| Moumita Bhattacharjee| October 2025 | Photo Essay |
I stand before life like a refugee trapped behind barbed wire, searching for a home in a land that is not my homeland. Life carries me like a cat carrying its kitten without listening to its mewls. It generally starts on a Monday when one is to get ready for the week’s hunt. I feel reality’s familiar grip on my neck, the canines pushing in as I let my body sway and sling till I’m dropped at my destination. I surrender to life’s antics the way a cub trusts its mother’s fangs. It hurts a little, but I suffer and stay still, going to places I don’t know, with the faith that there will be food and comfort. The cats of my town are an odd mix of Plato and pastries- wisdom bubbling on the inside, yet their whisker-faces remain ever so sweet. They hoard philosophy in their dens and bring politics to the feeding pots, coaxing their way into getting a few more treats to bring back to their little ones. And truly, even in history, hiding claws under the paws is how most middle-class mothers have survived for their kids.
Life doesn’t tell me the addresses of its sanctuaries or hospitals. So I make my nest in its orphanages, and I’m still asked to adjust — like a fat woman in a crowded bus being shown her deficiencies, or rather, her abundances, without an ounce of kindness. If I ask to breathe freely, I’m chased away like a thief-cat at a fish market stealing others’ vitals. How dare I hope for hope in a proletariat dystopia? A street cat belongs to the street regardless of its breed. Yet sometimes, I topple and trick life’s mouse traps and gnaw at its treasures. If I’m for the streets, I’m the king of highways and alleys – even the one that leads to life’s inner chambers where I’ll stick my paw and shed my black fur. No matter how many people, except for the black cat, acknowledge it as ominous, the black cat only acknowledges the importance of belly rubs. I, too, stretch my back and curl up for a nap in memory’s museums.
At the blind alley where I play hide and seek with my past, a blind cat sits on top of an abandoned taxi. I stare at it while trudging my way back home from a capitalist battle. In the rearview mirrors, I see life snickering at my incompetence. My whiskers droop as I whine, “But life only feeds me the bitter and the rotten!” The feline’s blind gaze replies that most cats are lactose intolerant. For those who crawl on all fours to survive, hoping for a bitter-coated sugar pill is better than the horror of starvation. The cats roaming in urban verandas keep meowing only if they smell fish curry being heated in the kitchens. Ransacking the gutters while dreaming of cakes is the beggar’s definition of living for life’s sake.
I used to think cats feel no shame while licking the same hand that strikes them away, until I became the scaredy cat that both hisses and purrs. Ethics are for those who haven’t felt a day-old hunger, and my people carry in their stomachs, generations of gaping mouths. I wear shame in my body like crisscrossing stripes as I loiter in life’s lap till its brutal slaps feel like gentle pets. And again, I let life wash away my sins, like a cat licks clean its kittens.
I ask, “Dramatic, isn’t it?” My neighbour’s cat twitches its tail, yawns and goes to sleep.
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Moumita Bhattacharjee is an overthinking bibliophile who seeks solace in literature and films. Her literary interests delve into feminist literature, postcolonial theory, and subaltern studies. She is currently a postgraduate student of English at the University of Calcutta, West Bengal. Her writing is mostly confessional in nature as it aims to cause a catharsis in her readers. She strives to write about all that is unheard, unsaid and unrecognized.
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So profound