here,there & elsewhere. Kookie kitty

We are at our wits’ end. Living with a young raccoon is like sheltering a tiny illegal immigrant who bites, poops in our shoes, swings from the ceiling fan and will never qualify for work.

We decide to leave him in a wilderness area. It’s a terrible idea but all the alternatives are worse. We bundle Kookie into Bins’ backpack and stand in line for a bus to the nearest National Park. Even before the bus arrives everyone else in line is staring suspiciously at the squeaks and chirps emanating from the bag being cuddled by the tall, scrawny foreigner with the yellow pigtail and tears streaming down his cheeks. Bins is openly sobbing, being not only French but Tamil too. He actually howls more easily than he laughs.

I’m too afraid to cry. I know that we’re breaking so many regulations just by keeping Kookie in the house that we’ll be deported straight to Mars if anyone discovers us trying to dump him in a National Park. When one of the guys in the line asks, “Sir, what kind of pet d’you have in there?” I bray with fake laughter and say, “That’s not a pet, it’s my partner wheezing from asthma!” Bins says, between sobs, “It’s a cat!” The man, a bit confused now, says, “A cat named Azma?” Another man, wearing a bright yellow tee-shirt pipes up with, “Sounds awful strange for a cat.”

Then a woman with a face like a frowning emoji says, “Awww! It’s not right to name your kitty Azma! How would you like to be called, you know, Diarrhoea?” The kid beside her starts hopping up and down, squealing, “Kitty! I wanna see the KITTY!” Yellow Tee-shirt says, “Sounds more like a parakeet than a ...uhh...paraKAT!” He begins to cackle at his own idiotic joke, just as the backpack starts to drip with pee. “Looks like your Azma sprung a leak!” says the first man and soon we’re all snuffling and honking at our various jokes and sorrows.

By the time the bus arrives, Bins, Kookie and I are so exhausted from a combination of tension and dehydration that we give up on the National Park and go home. Kookie settles down to a snack of Oreos with a side order of Windsor & Newtons while Bins washes out his backpack. It stinks like a portable zoo so he slides down the window-sash on his side of the room and hangs the bag out to dry.

Opening the top half of the window lets bugs into the house. But I am too drained to argue with him over this. By morning? You guessed it. Kookie has vanished. A trail of dainty blue paw-prints on the frames tells the story. Bins is heartbroken. He leaves cookies out for our little furry friend at night. In the morning he claims he saw a family of adult raccoons plus one junior stop outside his window to collect the loot. “Kookie is not alone. He is with his own people,” he says philosophically. “My sad, his glad.”

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

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