Cats and coffee pacts | Sunday Observer

Cats and coffee pacts

17 January, 2021

Cats want to be bipedal so they too can claim human rights. I see that every time they look up at a human and make some attempt to stand up on their hind legs to claim some dangling morsel of food, made to dangle to make them play up for it. It’s not something to do with cats as compared to dogs. Dogs are ever ready to be content. They can be surreally happy with the basics. Cats feel that they have been terribly wronged by the world. The world with all its greatness of multiple civilisations, coursing narratives, fusing geographies and chronologies is labelled as ‘world history’.

But perhaps they actually think that they are better than humans. But even if they think so, they will never tire themselves to prove it to humans. For them there is nothing to prove of their worth or being better than us. You only want to prove things to people whose approval, or envy matters to you. You take the trouble to prove anything to anyone only if they are worth something. But for now, I believe, cats just want to be bipedal.

Double Cappucino Tuesday

How often do you think about your mortality? How often do you flirt with it or taunt it, subconsciously desiring to believe yourself that you are in fact beyond the mortal dimensions which are said to be definitive of your humanness. I asked it from Carry just the other day as we sipped our usual double cappuccino sitting at the usual table by the window, the one that looks at the sidewalk turning left and within view of the four way intersection just in front of ‘Jeffrey’s’ –our ‘coffee parlour’ as we called it since our private ‘ritual’ of the ‘Double Cappuccino Tuesday’ –never missed unless for a matter of life and death.

No, not even a call from the White House was really on the list of valid reasons to prevent this weekly commitment we came up with at the end of that first ‘Double Cappuccino Tuesday.’ Why Tuesday? Because Tuesday tells you, ‘you survived Monday’.

But then it dawns on you that the weekend is still not in sight. And you need something to keep you going till then. Some intervention of sanity.

That’s what we have during our two hour commitment every Tuesday evening. The sanity of being in quietude. The simple promises we have made to each other is that there will be no small talk, or weighty discussions. Two people enjoying a refreshing beverage in the company of each other, with very little said. It’s knowing how to enjoy the presence of each other, comfortable in the quietness that each maintains.

Sharing space, in harmony at a table where we know we are not burdened to talk to each other simply to prove to the other that there is some sociable accord between the people in each other’s company reaffirmed by conversation. How much talk do you have to make to assure some one of your sincerity? We are bombarded with questions every day of our lives that have to do with work or obligations of some social order.

But at our ‘Double Cappuccino Tuesday’ utterances are the oddity, not the silence. Speech is the irregularity, not the wordless quietness. Speechlessness between two people who don’t find the quiet to be awkward in a firm friendship. And speech that we come out with could be quirky and simple utterances that may have something of a likeness as a line from some Bohemian poet.

If there was anyone who even once sat as an observer of how a ‘Double Cappuccino Tuesday ‘happens, the two of us are bound to be declared surely something close to not being sane. Absurd. That I bet would be the word used by an observer to describe a ‘Double Cappuccino Tuesday’.

Too daunting.” Was the reply Carrington Tedwell gave me. Carry said he always felt his first name was rather overbearing and out of generation for a Christian name. ‘Carry’ was how he wanted to give his name. I suppose my question was too weighty in fact and perhaps was rather out of the given nature of the utterances we share.

“Cat’s have nine lives, so they can afford to flirt with mortality or taunt it.” I said as something of an addendum. The reply was a smile that said my words were received as serious food for thought. We can read each other’s smiles really well, Carry and I.

Che Guvera

Che Guevara had more than one life. He was a man who taunted mortality. There is surely a great deal of ‘Cat’ in Che Guevara. I’ve done some serious reading about Che since well over ten years now.

And he is a man who enjoyed the quietude of meaningful silence over needless chatter.

We’ve never really greeted each other with the usual questions of “how was your day?’”And the other sorts that work as norms that define a cordial social relationship between two people.

Maybe our breathing and smiles are like purring. Human purring. There are no words in purring is there? But you know what cats intend to be made known of their state of mind by that.

To be continued....

 

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