My life is filled with love stories. Some were short-lived, some were toxic and met their end as they rightly should have, some were momentary, some real, some fantasy, some quiet and peaceful, some deep and long-lasting, some safe and hopeful and lastly some eternal.
On a wet monsoon morning, as I loitered in the backyard of my apartment, I suddenly caught sight of a pair of smoky bright eyes looking at me from the depths of darkness in the parking lot. As the eyes emerged out of the darkness, I saw their owner, a lean, lanky surefooted ginger cat. I crouched low and gingerly extended my arm towards the animal. She meowed happily and trotted towards me in a lively fashion. I gave her a few broken biscuits and she gobbled it all up while I looked her over (thinking over the incident now I wonder; a cat munching biscuits! How hungry she must have been). She was a blend of ginger and white. Though her body was a painful reminder of the many days she had gone without a fulfilling meal, her tail had retained its fluffy, soft texture. I warily petted her on the head and the moment I did it, she raised her head from her food and purred in unadulterated delight. I named her Bastra- the name of an Egyptian cat goddess. At that time I did not know that the spelling was Bast-Ra where Ra was actually the name of Bast’s father, Ra, the sun god. Thus I simply call and spell her name Bastra.
And so began our rollercoaster love story. During the course of the next nine months, Bastra had three litter seasons, giving birth to a total of seventeen kittens before we got her spayed. Every time she arrived at our home just before her labour allowing us to help her rear her children. Some of the babies died while some lived and got wonderful homes and queer families amongst our friends, each of which could be a book, a story of its own, and so I will leave these stories for another day.
When I was wondering what I could write about love, this came to my mind because I think this is special, this kind of love is not experienced by everyone, this is exclusively my own. My life is an exception, so are my love stories, so is my family and so are my dogs and cats. What society calls romantic love or the physicality that everyone gloats about and about which there are so many tales, thousands of years of literature from Kalidasa to Khasrau to Shakespeare. These commentaries and anecdotes of love have never appealed to me. To me romanticism is a fierce, total force that opens new doors to the mind, the heart and soul. Sometimes the most beautiful expressions of love can be an obligate carnivore lapping up milk and rice and crunching on thin arrowroot biscuits for the sake of her human and said human shedding tears of joy at the prospect of being an ‘uncle’ to her kittens. And her love is the only connection I had in the turbulent and traumatic period of transition in my life from childhood to youth. She’s the reason I stayed a child, the boy who never grew, as he was abused physically and emotionally, jeered, groped as the ‘TG kid’, the abhorrent ‘queer’ a term which I now claim with pride. I don’t know how to define my bond with Bastra; perhaps our love is queer-platonic. I’ve stopped trying to define it for definitions are boundaries, structures created by language and I don’t want to put her in shackles. She comes in and out of my home, a free spirit, a flash of white and ginger, head high, tail up, and that’s how I want her to be, my Bastra, my love.
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