Last month, Vincent entered my life.

Vincent of the bitten ear, so named for obvious reasons. He doesn’t bear any resemblance to his namesake, the Dutch post-Impressionist painter, but I would venture to say he’s quite the artist at heart. Once, when a friend left a wet oil painting on the floor, Vincent padded all over it, leaving tiny pawmarks across the portrait.

Vincent is a rescue cat.

He was found abandoned at a dumpster; small, malnourished, unwell, and eventually fostered by well-meaning friends, who already had three cats of their own. I saw his face first on Instagram. “Take me home”, the caption said, and my heart flip-flopped like a fish. Cannot. Must not. I live alone. I travel. Who will feed him? Take care of him? It’s a struggle. A juggle. Don’t be stupid.

Obviously then, there was nothing else to be done but go across and pick him up.

And just like that he slipped into my heart, and my barsati.

We get along splendidly. The first few days, I thought, would be difficult. Perhaps he’d be mewing for lost friends and companions, at the strangeness of his new surroundings. But he quickly picked his favourite spots — under the sofa, under the bed, in a flowerpot (especially if it had just been watered), under the moon chair in the corner — and fell asleep. I picked out toys from the pet store, found an old shoelace he could chase, and voila! That took care of all entertainment requirements. Gradually, he was allowed to venture out into the terrace, where more adventures awaited — with moths and bees and unreachable birds picking at ripened jamuns.

It is so easy to look after a cat, I tell everyone.

I write. He sleeps.

And I’m afraid by now I’m living up to all the clichés there are about cats and writers.

“That’s why you brought kitty home,” a friend teased. “You’ve always wanted to be a writer with a cat!”

And though I protested — I love animals, when I was little I wanted to be a vet, I grew up around animals in Assam, and have mostly always had pets at home — I must confess there might be something in what she said. Writers are well-paired with certain things — coffee, windows with a view, lovely fountain pens — and cats seem to fit snugly into the crook of this list. Obviously they aren’t inanimate, immovable things , but living, breathing beings determined to turn you into their slave. (Vincent knows he will be doled fresh yoghurt every time he follows me into the kitchen and meows mournfully. A friend’s cat will only drink water that’s been chilled to his preferred temperature.) Blame it on writers before us, Hemingway, Doris Lessing, Mark Twain, Poe, Eliot, William Burroughs, who assailed the world with portraits with their felines, and cat books and poems.

There are theories, of course, to explain this affinity.

Cats are lap-size, and hence more ergonomically suited to the writing exercise. As opposed to dogs. Or kangaroos (Elvis), anteaters (Dali) and orang-utans (Napoleon). (Although there are exceptions — Byron kept a bear, Baudelaire a tarantula.) Generally, though, writers prefer small, quiet creatures well-suited to someone who will be spending long hours sitting at a desk, staring out a window. The other explanation proffered is that there are several cat-writer characteristic overlaps conducive to cohabitation: they’re observant, curious beings, leading lives largely in their own minds. In other words, both are happy to leave the other well alone. They create their own routines, are largely nocturnal, and are perfectly content to amuse themselves on their own.

Some are convinced that cats are muses. That they inspire with their weirdness and comic traits and aloofness. Perhaps also the fact that cats, no matter how domesticated, are never entirely tamed. For the cat is social outlier. The animal appeals to our romantic notion of a singular, lonely genius endowed with not wholly benevolent powers.

Or, as Poe said, “I wish I could write as mysterious as a cat.”

But I’m convinced there’s something more.

In an article in The New Yorker , called ‘Virginia Woolf’s Idea of Privacy’, Joshua Rothman writes of how Woolf strongly believed in “preserving life’s mystery”. And doing this by leaving certain things undescribed, unspecified, and unknown. It has to do, Rothman continues, with a kind of inner privacy, by means of which you shield yourself not just from others’ prying eyes, but also from your own. Call it ‘an artist’s sense of privacy’. A certain resolute innerness. A “kernel of selfhood” that we can’t share with others. And I think cats share this with writers. Why else would Joyce Carol Oates say, “The writer, like any artist, is inhabited by an unknowable and unpredictable core of being which, by custom, we designate the ‘imagination’ or ‘the unconscious’ (as if naming were equivalent to knowing, let alone controlling), and so in the accessibility of Felis catus we sense the secret, demonic, wholly inaccessible presence of Felis sylvestris . For like calls out to like, across even the abyss of species.”? The affinity springs from this. The desire to keep a little bit of ourselves secret.

Janice Pariat is the author of The Nine-Chambered Heart, which will be out in November 2017; @janicepariat

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