Land of Lilliputians

So where do stray cats take refuge when nights turn cold and dark? Darkness, of course, they can manage, but cold? Though Roseee, like me, is fond of taking long walks during cold, foggy nights, she craves a cozy corner for her nightly catnaps. We know for sure by the way she starts knocking our doors and windows at night. She wants to come in and cuddle up, but she wants her independence too…a room of her own. “So what do we do?” the Lilliputians ask. I assume the mantle of a sage. “We can build her a home.” The suggestion ushers in ripples of excitement that reverberate through the entire Land of Lilliputians. Omar, the master builder, has, as always, ideas aplenty. He immediately starts sifting his brain. “We can use a big box to make a house.” The idea seems plausible and we set to work. “What will we call the house?” I am still in my thinking Buddha mode. We all start brainstorming.  Zainab, an extremely organized little girl that she is, brings a...

Roseee, a stray cat that she is, likes to go for long walks all on her own; she doesn’t hang about our place for long. But one day Roseee stays at our place, eat nothing, and sleeps.  If it had only been her marathon sleeping session, we wouldn’t have been worried. But she coughs a real couch, not once, not twice, but three times.  Zainab tells me: “Roseee caught it from you.” Yes, I was down with a protracted flu &fever, so bad that it made my jaws ache as if they were being hammered upon. I think about Roseee’s jaws and announce: “I will have to find a vet for her.”    Inappropriate medium for transporting cats There are screams of excitement and they all want to go with me. This uncalled for enthusiastic response to Roseee’s illness feels ominous and I start dreading the trip. “I didn’t say picnic, I said vet.” There’s a chorus. “You can’t go without us.” I am good at recognizing commands that just can’t be defied. So we pick Rosee...

Saif is teary-eyed and has an injured look on his face. “Aymen has fired me and she didn’t even give me my pay,” Saif tells me when I ask the reason. “Apple hired you, and then fired you! And she pays you too…to do what?” I am confused and curious. “Aymen, your Apple, runs a school. It’s called Kids Club . Maheen, Zainab and I teach there, and she pays us 30 rupees per day.” “There seem to be too many teachers. Are there any students?” I ask. “Omar, Roshan, and Mohib are the students.” I learn more about the school. It becomes operational every time Apple comes to Lahore, three to four times a year. Classes are held for two days or even one day depending on how long the ‘principal’ is staying here. The duration of her absence is considered holidays, and the students are required to revise and practice whatever they learn during rigorous school sessions. There are three students and almost four teachers because sometimes Apple likes to take a class or two...

Ginger and Cinnamon fight, Black Pepper hides behind the door. Roseee, though she is enjoying a few minutes of respite, peers inside. She wants somebody to come and give her something to eat. Real quick.   I give her a plate full of chicken liver, her favorite, and watch.  She has never been the greedy sort; if somebody gave her food she ate nonchalantly otherwise she would go and fend for herself.  But now things are different. Now Roseee has to feed her three adorable kittens.   Ginger, Cinnamon, and Black Pepper were born on August 22. I know for sure because this is the only day when Roseee didn’t turn up. Before that day, a very pregnant Roseee used to sit outside my room and listen to the wafting melodies. This is how I got to know about her likes and dislikes in music. Nusrat Fateh Ali is her favorite singer, and her preferred genre of music is qawali. During her pregnancy, Roseee used to sleep for long hours at a stretch, and also developed a t...

The package of being a younger brother comes with its privileges. But there are certain inconveniences, too. Ask Omar. You can be treated as a meddlesome mouse or an irritating fly. “Leave us alone, Omar. We want to play, stop bothering us,” Saif and Zainab tell Omar who is eying their brand new games of monopoly, ludo, and carom. There are many ways to handle the injustice of such proportions. Sulking and whining can get things done but it is, of course, not as effective as kicking the locked door or trying the full might of your lungs. Though Omar has nothing against testing the capacity of his lungs every once in a while, he has other ways of dealing with such discriminations. His classic response is: “Okay. No big deal. I will make a game like this for myself.” And he sets to work. After an hour of concentrated effort, he emerges with a handful of all the equipment, he needs to play these games. Loaded with the equipment, which seems like a humble paper pouch,...

It is about a donkey who decides to reinvent himself. Just when his master writes him off as too old and good-for-nothing, the donkey plans a career change,” I tell the Lilliputians who ask me what I find so interesting about a particular Grimm’s fairy tale. The expressions on their faces tell me I haven’t been able to convincingly convey my immense admiration for the story. I try again. “It is about a donkey with high self esteem and the courage of his convictions. It is about friendship. It is about how our own fears can transform shadows into hideous goblins, so a cat becomes a witch, a dog  becomes a man with a knife, a donkey becomes a black monster, a good old rooster becomes a devil whose simple crowing is heard as ‘throw the rascal up there’ and so on.” Very intelligent listeners that they are, they manage to cull out a few useful words from my largely unintelligible account of ‘The Travelling Musicians.’ “So it’s about a donkey, a cat, a dog, and a rooste...

