The Hindu Business Line : Little Angel with curls of concern

Our stray cat, Monday, quit on Thursday evening. We found it lying on its side with its hind legs torn on the pavement opposite the Bajaj Institute of Management at noon. The animal leaped in the air in a bid to park herself under a car when Lyla, the cat-dog woman of our office, tried to nab it and it took an alert Jyothi to grasp it firmly by the top of its neck and place it in a plastic basket.

We took a taxi to the clinic of Dr Silloo Bhagwagar, the lady vet at Colaba (near Taj hotel), who on first examination felt the feline would live.

Lyla placed the animal on a white table and held it down firmly as Silloo got into a detailed check. Her hind legs were hanging loose as Silloo gave her an injection and washed it with a red liquid to prevent maggot infection.

The cat mewed in pain as Silloo passed her fragile fingers over her back.

She then decided to go for a preliminary stitch of the torn skin on the right hind leg and as she went about her job inquired whether any of us would swoon at the sight.

"Many big army men with bigger moustaches have collapsed in my clinic seeing blood," Silloo told us in her soft-key, piano note, delivery style. We stood firm as the cat's leg got stitched when the doctor requested for a naming ceremony. On a whim we christened it Monday, it being the first day of the week.

By around 4 in the evening, the stray was neatly packed and we brought it to the office where Lyla fed her milk.

One thought the stray would live but by Thursday turned critical and in the evening the doctor medically lullabied her into the last sleep with her Maker.

Lyla wept. Jyothi looked grim. The 65-year-old Silloo could not have done any better. "I am pretty ancient," she admits. She is in a T-shirt and slacks and her soft face is unlined. Her spectacles bob up and down the bridge of her nose. Years of caring and worrying over strays have left a few white thumb-marks on her curly hair. Curls of concern or better, compassion.

It reminded one of the lines from Dhammapada: "Gifts are great, the founding of temples is meritorious, meditations and religions exercises pacify the heart, comprehension of the truth leads to Nirvana - but greater than all is loving-kindness."

Her clinic is a 600-sq. ft neat affair on the ground floor of a housing society with stray cats looking down on you from their perches on the walls and windows, while dogs sniffed around.

It takes some time to get used to the sorry crowd in the clinic. But once you settle down it is one of the best addresses in south Mumbai to spend time. Some are abandoned like the fat, white Persian cat near the window, now a permanent resident; there is Fraggie, the black dog curious to know what's going on.

"When I was a child I used to bring home cats from the streets for company. My parents never objected," Silloo says as she reluctantly unwinds a past with which she is in spare touch.

Her neat fingers scratch the table as she tells of the years doing a B.Sc. from St. Xavier's College and a four-year course in veterinary science at the Bombay Veterinary College in Parel.

"More than the courses I liked those buildings," she chuckles and you share it. Even today these structures are open, gracious affairs with spooky nooks offering a freeway to wind and sunlight.

"Doing a course to become a vet was thought to be an althoo-phaltoo affair. I was the only girl among 20 students," she informs shyly.

It was at the Veterinary College she met her senior Amrita Patel, the current chief of Amul, and that friendship still runs.

She worked for some time at the Haffkine Institute, after applying for a job advertised in a newspaper while on a holiday at Matheran.

"The place had many horses. One night I stayed up with a horse which gave up in the morning," she said and fell quiet as if the memory had turned into the present tense. She did not like the job.

"For two months, after quitting, I slept in this clinic, tired out. There was the Colaba market, Khusro Baug and nothing else," she adds, signalling her start as an independent vet when her father thought she would never make it.

The year was 1967 or thereabout. "It was around this time that the public had started turning hostile to strays. Mr Alimchandani was the first to come to their aid as otherwise they were cruelly gassed and electrocuted," she recalls, jerking her memory.

Then followed a seven-year stay in Canada doing an advanced course before she rooted herself forever in Colaba.

"I did have a good clientele attending to classy pets of the rich. But the strays slowly drove that business away," Silloo concedes as her mind roves over the years of giving a free, decent living, to the unwanted. For her, it was the decisive curl of concern.

When she was studying in the 60s she used to rush back to her Warden Road home, opening into the Arabian Sea, to watch sunsets.

Possibly, those moments of being blissfully alone set up her life.

Now the lady spends her spare hours, if any, on classical music and Japanese painting. As we packed up, one asked whether she believed in God. "Oh, yes. Without a Little Angel on my shoulder I could not have gone on."

For the strays, Silloo is the Little Angel.

P. Devarajan

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