A Life in Ginger Cats
Bassam Sidiki
The first beckons the dusk. Oliver ayoo aa!
my parents call out to me, rusks dipped
into their saffron evening tea. We scamper
in circles, Oliver and I, on the first floor
landing, a remnant of ribbon between us
midair like an ouroboros of lonely child, feline
friend. A stray, I christen him after Disney.
He never sits in my lap, though, just laps
up the milk we give him and prances away
to other benefactors.
I see him again only
in other forms, like Spotty, the portly tomcat
who comes with our new house’s sehen, ambling
with insouciant ease through emerald
shards of glass bottle lining the walls, or basking
in palm-weaved Karachi sun on the charpai.
He has no spots: he is a flame-kissed tabby
but he just looks like a Spotty, you know?
He’s naughty, too, pilfering from skewers
the marinated meat for Eid ul Azha barbecues
or gobbling up the ducklings Mom bought
as the poor things paddled unsuspectingly
in the plastic tub.
He never comes back
one day when we return from vacation, but
we like to think that the one who comes after
is his offspring. A white queen with amber
crown gives birth to him in our treehouse,
a slight screaming peach. My sister names him
Billi, Urdu for cat. Health is never on his side —
we don’t know how a being can grow smaller
as it grows — a purring candle stunted by its own
light. He’s as hospitable to his worms as we
are to him in our house — let him piss smugly
in our sinks, the rancid fluid gurgling with
the sundry refuse of our reluctant mornings.
He even pees on me once, but I forgive him.
I don’t have a choice because he’s dead
by the year after, before
we leave the country.
We are catless for a time. A few years ago
we get one who for the first time we don’t
have the privilege to name: he comes with one,
Leo: regal, astrological, our first real housecat,
a piebald domestic shorthair dappled like
an amiable cow. He might as well be both
himself and the ones who came before him,
his eyes like a chartreuse stupor which severs
the then and the now, the here and the there.
We pet his immaculate crest, field of jasmine
besieged by a sepia that has consumed so much:
youth, vigor, a husband, a father, a mother-
-land. He eats our hair and we let him because
we recognize his yearning.
about the writer
Bassam Sidiki is a Pakistani-American writer, scholar, and critic. He is the Nonfiction Editor at Asymptote and a PhD Candidate in English at the University of Michigan. His poems, essays, and criticism have appeared or are forthcoming in Hyphen, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Iowa Review, The Bangalore Review, Jaggery, Papercuts, and The Aleph Review, Pakistan's premier annual literary anthology. He has received honorable mentions for the Ora Mary Phelam Poetry Prize and the 2018 Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine, judged by Mark Doty. Follow him on Twitter @Bassidiki and find more of his work on bassamsidiki.com.