By the time we set off for the hills Rocky is so excited he’s ... asleep. Curled up in my suitcase. According to him, traveling by train overloads his senses. Kitty rolls her eyes when she hears this. “He just doesn’t want to carry any luggage! Lazy bum,” she says. “How well you understand him,” I say, grinning.

The four of us — Kitty, Bins, Rocky and I — arrive in the afternoon. We’re staying, as usual, with our friend who lives all year round in her private paradise near Mukteshwar. At this time of the year, her garden is like an ocean of green, with splashes of bright colour from her flowering plants — dahlias, begonias, morning glories. Rocky grabs three slices of cake from the tea table, before vanishing into the trees. “He made friends with the langurs the last time he was here,” I explain to our hostess, “and wants to see if they remember him.” “Needless to say, he’ll be back for dinner,” says Kitty.

“Please warn him about the leopard,” says our hostess. She’s lost dogs to that leopard, she reminds us. One of them was saved only by the timely appearance of the gardeners. “But it had her for dinner eventually,” she says, a little wistfully. It’s one of the hazards of living here. I’ve never heard or seen the leopard, but Bins claims he caught a glimpse once, “just its back legs and tail,” disappearing into the bushes along the side of the road as he returned from a walk in the evening.

We spend a blissful week, doing very little aside from watching the ebb and flow of clouds — now as rain, now as mist — and eating five meals a day: breakfast, midday coffee with cookies, lunch, tea with cake and finally dinner. Kitty tells Rocky to bring his langur friends for a visit, but he twiddles his whiskers sceptically and glances at our hostess. “They know they’re not welcome,” he says, nibbling his mid-morning cookie, “because they steal the fruit.” “Can’t you tell them not to?” asks Kitty. Rocky narrows his eyes at her. “Nah,” he says, shortly. “We animals don’t lecture each another much.”

In the evenings, we watch movies on Netflix. One of these is Aamir Khan’s Dangal . It’s based on the real-life story of two young Indians, Geeta and Babita Phogat, from a village in Haryana, who won gold and silver for wrestling at the 2010 Commonwealth Games in New Delhi. I’ve never had any interest in wrestling yet this 2016 film showcased a sport that required not only years of physical training but real mental skill too. Aamir Khan is wonderful as a father who yearns to have sons to carry on his wrestling prowess, but has four daughters instead. Against all tradition, he makes champions of the elder two. “Humans are so weird,” Rocky begins to say, but “Oh SHUSH!” I say to him, furtively wiping my eyes. “Just be grateful we let you watch movies with us!”

Manjula Padmanabhan, author and artist, writes of her life in the fictional town of Elsewhere, US, in this weekly column

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