Rules of the jungle…

We are  a family of six…ty or so. At least, last when I checked. We have this ‘catendence’ which is our version of keeping track of the pets who own us. So it is very school attendance-ish except that teachers never have to look under tables or open up drawers to check out where the children are. Our ‘children’ are special.

The children in our house have four legs for starters. And tails. Long, short, curly , straight, bushy and yes, one which is a very special, with only half; I will come to that later. ‘Children’ refers to ‘them who have conquered us’, driven their teeth through our furniture, ripped apart our cushions, smashed everything that was smashable, proved to us that what we thought was unsmashable can actually be broken. Baba sometimes soulfully says the pets have cost us damages in lakhs. And, unfortunately, he is not adjusting it for inflation.

I am also pretty sure that if the human kids in our house had attempted to do half this damage, we would be hunting for new homes.

So yes, back to where I deviated from. Last when I counted. Everyone  has been given strict instructions to not bring in any more animals since we are packed to capacity. That was twenty animals back. But somehow rules can be bent, if not broken. So, we are forever rescuing animals for a few days. And those somehow just become forever. Imagine bringing a baby to your house, nursing it back to health, watching it love you, falling for its innocent eyes, and then dumping it on the road one fine morning. Well that’s why it becomes forever. Maybe by the time I finish writing this little piece I will be told to welcome the latest member. Of course, strictly for a few days.

Ours has been a ‘different’ house for a while now. Things that seem so normal to us must be feeling really weird for a visitor. Like right outside our main entrance is a row of slippers (either blue or pink – we got smart after a while) all lined up. A close look will reveal that they all have got bite marks around the edges, almost like a pattern. An even closer look will tell you that none of the pairs is actually a pair! They are all survivors.

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

Surviving in our house means living by the rules of the jungle. You deviate from the rules and you lose sympathy immediately. Let me give you a small example.
It’s a known fact that if you are reading a book and need to go to answer the doorbell or attend to some such other mundane task, you must shut the book, pop it into the cupboard and then proceed. In short you have to act like you are through for the day. If you think you can casually stroll off and return to pick up where you left off, then well, you think wrong.Cause you will never be able to do  that. As in ever again. If a cat has passed by meanwhile then out of sheer delight she or he would definitely have scratched out precisely the page you were on (somehow it is never the page you have already read). If a dog has attended to your book while you were away, just go buy another.

If you happen to mention this great injustice that has transpired, then someone will very unsympathetically put forward this question… ‘Why did you leave your books on the bed?’ What do you say? I was testing the law of probability?

Books are scratched out yes. But paper is not the favourite material. After close study (when I should have been studying other stuff) I have come to the conclusion that dogs prefer cloth. Unfortunately that includes bed sheets. So they will start digging, very sincerely, aping other dogs who do the same to soft mud or sand. It takes on an average two minutes to rip a sheet if its new, slightly less if its not. Cats, on the other hand, prefer leather. They will scratch away, with equal sincerity, bags and diaries till suddenly there is a new pattern all over the surface. I do not know whether the first time it happened I was upset, but now I could not care less. It is almost a matter of pride. My cats are happy in my house. I got proof!

We also know if we have bought black to wear, white comes free. Pretty uniformly you will have fur all over it. (Winters are a nightmare – if you still care about how you look). That’s yet another thing I have noticed. The white fur will stick to black, the black fur always finds white wool to settle down on. And by the way, lint removers were not made keeping our house in mind.

So, ripped. Torn. Pock-marked. Bitten through. Chewed thoroughly. That’s the description of our house. But strangely, the more battered we get, the more whole we feel.