Making amends to a ginger cat
Or a coming of age tale in a pet hostile society
I was preparing a fairly witty and curious piece about aubergine history, the way it has traveled and how we can learn something from that in the face of the scary rise of the far right in Europe when shared a heartfelt piece about his orange cat and the grief about losing him to kidney disease, and eventually saying goodbye. His honest fragility and beautiful life spent with this cat shines through, and I couldn't help shedding many tears while reading it. I was reminded of my own beautiful ginger cat that I had many years ago. I started writing about that and it turned out to be this piece about my childhood and adolescence. I couldn’t stop writing so it got a bit long. It’s not quite cheerful, but it’s from the heart, and possibly the most personal piece I’ve ever written in a public sphere. Pets, the things they do to us.
I have a thing for orange cats. They say they're insane but not only do I find them immensely gorgeous, I also find myself reflected in their uncalculated, absurd but endearing madness. My partner and some close friends occasionally call me a kitty, and I can't quite deny that sometimes I do choose "meowing" as my preferred method of communicating to those close to me. For someone this fond of cats it's strange and sad to have none.
I was born in Tehran right in the middle of the Iran-Iraq war, during one of those many nights when missiles rained over the city like fireworks. About 4 years later, before the war was over, my parents went through a dramatically painful, but not quite successful separation.
My mother and I briefly moved to my paternal grandparents house, as our house (which windows had been shattered by other missiles and were held together by duct tape) was forlorn, because my father had a new family now.
I don't have many memories from that period, except 2. One that I discovered, or perhaps comprehended “salad”: tomatoes and cucumbers and lettuce, I distinctly remember distinguishing every single vegetable and realizing that when put together, it's called a salad.
The second one is about, not so much of an imaginary friend, but an imaginary pet. A black kitten by the name of Sor O Mor O Gonde, which in Farsi is something ridiculous and a bit crass to say big and healthy. I must have heard the word from the adults and found the sound amusing, despite having no idea what it meant. That house, which had a garden like many houses back then, was said to be full of cats and kittens once, not as something endearing, but more as a sign of lack of care.
That’s why, according to myself, my (imaginary) black kitten was always hiding under the couches and in other dark places. I would regularly stick my head under the chairs and in the dark nooks to talk to him, pet him or feed him.
Shortly after, my mother and I moved to Mashhad, her native city, in the north east of Iran. A very large city, some 1000 km away from Tehran. We rented an apartment in a 2 story building that had a garden. There were many little girls and some boys in that little street and that street was our backyard. We would bike around (we weren’t allowed to get far, just in our street). I was about 5, and those biking days with other little girls were some proper childhood memories to hold on to. We once threw a birthday party for my favorite doll (I was wearing a very red lipstick, see photo). There was a cake and candles that I pretend-blew on behalf of my doll.
There was a boy, who had a black kitten with white paws. I don’t remember whether the kitten was actually his, but I do remember that he didn’t have a bike, so for the price of riding mine, he would allow me to sit on the steps of the entrance to a house, and hold and pet the kitten.
To me it was a fair exchange, but my mom didn’t agree. She thought I was allowing myself to be taken advantage of. I didn’t have a kitten and I desperately would’ve loved to have one, which was pure nonsense to my mom. A bike was a tangible thing, a “property”. A kitten was… nothing in her eyes, something that can scratch you, something polluting, something I could catch something nasty from (like becoming infertile!).
We didn’t really have a pet culture back then. Some people who had houses with large gardens in the countryside had dogs, but merely as guardians not as coddled and adored dogs. Vets were very few and mostly worked with farm animals, horse races and things like that, not pets. I don’t remember anyone having cats inside their home then. Birds perhaps were the exception; canaries, parrots, lovebirds and finches. Pretty, singing (screeching) things in a cage. I got 2 white specimens of the latter not long after the kitten-bike exchange. One of them died soon after so we got another one, the other lived for ages.
By the time I was 11, we were living on the ground floor of another two story building, with a garden. Every morning I waited for the school minibus at the mouth of the alley. One day I noticed a mewing little kitten on the short wall right where I was standing. She was mostly gray, with bits of white and extraordinary green eyes. I called out to her (to this day I always say hi/meow to cats, they mostly greet me back) and she came to me. I was holding her when the minibus arrived, and having no other choice, I got on with the kitten still in my arms. Some girls screamed (possibly because of inclinations towards kittens like my mother’s), but the kitten remained calm. I wanted to keep her and yet we were going to school. I had an extra plastic bag where I kept my trainer pants (we had that 1 PE lesson of the week that day). So I took all of my books and notebooks and pencil case from my actual bag and shoved them brutally into the plastic shopper (which of course tore later in the day), put the kitten gently into my bag and left the lid open and asked the driver to keep the bag and the kitten safe for me until he picked us up again after school.
