Cat jumping on Pa's head

 

It was almost like unleashing a tiger on one’s own father. This feral cat had this bad habit of littering at all the wrong places in and around our house. It was thus ordained that she was to be taken to stick as and when seen without losing any time.

I saw her sleeping under winter sunrays on the stone slabs overlooking the inner yard. Like a supreme predator, I stealthily picked a bamboo stick and poked at it quite forcefully from the railings above. It received quite a hard poke at its ribs that sent it out of its wits. Not having much clue about what to do, it jumped down in panic.

It was a beautiful day for sunbathing. Father had a close crop of his grey hair and had given a nice oil massage to his scalp that needed attention and pampering after weeks of lying hidden under his woolen cap. The idiotic cat landed straight on his philosopher’s head. Well, the cat took revenge for its fall. Father had scratch marks on his scalp. The act turned unpardonable even with the cat’s entire set of littering crimes.

‘You are good for perpetrating a self-goal only! Why didn’t you hit her in a way so that she landed anywhere on earth except my head?’ nursing his scratch marks, Father turned serious enough to settle a score from his side.

However, he was a kind man in every sense of the term. The instantaneous flare of anger was curbed, the red flame changed to a grumbling of some words about my foolishness, then to some stoic reflection, followed by some clandula ointment on his injuries. Then a book found him well absorbed in its pages. Father would forget all individual and collective miseries, even if there was a nuclear strike, as long as there was a nice book in his hands.