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A Purrfect Evening (Reposted)

May 24, 2026 / / 0 Comments

Vignette of a daily twilight ritual in our backyard—REPOSTED from my original post dated December 21, 2021 on The Medium

Mister KB gracing our sunroom table

The day wears on, as days do, and even the tenacious hangers-on amongst the twilight’s photons finally take their leave. Both the streetlamp near our house and an array of porch lights hanging over the back doors of several neighbors stand by in eager anticipation.

All these lights are automated and sensor-activated, waiting to respond when the ambient light intensity wanes below a pre-set threshold. In a few minutes they would all fire up in near unison and self-importantly illuminate their back doors and a patch on their respective yards.

The streetlamp, of course, puts them to shame by its dazzling luminosity though. You can almost hear it announce, eloquent in its silence, “Let there be light!” — and in that instant dissipates the diaphanous darkness of the dusk descending upon the terrain. That tall, gaunt, cyclopean bringer of light applies a shimmer to the public-facing side of our townhome — including its retaining wall that looks in on the hedge around our back lawn — and illuminates both three-quarters of the lawn and the adjacent concrete, motorable path that separates plots of land in our neighborhood.

In summer — and sometimes during spring too — we leave the lawn unmowed for a couple of weeks, allowing the grass to grow unhindered, especially after an opportune shower; we don’t mind the odd tuft of crabgrass or a patch of three-leaf clover or the ubiquitous dandelion flourishing along with the burgeoning blades. As the evening draws close to the night, the verdant field can be seen to express its barely suppressed excitement via delightful susurrations in the tall grass, for this is the eldritch time when the earth comes alive, with crickets, some enterprising stink-bugs, scintillating fireflies, several litters of neighborhood bunnies, an occasionally visiting possum couple, and all other manners of life.

It is around this time, on most days of the week, that I gingerly roll in our Silver Subaru onto a metaled parking pad that traverses one corner of our back lawn. I clamber out of the driver’s seat, grab my laptop bag from the back seat, and — beep! — lock my car. For the next few seconds, the clop-clop of my soft-soled boots on the concrete garden-path approaching our patio adds to the vital vibrations of the lawn that is by now well-lit.

Kyebbie/KB, a.k.a. our community hauspanther, a Black American Shorthair
Fearsome natural predator of our neighborhood… especially when not purring loudly and asking for a head scratch (Photo and collage by author)

But unbeknownst and unseen to me, a pair of watchful eyes stalks my steps from behind the tall grass or our next-door neighbor’s rose bushes. In a matter of seconds, just as I am about to latchkey self and laptop bag into the patio, he breaks out his ritualistic butt-wiggle and viciously pounces on my trouser legs… rubbing his body against my calf and purring loudly until I reach down and scratch between the ears of this fearsome natural predator of the neighborhood.

Epilogue

One doesn’t usually place introductions in the epilogue, but I realize this vignette remains incomplete without at least some introduction to our purring pawsome predator. Meet Mister, alias KB. Once abandoned by some (I can only assume) heartless people who moved out of our neighborhood leaving him, KB regally inhabits the porch of our nonagenarian next-door neighbor and rules over an extended plot of land that includes, but is not limited to, our conjoined backyard garden and lawn.

Having lived unhoused for a long time, KB has adapted to the struggling but free life of an outdoor cat. He zealously guards his territory against cats visiting from nearby neighborhoods, frightens birds and bunny rabbits that dare encroach his patch of grass, and yet was completely copacetic towards a mother-child possum duo that shared his living space one winter and ate from his food bowl. (The child possum, now an adult, still comes by occasionally to say hello and partake from the remnants on KB’s bowl.)

Even though his love for our neighbor is boundless — he pays no attention to anyone else around when she is out and about — he does seem to have developed an affection for my wife and me. Every morning, evening, and night, he sits on the steps outside our sunroom door and demands peremptorily, as cats do, to be fed and given head and cheek scratches. Sometimes he deigns to step inside, make good use of a scratching post we have there, and lounge on the table; sometimes he curls up on a smallish cat bed we keep for him in the sunroom and gets his forty winks.

During one particularly harsh winter, we bought KB an insulated cat house with a heated pad inside and placed the cat house inside a larger dog house of some durable plastic material in order to protect it from the elements. It pleases us to no end to find him sitting inside, especially when the temperature drops outside.

For his annual health checkup and vaccines, we take him to the same vet who cares for our cat babies, and he proceeds to charm the vet clinical staff by being an absolute cuddlebug. Every time that happens, we mentally cuss out the unknown, unseen cruel family which had cast him out, all the while feeling glad and grateful that our neighbor and we still have his trust.

In turn, KB loudly greets us everyday, without fail, when we get back from work and occasionally seeks to contribute to the family food reserves by bringing us dead mice, which he neatly lays out on the steps to the sunroom.

