There is a white female cat that goes around my house and the adjoining ones. We never really supported it, but there were sufficient places around my house where it could hide peacefully. Last year, around this time we found out why it had suddenly taken a liking to an open attic like area at the back of my house – it had used that space to deliver a litter of 4 kittens.
It takes immense self-control to ignore new born kittens and within a couple of days of spotting these, my mother and I were inclined to feed them milk. My father provided the lone voice of sanity, but he was out-numbered by the members of his family.
The next logical step was to name these kittens. I didn’t want to go with the traditional names like whitey or kitty or whatever and inspired by Raghu, I decided to give them Indian or to be more specific, Tamil names. Now, what Tamil names do you give to 4 boisterous kittens, all of whom had silently taken over our house?
Like I mentioned before, this was circa December 2010 – January 2011 and the DMK was very much a potent force. I got my next fit of inspiration and decided to call these kittens – Azhagiri, Stalin, Kani and Maran. Just like that, I clearly hit the jackpot. The names were well received at home (that is my mother) and we went about matching the names to each kitten. There was clearly the rowdiest of the lot and that was assigned Azhagiri. There was one always sticking with the mother and that was assigned Kani. The one that was a little independent was assigned Stalin and the last one, which was also a loner and a white one, was assigned Maran.
By the time January 2011 ended, the kittens had grown up some more and the air in the state was also slowly inching towards the impending elections. I thought I would start chronicling the activities of Azhagiri, Stalin, Kani and Maran and then map them to their namesakes in the Tamil Nadu political circles. Believe it or not, by the time March came around the kittens all disappeared. And it happened one-by-one. Though I don’t remember the order in which they vanished, the fact of the matter is that, they all vanished in a couple of days. You can’t simple say that they grew up and went their separate ways. Because, they did make the odd visits now and then, but by the time summer came about, they were all gone and haven’t been seen since.
And as most readers would be aware, the DMK stalwarts also started seeing a similar impact and within 3 months of losing power in the state elections, all of them have vanished. Or at least, they are not as visible as they were. Pretty much like the kittens.
Now, you are inclined to think that this was nothing more than a coincidence and it was also natural that the DMK leaders would all fade away slowly from the public eye. I would have agreed too, had it not been for history repeating itself.
You see, the mother cat, gave birth to two kittens in November this year (at the same open attic space and prompting me to term that place as “கோஷா ஆஸ்பத்திரி”). Both kittens were as pure white as their mother and it was difficult to tell them apart. Now, seeing this all white brigade, I opted to name the mother cat as peengaan (porcelain in local Tamil parlance) and so the kittens became Cup and Saucer. But I had to make them more Tamil sounding, so I stretched Cup to Kapali and changed Saucer to Sasi.
You know where I am going with this story. Yes, it deals with Sasi’s fate. You see, two weeks back, I woke up in the middle of the night to some strange noises inside my compound. I opened my windows and found two stray dogs (presumably entered from the next house, where the gates are seldom closed) crouching around a bush. I shooed them away and one of them ran in one direction. The other one stooped down, picked up something white and I immediately understood that it was one of the kittens. It then ran away with that kitten in its mouth! It was around 2 AM in the night and at that point, I wasn’t too sure if I really witnessed something real or if I’d dreamt the whole thing.
But the morning clearly proved that it wasn’t a dream, because we found one of the kittens to be missing. The one that was missing was Sasi. And lo, barely 10 days later, Sasikala the udan piravaa sagodhari of Jayalalitha was expelled from the primary membership of the AIADMK party.
Now we have two clear case histories where my naming of kittens has impacted their counterparts in the political world. When the mother cat has her next litter (which my mother says is barely 2 months away), I am now going to stretch my experiment and try the names of some national level politician; maybe Sonia can be the first one!