He did so. The kitten had been jumping all around the minibus all morning, he told me. When I brought her home, my mom was predictably furious and said I couldn’t keep her and she would not allow a cat in the house. It was the weekend, I kept her in the building hall, and spent all my time with her in the afternoon. I left food and water for her — that I meant to call Michelle, god knows where I had heard that — in the hall, and went to bed that night hoping that in time, I could persuade my mom to allow me to take her inside.
I developed a fever that night (I had been splashing about in the heavy rain that day on our way from class to the gym, which was in another building), and my mom told me that my kitten had escaped, but was still around. I kept thinking I could hear her meowing in the garden. My mom told me our neighbor was feeding her. I never saw her again.
A few years later, I was 15 or 16 perhaps, a couple of moves (one to Tehran and then back to Mashhad) later, my aunt got 2 cats for her 3 children. She was recently divorced out of an abusive marriage, and it seemed the cats helped. She would take them to the vet and keep them at home and my teenage cousins loved them. She would even bring them to our house or my grandmother’s when they came to call. My mother, seeing that cats were “clean” and taken care of by the vet, uttered half-heartedly that this way, I could have a cat too.
Barely weeks later, in the streets of our school, my friends and I found 2 kittens on a big cement block. I think we wanted to rescue them from the other screaming kids. We didn’t wonder who had put them on the cement block or whether their mother was around. One was a black tortoiseshell, the other orange, with a snow white chin and chest and an orange spot on his white snout. Funnily enough, we were going to a PT lesson again. We put the kittens in a small cardboard box that was around and took them to the gym. I made it clear to the teacher that I was taking the orange one home, and nobody should touch the kittens. I went looking for them after school and found out the box had been moved to the secondary school (we were at high school, the buildings were next to each other). I was in terrible terms with the secondary school staff, due to years of abuse and trauma and their semi-unsuccessful attempt to kick me out of school (a story for another time, or perhaps never. Some shit’s better left unstirred.) For the sake of the orange kitten however, I deigned walking one more time into the staff room of my ex secondary school, a place I associated with hell itself.
He slept in the box on my lap during the short minibus trip towards home. As I climbed the stairs towards our apartment which was now on the fourth floor, I dreaded my mom’s reaction. What if she sent this kitten away too? She was in the middle of “no, not another one” when she saw him and stopped mid sentence. “Oh how beautiful he is!” she exclaimed. And beautiful he was, with super fuzzy kitten fur that made him look like undefined around the edges, only with huge amber eyes
I named him Charlene (gawd! I know!), after a song by my favorite celebrity crush, who had once actually gifted me an orange kitten in a very confused and semi-erotic dream. But my mom called him Pishoo, which simply means something like kitty, or kitto, and as she spent the most time with him while I was at school, he became “Pishoo”.
We did take him to the vet in those early days, inside my school bag because we didn’t have a pet carrier. Later we opted for a picnic basket that had a sturdy closing clip, with a blanket. Pishoo hated going out for any reason, he would wreak such havoc, hiss and claw at us, releasing an unpleasant odor and sometimes even peeing out of fear. Once we spent 2 exact hours trying to catch him, and eventually, we gave up on taking him to the vet all together.
It soon became clear that Pishoo was terrified of everything and everyone that was not my mom and me. But apart from this, he was the sweetest thing on the planet. In a world before youtube and instagram, I watched first hand every single little crazy and adorable thing that cats do that make us love them so much; the way he slept in an impossible neck position, the way he touched me tenderly with his paw to ask for food, they way he drank from the goldfish ball at the Norouz table. He didn’t like being held at all, but when I watched tv he would come and sit on my lap and let me pet him. I adored his warm weight on me. In fact, I remember feeling a distinctive ball of light and warmth, like the ones they tell you to picture during meditation, whenever I came back from school and found Pishoo waiting for me.
My mom did try yet again to be rid of this cat too. She hated the way Pishoo had scratched the hell out of every furniture, but I set very difficult rules for anyone who tried to adopt him (for instance no families with small children, he was terrified of children). So Pishoo ended up staying at our home. I was so attached him that when my father’s stepmother invited my mother and I to spend part of the summer with them in Kuwait, I used Pishoo as an excuse to not go, saying I wouldn’t go without my cat. Where would we leave him? As if a part of me knew in protecting Pishoo and staying, I would’ve protected myself from something dreadful that would mark me for many years to come.