“Again my yellow bowl! Why you always take my bowl, and you are always eating cereal,” says Omar in a voice that’s higher and shriller with both anger and exasperation. “I like your bowl. Cereal is my comfort food.” Omar is not interested in knowing how I deal with my emotional and spiritual lows. And he is possessive about his cereal bowl. “Can’t you eat in another bowl? Take the green one.” “Eating in your bowl makes me feel like Goldilocks,” I tell him. My penchant for occasionally living out my life in fairy tales never fails to evoke Omar’s admiration. And now I have his attention. “And I am the baby bear,” he laughs with a flash of recognition in eyes.   “Yes. But we are friends. Goldilocks ran away in the end instead of making friends with the baby bear. They could have had so much fun together,” I voice my primordial issues with Goldilocks. Omar thinks for a while and nods his head in agreement. “But why did she run away? Why didn’t she ask t...

Roseee is a whimsical cat. For some reason, she has decided to adopt the land of Lilliputians as her home. Roseee was wooed the way stray cats ought to be befriended: with milk and butter. It was her skeletal look that made us want to fatten her up. Real fast. Perhaps all our milk-butter maneuvers touched a chord in her heart, perhaps she really likes us. The rather unimaginative name, Roseee, stuck to her because Roshan's Baba uttered the word and she lifted her green eyes, looked at us disarmingly. Writing her name with three eee is my way of making the name extra special. But in my hyperbolic imaginative way, I also like to think that the name, Roseee, has a deeper meaning. The etymology of Roseee can be traced back to the word rose, the rose scent is elusive, roseee the cat is elusive, too. We can’t hold on to her, she likes her independence.  There is also something royal about the name. It was Nur Jehan the queen who accidentally discovered rose essence when sh...

“Do you know how to do partition?” Omar asks me. “Partition? Why what happened?” I ask. My mind races through the possible battle scenes amongst the Lilliputians that had led to the ultimate decision to create boundary walls. “I want a partition in my hair,” he bends his head so I can clearly see the space that needs to be ‘partitioned.’ Then he points to his left side and hands me a comb. “I want it here.” “Oh, side parting. That’s easy.” I quickly run the comb through his hair. “Partition done?” Omar asks as I put down the comb. “Yes. Go look in the mirror.” A second later, I hear a voice that seems like a prelude to a tantrum. “You call this partition?” Omar shrieks. “No, I call this parting,” I say in a quiet voice. The idea is to set an example of polite conversation. Neither my impressive vocabulary nor my well-mannered conversing style impresses Omar. In fact, nothing registers. “The line in my hair is not straight, and my skin is not vi...

It’s a paper that Mobby holds and gazes at with amazement. But what a paper it is! Apparently, it’s merely a page torn out of his big brother’s activity book and bedecked with some artwork. But then, take one look at it through Mobby’s eyes and you can see a rollickingly alive world that changes and spins before your eyes. Actually, it’s a TV. It’s a TV that has been invented as an act of defiance. “Amma said no more cartoons. So I have made my own TV, and now I can watch it even while lying in bed,” Mobby tells me with a frown that, as we have now learned to recognize, signifies his defiant I -will-figure-out-a-way-out-of-this-adult-mess mood. He jabs his fingers at each picture in the ‘TV’ and tells me about the wonderland ruled by a ladybug. A pretty, smiling ladybug. “I asked Amma to draw the ladybug, and then I made: a kangaroo who sits on a long ladder; a snake that is trying to grab ladybug’s banana; a spider that looks like a bat; a few green cockroaches...

  The door opens with a thud as Saif runs inside; he flings his school bag on the floor and asks: “How many?” “Four,” somebody replies. “Just four?” Saif says and his brow furrows in consternation. Now he opens the fridge and inspects the objects of his mathematical inquiry: four brown eggs sit smugly in the egg container. But they are just four! Since the day my carnivorous family ate up Napoleon and his family, ten new hens have been living in the hen coop and carousing under the grapefruit and tangerine trees. And they lay eggs. While every Lilliputian is impressed with the mysterious feat that the hens are capable of, Saif is totally bewitched.  He sits for hours in front of the hen-coop, observing the hens in a bid to find out how they manage to make eggs without any apparent exertion on their part. Added to this ponderous undertaking is another overriding concern: since there are ten hens, there should be ten eggs. So when Saif comes in the after...

  Under my bed is Omar’s treasure trove. It is an odd assortment of a few planks of wood, a handle of some discarded racket, a few iron rods, a gigantic nail that serves the purpose of a hammer, and the miraculous scotch tape that can join a few unlikely objects to make dreams come true. The cave under my bed is considered an ideal repository not just of Omar’s property but his trust as well. “I know you will never throw it away. Everybody thinks it’s junk, but you will not let anyone touch it, right?” he asks me with no trace of doubt in his eyes about my unflinching loyalty. “I won’t,” I reiterate my trustworthiness.  Don’t we all have treasure troves that can well be junkyards for others? Who knows why something is treasured by someone and for what reason. “And if you do so….,” here he rolls his eyes, puts his hands on his hips and makes a face depicting all the anger that a six-year-old can muster up. “I will be very angry.” Omar likes to assert his au...