The children who live upstairs came running down one morning in great excitement. “Kittens! Kittens!” they said, their eyes shining. “There can’t be,” I replied. “There are no cats in the house.” Then, the image of a grey cat I had occasionally seen slinking in through the gate popped into my mind, and I asked, “Where are they, anyway?” “Inside the pipe,” they exclaimed, “we heard them crying”. I went out with them. “Inside there,” they said, pointing to the storm water drain pipe which led from the roof to the ground, and, sure enough, I could hear a faint mewling. The children were hopping up and down with impatience, “Please let’s get them out. They’ll die there.”
Meanwhile, the children’s father had joined us. He knelt down and put his hand in through the bottom end of the pipe hoping to reach the kittens, but they just crawled further up. “It’s not possible to reach them,” he said, “They’ll come out on their own. Or their mother will rescue them.” Then looking at the children’s pleading faces he said, “Okay, I’ll try some other way.”
Climbing on to the roof of the house he poured a bucket of water into the pipe. The water sloshed all over the tiles at the bottom … but no kitten came out. Then another and another, until, suddenly out popped two bedraggled little kittens. We caught one before it could escape, but the other scrambled back into the pipe before we could grab it. The kitten was drenched and shivering, clawing at our hands and crying piteously. We dried it with a towel. Meanwhile the children’s father had gone up to the roof to pour some more water into the storm water drain pipe. It took nine buckets of water in all and two hours before the two other kittens were washed out.
Then we realised that the kittens were not safe from dogs and crows. We managed to find a large-ish cage, put the kittens inside it and placed it in the garden, with the door slightly ajar. We hoped the cat would come looking for its babies.
Late afternoon … and still no signs of the mother cat. Meanwhile the kittens, fully recovered, were making tentative forays outside the cage, playfully tumbling over one another. We started making plans to keep them and thinking of appropriate names for them. “How about Holi, Roli and Rangoli?” I asked the children. After all, we had found them on the day of Holi.
Then just before sundown, silent as a shadow, the mother cat slipped into the garden, caught each kitten by the scruff of its neck, jumped on to a ledge and disappeared. Our plans to keep the kitten triplets vanished with it.
Meena Gupta
Email: meegup48@gmail.com