In the end we did go to Kuwait, and of course we didn’t take Pishoo with us. We took him to my grandparents’. My grandmother was never a pet loving person. Actually my cousins and I had a joke that not only pets, but even dolls weren’t safe with her. We had baby chickens that we would leave in her garden, they’d never survive the stay. Before leaving I begged her to not let my cat outside, fearing he would run away, or get lost. He was ever so terrified of everything and had been an indoor cat ever since he was a tiny kitten.
A month later, having witnessed the World Trade Center burn and collapse, and — in my case shaken to my core — we came back to Mashhad and went to my grandparents to collect Pishoo. He was hiding somewhere upstairs but the moment we arrived he ran to the doorway to greet us, having recognised our voices. When we brought the basket for him he got in voluntarily, and he even stayed calm during the car journey. He knew he was being taken home, he knew he was safe. It was moving to see the usual frightened cat this docile in the face of going back home, even my mom had to admit it.
I wasn’t in a great place for the next two years, but Pishoo was there by my side and lessened the depression weighing me down from time to time. He was hilarious, broke a few things that made my mom furious, but we played with him and he made us laugh. His life wasn’t without trauma either. Once he was chased by my cousin’s poodle because my father — who was visiting — had insisted he would bring the dog over, saying the poodle and my cat “would become friends”! Pishoo stayed under my mom’s bed for more than 48 hours and the only food he ate was out of my hand, when I squeezed myself under the bed to reach him. Another time we thought we had lost Pishoo during a move and went to the street calling out for him like a bunch of mad people, only to find that he was strategically hiding in the wardrobe in a way that no one could see him unless they put their head right inside and looked around it.
Pishoo’s most terrifying misfortune however was when he fell out of the balcony. I flew down four flights of stairs in my night things, so hysterical that the neighbors put their heads out of their doors to see what was going on. I found him in the dark parking lot of the building. It was pitch black but I saw a glint of his eyes. I called to him, approached him slowly and managed to get him. My stomach lurched horribly as I found a lot of wet in his mouth. He didn’t protest as I took him in my arms but when we reached the building hall with many worried neighbors around, he panicked and lashed out. All the way to the fourth floor he fought tooth and claws to get off my arms, but I would not let go. I still have some of the scars on my arms. He limped-ran under the bed again as, crying madly I tried to find the number of the vet we hadn’t used for a couple of years. It was about 10.30 pm. The vet was cruel, he told me that by my description, Pishoo wouldn’t survive the night. He did give us his assistant’s number though and he was kind enough to tell us to bring Pishoo over. It wasn’t easy, we nearly had to dismantle my mom’s huge bed to get to him. I wept desperately all the car journey to his studio.
It turned out Pishoo was fine, in the end. He did have a limp, and a slightly torn lip (that had bled and frightened me of some internal bleeding). I was prescribed some sedatives as well, as I was completely beside myself.
For the next six month Pishoo spent all of his hours under beds and couches, never coming out. When he started to gradually leave his sanctuary, I was ready to go to university. My art and architecture university where I was going to study graphic design was in Tehran. This meant that I had to go live with my father, and a half of the family he had created when leaving us. He had already abandoned the other half. It was a turbulent time for many reasons, perhaps the most turbulent of my life. I had lost all appetite for discovering new things, I resented having to go to a new city, I dreaded living with my father, and I didn’t want to leave my cat.
I left. I would see Pishoo only when I went back to Mashhad every couple of months or so. Then about 2 years later, my mom had to move yet another time and she announced that she would not take “the cat” to the new apartment. There was nothing for it, she would not hear any reasoning; that this cat has lived indoors for 4 years, that he has been a part of our home and you just can’t throw him out. “You don’t live here anymore, so it’s my decision. I don’t want a cat in the new apartment.”
My mom’s plan was was to leave Pishoo in my grandparents’ backyard. My little baby, who was frightened of everything, who had never been outside since he was a tiny kitten, who slept in the gap under the fireplace in winters, who really counted himself as one of us people, not the pets, and he would not recognize their presence (which was so weird!), was to be abandoned in the backyard of my grandparents who had never been animal lovers. A place where big, scary stray cats wandered from time to time, where huge crows flew, and where neighbors were more hostile towards cats than friendly.
