ELSEWHERE. Alexander and I

My friends Margaux and Michael are away for the weekend. So I’m over at their house once more, to provide food and love to Alexander, the Great Orange Cat.

He greets me at the door holding his creamy-white tail aloft. “Hello, Visiting Slave,” he purrs, “good to see you. Come this way, please?” He goes toward his dinner bowl. “It is empty, you know,” he says, sniffing delicately at its rim before gazing up at me with his huge golden eyes. Then he walks a short distance away and turns his back politely while I scurry about, opening a can of dinner for him.

I am very grateful that he’s forgotten about our last encounter, with the trauma of being locked out, possibly for the whole night. In the evening, as shadows lengthen in the old house, he sits beside me, holding my hand. He knows I am worrying about ghosts. I don’t believe in them, of course. But curtains rustle, floorboards creak, and are those soft footsteps I hear overhead? No, not really. Ah well. Time for bed.

I say goodnight to Alex. My room is on the ground floor. It has glass doors looking onto the backyard. There’s a badminton net stretched across it. When I put the lights off and lie under the quilt, I can see the net flapping in the bright moonlight. It’s nothing, I tell myself. There’s a breeze. I’m not wearing my glasses. Relax. Then the door of my room bangs open and my heart hits the ceiling. It’s only Alex, of course. He climbs onto the bed, curls up at my feet and begins to snore.

No question of sleep now. If I get up to close the door, Alex will only scratch on it at once, wanting to leave. But I’d like him to stay because he keeps the ghosts at bay. While I’m fretting about my choices I glance up and see that, outside in the backyard, the net is now jerking in a completely non-breezy way. This time my heart stays put but I stop breathing. I reach for my glasses and sit up. Yup. There’s a dark shape out there, low on the ground.

That’s when Alex lifts his head and looks out. The moment he does that, I am calm again. He jumps down from the bed, goes to the glass, looks out. I follow him. There in the moonlight is a raccoon. A big male, going by size. He has got the characteristic striped bushy tail, pale body, and bandit-mask across the eyes. He totally hates that net! He’s snatching at it with his small, black hand-like paws, he’s jumping up and biting it. It’s strung between two slender poles. As soon as one pole is down, he stops and stalks off.

Up on the roof of the next-door garage, I see a number of smaller raccoons. They make soft trilling sounds. “Yay, Dad!” they chirp. “Destroyer of Badminton Nets!” I get back into bed. Alex purrs beside me. Then I’m asleep.

(Manjula Padmanabhan author and artist tells us tales of her parallel life in Elsewhere, US, in this fortnightly series marginalien.blogspot.in)

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