What was I thinking?

It was a twilit hour and there was no electricity in the Colony. I felt a bit nervous about entering the narrowish roads leading in and my car seemed conspicuous by it’s incongruousness.

I asked Nazish if there were any chances of getting stuck somewhere in there, but she confidently assured me I wouldn’t, that big trucks navigated these alleys without a problem. I drove slowly, taking in the dimly lit shops, the groups of men, the odd animal tethered here and there. I crossed a railway track and then I was totally in, entering completely unfamiliar territory with no idea what to expect. I realized I was thrilled to be there.

We drove along a wide main road for some time while Nazish familiarized me by pointing out shops owned by her relatives, one being a tailor, another a car mechanic, a tv repairman. We turned left, then right, then left again, the lanes getting narrower and narrower, shops and warehouses giving way to homes until finally she told me to stop halfway down a dirt road. I switched off the headlights and the world was dark.

Everyone got out of the car and Nazish unlocked the door that led into her little house, welcoming us into the open courtyard. She unlocked the door to the only room in her house and ushered us in, insisting we sit on the charpai while she took off her burqa and hung it on a hook on the wall.

In the light of her cellphone and mine, I looked around the small square room from my perch and discerned a mattress on the floor next to the charpai, a small tv on a dilapidated cabinet wedged between. Behind the door was a steel cupboard, and a smaller one that I had given her to keep her daughters’ clothes in. Next to the door was a fridge and if I remember correctly, a washing machine too. Nazish took the lack of electricity in her stride, apologetic about her house being messy. It was something I’d say. The apartment we lived in and which I wished was bigger seemed like a palace in comparison.

She had nailed an old curtain I had given her to hide the small enclave in the wall next to the charpai, where she stored blankets and other paraphernalia. This was her store room.

And this was to be Fuzzy’s new abode. I uncovered the basket and he poked his head out curiously, then jumped out and immediately started exploring the peripheries of the room. It struck me how incongruous even my cat looked in that setting, a fluffy majestic Persian, followed by a fascinated Sidra who just wanted to grab him in her arms and cuddle. To escape her slightly-bordering-on-violent ardour, Fuzzy jumped into the store and sat down on a pillow stack, refusing to budge from there.

I have never seen Fuzzy hiss at anyone before, so it was a shock that he hissed at little Sidra, who burst into tears. I was scared he might have scratched her, but he hadn’t. He was just confused, and I turned to Amu. I knew what she was thinking, because I was thinking it too.

In the meantime, Ailya had run off with some money Nazish had slipped into her hand and come back happily bearing a large bottle of cold Fanta. Nazish rinsed out some glasses in her tiny kitchen and poured some out for us. Here, in her house, I felt awkward about the fact that she washed our dishes, swept the floor and cleaned our bathrooms every day. Amu was smiling though, and looked perfectly at ease, in no hurry to leave. The child was more adaptable than I had thought. Ailya and Sidra munched chips, happy to have us there. Both wore identical but differently-coloured butterfly clips in their hair, one blue, one pink.

The plan was that Fuzzy would sleep in their room at night, along with them and all of their possessions. I thought about this, as I felt myself internalizing the panic Fuzzy was probably feeling. My mind meandered through all the possible ways Fuzzy could meet a grave end, or at least, all the ways he could potentially suffer. I imagined him prowling the concrete courtyard of Nazish’s house at night, stalking mice, getting infected by fleas and all manner of parasites, escaping out the door and slinking around the Colony, terrified, getting into fights with feral cats, ill-equipped for survival in the Outside World.

I suppose we left Fuzzy there as an experiment. What could possibly go wrong in a night after all? I instructed Nazish to take the next day off and spend time with Fuzzy, acclimatizing him to his new environment. We took our leave and got back in the car, headlights seeming harsh after the moonlight in the courtyard, reversing all the way out of that dirt road. Nazish had given us instructions on how to find our way back out onto the main road, but I took a wrong turn and had to get directions from some men, who didn’t seem too taken aback at the sight of two ladies driving around their neighbourhood.

I don’t know what I felt when we got back home from our surreal expedition. We sat around, listless, not talking much, looking around with new eyes. Going out for dinner with friends wasn’t a good distraction, eating expensive Thai food made me think about Nazish’s dinner, and coming back to a house with no Fuzzy in it was sickening. Mini’s presence exacerbated the guilt.

I couldn’t stop thinking about Nazish and how she lived, couldn’t stop comparing my privilege with her lack of it. My mind was abuzz with all the stories I had heard from her that day and her life seemed rich to me, devoid of the moral shackles of the middle classes. Her children didn’t have to go to school if they couldn’t afford it. If they were unhappy with their marriage, they could easily have affairs or divorce and marry again; relationships seemed so fluid despite the rigidity of the implicit rules they lived by and age didn’t matter either. So many cousins had committed suicide by drinking pesticide when life seemed too unbearable to go on living, and that was okay. Relations within the family were fraught by tensions due to cousins being forced to marry cousins, as marrying outside the family wasn’t permitted, yet they could all get together at weddings and dance and crack jokes and laugh at the latest scandals, elopements being passed off as kidnappings, babies being produced to keep up a supply of future brides and grooms.

It was no use trying to sleep. I lay awake most of the night, realizing through my tears how attached I was to that stupid, beautiful, pain-in-the-ass cat. I still had no idea how I would deal with him for the rest of his life, but I couldn’t wait to go back to Nazish’s house the next day and bring him back.