Winter always brings with it the memory of the death of our feline pet, Chimbu. The cause of Chimbu’s death was quite baffling and surely it would move even the stoniest of hearts.
The kitten, solitary in the first delivery of the mother cat, became the apple of our eyes in a short span of time. He came to play with me whenever hid mother was away. We would feed him whatever we ate and he became as big as him mother in five months. Curious enough, the kind of bond between mother and child was very special. The bigger the kitten grew the stronger the bond became.
Every day the mother-son duo would wake up early and started playing. Soon the whole house would become their playground. In the process of playing hide and seek, they would wake us up. After the play, the kitten would suck from his mother’s teats. His drinking mother’s milk when so grown up bemused us.
One day, we did not hear the usual hubbub created by the pair. My mother anxiously wondered about him when she brought me coffee. “What happened to the cat?” she asked. “The mother must have been pregnant,” I said. I had noticed mother cat’s belly bulging of late.
The next day, too, there was no sign of the duo. “What could be wrong with them?” I wondered and ventured out to find out what had happened.
To my sadness, Chimbu could be seen sitting on a log mewing a sad, low note. I called out but he did not even care to look at me. I went to him and stroked his back. He had always responded to this. But now he ignored me. Picking him up I cuddled him to my chest. He had become quite thin. Chimbu stared at me nonchalantly. All his mirth had ebbed away. His sunken eyes conveyed an obscure loneliness which I could not understand.
Concerned about his health, I ran to the big river which passed by our house. A group of fishermen were catching fish from the river. I paid through my nose to purchase some fish and offered one to Chimbu. Sadly, he did not even look at it, let alone eat it.
A small of piece of cream cake was also offered but to no avail. He spurned this item too. My mother, too, did her best to feed him, offering him many other items, but in vain. “Chimbu must have some ailment. That is why he does not want to eat anything,” my mother said at last. “I believe so, too,” I said, nodding.
He never cared to eat anything but only sat mewing for hours. Only later did we come to understand that his mother had gone missing. Once we were sure that she was missing, we embarked on a meticulous search for her, throughout our sprawling compound. That search fetched us the wretched truth.
Quite far in the backyard, where the hedges bordered the compound, lay the mother cat dead and decomposing along with three just-born kittens which had also started decomposing.
No sooner had I sighted this than I rushed to our kitchen, where my mother had been preparing breakfast, to convey the sad news to her. But as I was running to the kitchen, zigzagging my way through the growing vegetables, I saw to my shock Chimbu lying dead among the creepers only his black head exposed. I was completely devastated.
What struck me the most was the love he had had for his mother. He had always with been her. They had never separated except for brief spells of time and this togetherness was his very breath. The moment she died, he too had started dying, mentally and physically over one long week. The love he had for his mother was more precious to him than his life itself, it appeared.
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