General Dyer

One fine Sunday morning, we had a guest. A four legged one, so he was welcomed with open arms. When Baba went out to get the morning newspaper, he came back, grinning, with a cat who was purring lovingly, following him.

He was obviously a house cat judging by the ease with which he mixed around with the humans and his confident stride towards our drawing room. Since it was early for a Sunday, half of us were still in bed, but the ones who were up, went to meet the adorable kitty. It was then that we noticed his right front paw. It was wounded. Definitely an old wound, but a nasty looking thing with one of his claws jutting out permanently. Ever ready to rescue a four legged in need we were keen to get him looked at by our vet. I remember his playful swipe at my leg when I bent down to pet him. A dear little thing.

Excited, I went in to inform my sleepy siblings of the interesting start to our Sunday. Those were the days when Snap has just recovered from her injuries and was living in the drawing room. As her name would suggest, she was not the best tempered dog in the world. And since we had not introduced her to our cats, we had not allowed our visitor to enter. We were a little apprehensive about how she might behave. So, sleepy eyed, Broti went to the front veranda attached to the drawing room to meet our guest who was poised for entering the drawing room.

We have an family joke about Broti not being fit for the emergency services…her reaction time being, well, below average to put it politely. So a sleepy eyed Broti, with a snappy dog at her side and a cat desperate to come in and perhaps grab a bite of something waiting on the other side was recipe for disaster. As it happened, all of us had been locked out of the drawing room.

Sure enough, within a minute of her entering the room we heard a blood curdling scream. Looks of pure horror were exchanged by the rest of us who ran towards the door that had been locked from the inside. The screams wouldn’t stop – a weird cocktail of human, dog and cat sounds. Finally, we heard a door bang shut and the screams stopped. By this time, we were in a state of panic. The door to the drawing room opened slowly and a much flustered, battered and injured Broti emerged. Sleep had vanished and her leg had been a casualty of whatever happened in the room. We dashed in to see whether the kitty was still ok, when my sister burst out hysterically, “He attacked us!”

Met with absolute silence, she elaborated, “He just came at us with his paw and first slapped me up and then chased Snap under the bed and attacked her!”

The silence, perhaps, would have been more sympathetic, for her last statement was met with peals and peals of laughter. The idea of a sweet kitty with a mangled paw slapping up a dog and a human both, was hilarious.

My sister has a knack of ending up with the short end of the stick, always. So, we decided to play down the gravity of the situation and two of us went, carefully, outside to walk around the neighbourhood, visiting the known cat houses, to enquire if anyone was missing a pet. No luck. Worse luck followed. We didn’t notice the gentle, sweet kitty on entering our house and he ambushed us, in our own veranda , taking yet another victim- Debjanee. By now, we were under siege in our own house. Only Baba seemed unaffected as the cat continued to purr and rub up against him. We finally decided to put him in a cage and take him to the vet, anyways, since he just wouldn’t leave. The plan was simple…but who was going to bell the cat?

By sundown, we were three down. Baba and I had volunteered to bell, sorry..cage the cat. The mission though successful, had added yet another casualty to the list. Upset by Baba trying to hoodwink him into the cage, in an et-tu Brute fashion, he flew up and gave him a nip on his hand.

We kept him in a cage in the drawing room for a few hours, after the visit to the vet, where he was becoming very impatient. His melting looks were becoming sterner and his eyes forming slits, so we released him just outside our house to give him a choice. He didn’t even look back.

We never saw General Dyer again.

Fun Fact: Every time he attacked someone, he used his mangled paw to injure. Never have we laughed so much after seeing our kith and kin injured!

For those who have forgotten, General Dyer was an infamous man in Indian History, responsible for the Jallianwala Bagh tragedy where he opened fire on a peaceful crowd after blocking the exits to the Park.