HERE, THERE & ELSEWHERE. Mystic whiskers

Kookie, our wild raccoon buddy is furious with me. “I don’t look like THAT!” he fumes, pointing at the drawing I made of him for last week’s column . “And I don’t speak like THAT!” referring to the way I reported his speech. According to him, it was pure species-ism on my part, to depict him as a furry overweight pasha puffing on his cigarette and talking in pidgin. “If you wrote about people of YOUR species like that, you’d be sent straight to the animal shelter!” he informs me. “Maybe put down!”

I promise to mend my ways and Bins offers to buy him fresh donuts from Dunkin’, next door. But Kookie says his price is to be allowed to write another review. “In February I wrote about that famous man, yes?” Intizar Hussain’s Story Is A Vagabond, translated by Prof Alok Bhalla. “Well, today I want to review that—” He points towards a book with an enticing cover illustration of a cat: Nilanjana Roy’s The Hundred Names of Darkness. “It is very interesting to me,” he says. “I really liked it.” I am surprised to hear that he’s already read it, to which he doesn’t bother answering but instead tells me to get out my notebook so that I can take dictation.

“The best part of this story,” says Kookie, “is that it shows us what the world of humans looks like to us four-footers. Not the fancy-pants pooches and kitties who live like pampered prisoners inside human homes! Instead it’s about the tooth-and-claw struggles of all those of us who live on the streets, in parks, in trees and in sewers. It’s about the Common Creatures of the City! And wow: it really goes the distance.” His whiskers quiver with sympathy. “I thought we had a hard time, here in Elsewhere. But over there? On the other side of the planet, in New Delhi? Whoa. That is something. I had no idea that other places had so much wildlife alongside the humans! Peacocks and mongooses, monkeys, pigs and kites! With the humans throwing stones at them, hurting them, kicking them!”

He finds the names and references very exotic. But most of all, he adores the mystical powers of the cat-protagonists and their whisker-powered telepathic network. “It is very advanced,” he says. “I have not heard of such a thing even here in the US.” Bins twiddles his moustache in an effort to match the way Kookie twitches his fine set of whiskers. “So...it surprises you that in the Old World we maybe have some advancements not dreamed of in the New World??” I try to get a word in edgewise, to point out that this is a novel, after all, and there’s an element of make-believe...

Kookie fixes me with a black, glittering eye. “You humans,” he says with withering contempt, “have NO idea what we creatures are capable of! And if you DID know, you’d only try to harness us to suit YOUR purpose —” He’s about to launch into a bitter attack when Bins brings out his secret weapon: jelly donuts. “But you have your uses,” concedes Kookie, licking his chops. “More?”

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

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