The King of the Castle or Guru?

In which we learn about Sushi, the resident cat of 786 Hilal … and a bit about Kimchi, his nemesis.

Sushi is without doubt the king of the ‘castle’ that is 786 Hilal. In spite of his fishy name, he is, in our naturally partial view, a most splendid example of feline creatureliness.  

Of desi (native) stock, Sushi shows no traces of any exotic breed like the luxurious pelt or squashed face of pernickety Persians or the smoky aloofness of slinky Siamese. Sushi is a plain, common or garden variety, grey and white tabby. He’s not even especially handsome as the often pleasing symmetry of stripes in a tabby is, in his case, broken up on his snout by a small brownish coloured patch to the right. If one didn’t know better, one might be tempted to scrub this stain clean off his otherwise white fur. I somehow appreciate this half-hearted patch of colour, however, as if this minor blemish keeps Sushi within the realm of the mortal. For at times, Sushi reveals his alter ego as the resident Guru.

Sushi’s arrival was fraught with trauma. His mother had been a domesticated cat belonging to my sister-in-law’s daughter-in-law. As she was moving home she had to rehouse her cat and its litter of kittens, so we committed to taking in one and left the choice up to her.  While bringing him over to us, Rubina had kept him on her lap. Needing to swing by her old flat for a moment, as she opened the car door, Sushi shot off into the garage and disappeared. Rubina alerted all the residents to contact her should he be found. He managed to evade detection for two days before someone found him and called her. When he reached us, scrawny Sushi was plastered with car oil. Hissing and spitting, he was in no mood to accept any TLC, so we left him in my son Joshua’s room for a couple of days to acclimatize and calm down.

Once he was cleaned and able to eat, Sushi started to delight us all with his kittenish antics and friskiness. He soon endeared himself to us with his playful swipes and keen intelligence. His sense of humour was subtly elegant. Teasing the geckos was a favourite pastime of his, though he was far too gentle to actually eat them. Or far too spoilt. Or too chicken. Or an advanced practitioner of Ahimsa.

I soon realized that in comparison with other friends’ kittens which had been adopted straight off the street, Sushi had been advantaged in the pet stakes by being the son of an already domesticated feral cat. This was what lent him such an agreeable air of nonchalant domesticity. And being the only indoor pet he had the run of the house – barring the bedrooms – and soon came to regard 786 Hilal as his territory. 

Naturally we would all give him the appreciation due to the territorial sovereign. Kindness and respect to domestic animals is an Islamic ideal my family grew up with. In the traditions of Islam we hear tales of how the Prophet Muhammad respected cats, to the extent of once cutting his robe so as to leave a cat that had been sleeping upon his lap in undisturbed peace. Wherever my family had called home, cats would soon move in, unannounced and uninvited but always welcomed. It was easy to extend this courtesy to Sushi, so amenable did he seem to us.

In spite of his high status Sushi found himself unpleasantly upstaged a few years later by the arrival of Kimchi. Kimchi was another scrappy thing that had barely been weaned from its mother before its owners, some dear close friends, had to move abroad. This kitten had been earmarked as Sana’s pet but she had hardly had her for any length of time, and now, having to leave, I felt sorry for the little thing, ugly as she was. And so Kimchi came home to 786 Hilal.

To cut a long and sorry story short, oriental food names aside, the two cats had nothing in common and Sushi took an immediate and intense dislike to little Kimchi. Kimchi had zero feline social skills. She also unfortunately did not respond positively to our attempts to civilize her  - she was never able to welcome human stroking or trust us enough to hold back on hissing and spitting after one or two tickles behind her ear - and it began to dawn upon me that Kimchi’s fate was probably to become the outdoor cat and live in the garden and garage. 

Nonetheless Sushi went into an emotional tailspin and sank into a marked depression. He lost weight and his zest for life and took to moping around miserably. He made his displeasure known however by leaving his bowel evacuations everywhere. Gradually he became a shadow of his former self.

It took the eventual banishing of Kimchi to the garden and an entire summer’s worth of TLC from my husband Abbas to restore Sushi’s confidence in being king of his castle. While I was away with the children over the summer holidays, Abbas made sure to indulge Sushi by allowing him every night  into the bedroom, heretofore off-limits, talking to him and stroking him lovingly. When we returned from our holidays, Sushi had been restored to a credible reflection of his former self. And Abbas had been blessed by his feline presence, not to be sniffed at, in the absence of his own loved ones. Furthermore, Kimchi’s new status as ‘gata (cat in Spanish) non grata’ suited Sushi just fine!

One of the most loveable things about Sushi is that quality he shares with all felines: the ability to sleep and laze around, unperturbed by the hustle and bustle of the day.  And this quality is not just lovable but instructive. Whether it’s a lion digesting his fill of a kill in the Kalahari, or Sushi’s post-prandial napping, their ability to repose in utter stillness is something I envy. It takes a lot to slow me down and make me stop. And as Sushi has grown older and less frisky, I regard him with awe and appreciation for reminding me to stop and be still, to merely observe and do less. It’s a lesson I need to continually learn, so addicted am I to action. 

Sushi shows me how he gets what he wants simply by being true to his nature, effortlessly. Its this instinctual quality of beingness that his feline nature exudes that makes me elevate him to the status of a domestic Guru. His mode of being is to be totally in the moment - what the Sufis call ibn ul-waqt. And sometimes I even find myself pressing my hands together in a namaste salutation to him as I catch the ‘lesson’. But don’t tell the neighbours: they may think I’m apostasizing!