There were many shouts and rows but in the end, I had no say. She had made her decision; no cats in the pretty, new apartment. I couldn’t quite believe it. It had been only her and Pishoo in the past two years that I had been in Tehran. How could she be so unattached to let go of him as if the living, warm, beautiful, fragile being that had been a part of our lives for the past 4 years had been nothing more than a pot plant? How could you abandon the creature who believed he was loved and safe with us here so easily?
On the day of the move, Pishoo was once again in his basket, almost resigned. I kept talking to him as tears fell down relentlessly, I asked him to forgive me. I told him I knew how it felt like to be abandoned unceremoniously by those you thought loved you (as this was exactly how I felt back then). Time after time again I said I was sorry, not sure whether he knew I really was or not.
My late grandparents were in Sweden that summer to visit my uncles. I couldn’t go to the backyard as my mom “freed” Pishoo there. She told me he went straight behind the big table top that was leaning against the wall. She left food for him. We left. I was shattered into a million pieces.
For the next few days my mom would visit there everyday with fresh food. Pishoo was still hiding behind that tabletop. Then eventually, summer was over, my grandparents returned home and I went back to university in Tehran. My mother would see Pishoo when he visited my parents. This was the only time he was allowed inside. They’d leave food for him and even created a sort of nest for him out of an old chair and blankets, but he was no good at defending these commodities from other stray, possibly more violent cats.
I saw Pishoo perhaps only two more times, the last of which will haunt me till the day I’ll die. It was just over a year since we had abandoned him in that backyard of my grandparents. I knew he had been disappearing for periods as long as a month, always coming back a little too thin, a little worse for wear. I knew that by the day we were supposed to visit, he had not been seen for 3 days.
To our utter astonishment, not even 5 minutes after my mother and I had arrived he came inside — not quite running, but still very fast. I quickly took in his thinner body, the fur that was no longer fluffy and sleek and the dusty gray paws that had once been snow white. But it was his eyes —I will never forget his eyes — that broke my heart all over again. They were listless, as if a light inside them had been extinguished. Sad, devastatingly sad eyes of the little kitten I had once put inside a cardboard box and took home for us to live together, only to be ruthlessly abandoned, never having learned the rules of survival in the wild.
He sat on my lap for a long time. Longer than he would’ve ever done back at home when he was a hyperactive ginger cat. I stroked him and talked to him and with each scar or callus that I felt on his skin another part of me broke down.
Then he left. And this was the last time I ever saw him. Some time after this, he left my grandparents' backyard and never returned. Judging by the way he looked, he must not have made it. He wasn’t even five years old.
In the years to come, I went on to develop a severe allergy to cats (and dogs, and rabbits, and horses and a lot of other things). It’s perfectly manageable but I can’t really have cats at home. My mom meanwhile has now “bought” two kittens since last year. They’re of a pure race and expensive and they do the job of entertaining her without being too naughty or jumping on things. She’s a lot more open to them than she ever was to Pishoo, even though Pishoo was a lot more dependent on her than me.
Now everyone in Iran has pets. There are vet clinics and pet shops everywhere. The regime tries hard to punish people who walk their dogs outside the same way they punish “improperly covered up” women; by harassing or sometimes even detaining them, sometimes even taking the dog away. But much like everything else, they’ve had little luck in making people obey, despite the use of brute force. Pet Shops and clinics are flourishing. Frankly it’s even kind of bizarre, considering the disastrous economic situation, but most people manage to take care of their cats and dogs. It’s become a sort of fashion too, to “buy” the most expensive race of cats and dogs. There are also many who work in animal welfare and shelters, encouraging people to adopt, rather than shop. There are even cat cafes and museums in Tehran and other cities now. People are learning to be kinder to animals all over. Little bowls of food and water are left in alleys and parks for cats and birds, especially on hot days of summer and snowy days of winter. Things have changed. Perhaps we’re still not at the level of Turks in loving our street cats, but there’s hope now.
I will always miss and grieve my beloved Pishoo, my beautiful, crazy ginger cat who deserved much better. I hope he’s happy in cat heaven, and that he has forgiven us.
Your story brought me to tears. I sense, somehow, that Pishoo knew how much you loved him and that there were circumstances beyond your control that prevented you from keeping him. ❤️. Your kind of love for Pishoo is eternal.
Tears!!! I’ve experienced something similar. People called me crazy for loving cats and now they’re all obsessed. I’d have to say btw unfortunately the Turks are not that better at loving animals. They just passed a law to enable killing street animals. The world is cruel to animals and humanity is cursed till we learn to be loving to animals.