one.”
Datura watched Aconite, his blue eye calm. It was clear that she had no fear of the outside; his whiskers told him that more of the ferals were beginning to come out, groups of them sitting close to the windows and doors, drinking in the fresh air. Despite the Bigfeet, there was a crackle of excitement running through their ranks. Even Ratsbane sat quietly, watching and mapping what he could see of the rat holes and the clumps of earth left by the moles. Sooner or later, perhaps even as soon as tomorrow, the ferals would want to explore.
The scents of Nizamuddin wafted in his head, forming a map of the colony. The Bigfeet were everywhere, but like the canal pigs, they were to be treated as obstacles to be avoided, and their trash cans and unguarded kitchens would be of great use. Prey was everywhere, too; Datura couldn’t understand why the Nizamuddin cats seemed to hunt only for food, given the abundance of prey in the trees, the gardens, the wild, empty lots. They hadn’t even broken the necks of birds like the babblers, who were so easy to catch, judging by the silly way in which they hopped along the ground.
He cleaned his claws, sharpening the points by stropping them on his teeth. He thought of his few excursions into the closed concrete veranda at the back of the Shuttered House, a dead space littered with dried leaves and the husks of locusts. He thought of the barren roofs where the bats made their homes and the spiders wove thick webs, inhospitable even for birds.
Then he raised his head again and sniffed the air, so rich with prey and the tantalizing scents of green grass, trees, Bigfoot homes. The white cat’s chest fluffed out as he growled. In Datura’s mind, an immense anger was beginning to form and grow, though he could put neither words nor whiskers to it. The outside he had stayed away from all his life was inviting and filled with promise—for all the cats of Nizamuddin except for the ferals of the Shuttered House, he thought. It would not have occurred to Datura to blame himself for not venturing outside earlier. Instead the rage built within him at what he thought had been unfairly denied to him.
Aconite’s contention that the grounds of the Shuttered House were free of cats was correct, he knew, the scent trails he had followed through his whiskers told him that a large colony of cats lived just beyond the grounds. Another skein of scents led to a dargah, the smell of meat from the butcher’s shops and the restaurants making his whiskers ripple. He could scent no battle lines or hostility between the dargah cats and the colony cats—both sides had young hunting queens and warrior toms, from what he could tell, and yet they seemed to live on peaceful terms.
A bird flew low across the horizon, and next to him, Aconite chattered her teeth in the classic hunter’s reflex. The longing on her face was unmistakeable, her neck stretched up as she pointed towards the bird. The ferals of the Shuttered House would soon start going out, thought Datura. The question was whether to treat the wildings who lived just outside the grounds as a threat or to ignore them. What did he know of the wildings that might be useful? How should he approach them?
A shiny green beetle trundled up near his front paws, its antennae twitching in excitement as it scented the outdoors. It hesitated, then moved forward. The white cat watched it climb the dusty wooden sill with some effort; it fell down twice, but kept going back. The third time, it managed to heave its fat bulk onto the sill. It twitched its antennae again, cautiously testing the breeze.
The outside was brimming with prey, ripe for the plucking. The more he looked at the open grounds, the more he let his nose travel the rooftops and explore the rich possibilities of the Bigfeet houses, the more Datura’s eyes gleamed with avarice. If the Shuttered House had been left alone, he would have known none of this. But his home had been flung open to the winds and the rain and the scent of prey from the outside—the white cat would make it his home, then.
His blue eye watched the beetle idly, as it began to move out towards the wall and the faint rays of the sun, his thoughts veering back to the wildings. What were they really like? He didn’t think they would be good predators; too soft, too kind. They were the kind who would offer—his mouth drew back in an unconscious snarl—to ‘share’ their world, the kind of weak clan who would try to talk to those of a different scent instead of killing them straightaway. He thought of the brown kitten who had wandered into the Shuttered House and how it had escaped their claws and teeth. The kitten and those like him had been free all this time to roam the lands and roads outside, while he and his feral family had been shut up indoors …
The beetle was moving faster, now, clicking its antennae eagerly as it scented wet mud.
Not predators, then, the white cat thought. So what did that make the wildings of Nizamuddin? His mad eye blazed up at the sky, and looked back at the beetle, which was almost over the lip of the wall. Its glossy back waggled back and forth as it tried to make a smooth descent. Casually, Datura stretched a paw out, and back; then his paw moved so fast that it was a blur as it smacked hard into the beetle’s shell. The creature, smashed across its centre, landed on the ground, half-buried in the earth. Its antennae twitched once, feebly, as it lay on its back, and then it was still.
“Prey,” said Datura aloud, his mew slow and sharp. It made the white cat feel much better. He knew how to deal with prey.
Though it was well past midnight and dawn would be lightening the heavy, clouded night skies soon, the old stone baoli was filled with cats. Some sat in the trees, glad for the shelter their wide leaves offered from the rain. But most were gathered on the ancient quartzite steps that ran in great tiers around the dull green waters of the stepwell.
“They must all come,” Miao had told Katar, Hulo and Beraal, before sending out an urgent message on the link. The dargah cats had arrived, their tails waving like banners. Abol, Tabol and many of the canal cats were missing, though. The Bigfeet had put up a gaily coloured tent just across the bridge to celebrate a minor religious festival and two large groups of canal and market wildings were camped near the awning, feasting on leftovers.
Now the Siamese stayed motionless on the highest step, listening to the uproar that had burst out among the cats after she had shared Katar’s news. Her delicate black nose was hard at work, trying to scent the way the decisions would go.
Katar’s tail swished back and forth as he confronted Qawwali.
“Surely this is a matter for the colony cats?” Qawwali was saying. “I sympathize—a plague of ferals is a very dangerous thing—but what does this have to do with the dargah cats? The Shuttered House is not in our territory.”
“Do you think the ferals will respect our boun
dary lines?” asked Katar. His mew was sharper than usual. None of the various clans of cats in the area were used to gathering as a group, except for the odd brawl; Miao was the only one present who could even remember a time when all of the cats had been summoned for a clan council. They did most of their business over the link, and it made Katar nervous to be in the company of so many different felines, to feel that his back was always being watched.
“But who is to say that the ferals will attack us at all?” asked one of the few market cats present. Katar felt the murmur of assent ripple along everyone’s whiskers. Above him, Miao stiffened as the scent of the gathering changed.
Hulo bared his teeth, his rough hair slicked down and sodden by the storm. He was standing in the thick of the rain, and he didn’t seem to care.
“Of course they won’t attack us,” he said, his whiskers raised belligerently, and the feline assembly murmured its assent. Hulo glared at them, his ears flicking the heavier drops of rain away. “No, they’ll be good little ferals and ask if they might have a few drops of milk, if we don’t mind sharing. Use your whiskers, fools! If they’re losing their home, if they’re not used to foraging for their own food, if they have no sense of boundaries, what do you think will happen? This is war, you understand?”
The Wildings Page 20