Accompanied Vaish on an important mission before the class last saturday - changing the water and food for Kitkit, Anita's cat as she was away doing Tsunami relief work at chennai. Both of us were nervous to say the least as we hadn't the tiniest clue about cat behaviour. On top of it Anita had warned that kitkit waits behind the door when she hears it being opened and charges out as soon as it is. The last thing we wanted was to lose her cat as we were pretty sure we would never know how to coax her back if she decided to charge out. So we opened the door ever so gently like two thieves and entered the apartment with our hearts going thud thud thud. No sign of a cat....I lay flat on the floor in each room and turned my head around looking for something like a stuffed toy....Nothing.....Sniffed around...couldn't smell a thing...Finally I sat in one corner and started chanting what I thought was cat language "....psss...pssss...kitkit...kitkit...where are you..pss.pss.." And it worked....There was a plaintive "meeeeeeeeeeaaaaaaoooowwww" and it was not particularly friendly...perhaps my pronounciation was so awful that she decided to protest ( happens all the time in French class!!!)
Then a tiny white thing peeped from behind the fridge assessing my philistine self. I was shaking as I obvioulsy smelt of Amigo who was all over me just 15 minutes earlier and Saba. Fortunately Kitkit just concluded that I was too weak to confront and slowly marched past me while fixing her gaze on me as i withdrew more and more into the wall...and I called out to Vaish that she had emerged.Vaish was so excited that she did the most sacrilegeous thing: she said, " nice puppy.. where are you?" yes,she actually said "puppy" and that was it!! Kitkit decided to hide herself from us for ever and never said another word or came out until we finally left after changing her food and water. I bet she later complained to Anita about her taste in friends!!!
God, we were miserable and shaky for people who communicate with dogs so effortlessly. Thanks to the hype that cat lovers do about the superiority of cats, we felt like slum dwellers looking at people from page 3. And the worst part it, cats seem to believe it too.....god, wonder which paper they read....

"Thousands of years ago, cats were worshipped as gods. Cats have never forgotten this."
whatever.......