Bangalaimon and I

May 23, 2026 / / 0 Comments

Well before reading the fantasy novel series His dark Materials by Phillip Pullman, I watched the movie based on the eponymous first book, The Golden Compass, and was immediately fascinated by the idea of a parallel world in which human souls existed as sentient animal companions called daemons. In particular, I was taken with the shape-shifting daemon Pantalaimon or “Pan” of Lyra Belacqua, the young protagonist in the series. I hasten to add that this essay is not a critique of the books or the movie. In the books, as is common for the daemons of all children, Pantalaimon can take any animal form he chooses, and indeed he changes into many forms throughout the series and finally into a pine marten (a cat-sized carnivore in the weasel family) as Lyra enters adulthood.

What stayed with me from the movie The Golden Compass is Pantalaimon’s wildcat form, which manifests when young Lyra is feeling bold or needs protection from danger. I feel like I have my own daemon, shape fixed (since I am of advanced age) into our precious Widget Greything—whom I have previously talked about in this space and whom, since last November, I have christened my Bangalaimon.

To be honest, I have never seen Widget in any other shape. Twelve years ago, when barely a month-old he came to be with us, he was a small kitty, happy kitty, little ball of fur—much like the children’s lullaby I first heard in the American sitcom, The Big Bang Theory—who used to sleep bundled on my chest and occasionally suckle on my chin stubble while making dough on my throat. In 2026 Common Era, he is our senior cat with his own personality, his adorable quirks, and his relentless desire to enjoy human food which accompanies his sad inability to eat anything other than his prescription diet without getting all itchy and sprouting an ouchie-paw (the absolutely scientific term for inflammation used for our Widget by our dearest veterinarian). The last bit is also what led to a belly shorn of fur due to constant and prodigious licking before he was put on anti-inflammatory medication for life.

I was out of commission and hospitalized since the middle of September 2025 with a serious medical issue which could have gone either way, but did not (thankfully) under the watchful eyes of my wife, my excellent team of physicians and nurses at the hospital, and the photos of our Widget Greything, our dearly departed Haalubaba, and our community cat Mister watching over me from a whiteboard directly across my hospital bed.

What made Widget my Bangalaimon is simply this: on the fateful day in November when I was finally discharged from the hospital and brought home by my wife and my brother-in-law, the moment I entered through the back door and the kitchen, the moment Widget saw me, he came and sat on my feet and rubbed his nose against my leg. When I plonked myself on the sofa, he took his rightful place on my lap just like before.

author and cat, person and his daemon

Since then, in the initial several months, I had several weird discomforts while sleeping at night as my body was settling down, and it was impossible for me to have Widget sleep curled up on my legs as he used to do before. One of the main reasons for that was that I had to get up nearly once every hour to go to the bathroom. My body’s temperature regulation also seemed to have gone a bit awry, and I felt too warm or too cold at night. Widget compromised by laying himself carefully down between me and my wife on the bed, like a warm, hairy baby with whiskers and a tail that moves much like a windshield wiper.
What took me a while to realize is that throughout this difficult time, Widget kept a watchful eye over me. Every time I woke up to get to the bathroom, he jumped down from the bed and sat down in front of the bathroom door with his eyes towards me. When after finishing I came back to bed, he would soundlessly come back to the bed and resume his position. For months on end, he did this every hour, every single time I got up; he did this when initially, as instructed by the hospital, I had to wake up my wife to help me out of the bed and hold me steady while I walked on my unsteady legs to get to the bathroom; he did this when eventually, after months of physical and occupational therapy, I was able to walk to the bathroom and do my business without additional help. He just watched over me all the time all this while. He still does that now that I have gotten more comfortable in my skin and have been managing with getting up only once or twice to visit the loo or even sleeping through the night. Of course, he is back into his favorite position of sleeping at night, on the covers but using my legs like a hammock, and I am no longer uncomfortable while sleeping. But he is still following me around the house like my shadow, my one-and-only Bangalaimon.

An August Requiem

August 9, 2025 / / 0 Comments

Today, the 9th of August, marks a year since our Haalubaba—having decided that Being One with the Universe sounded like more fun—shuffled off this mortal coil leaving a Haalu-shaped hole in our heart and soul. He was all of nearly ten and a half in years and twenty in pounds. Yes, he was our big-boned homeboy furbaby with a distinguished embonpoint, weirdly angled hindlegs that gave his stair climbing a 1-2, 1-2 rhythm, and a singlemindedness of purpose which is often considered a hallmark of the firing of the single communal neuron that is famed to be shared amongst all orange cats on the planet.

Our Orangeling, Pudge Clementine Haaluababa, with his glorious embonpoint on display, listening to something or someone with rapt attention
Our Orangeling, Pudge Clementine Haaluababa, with his glorious embonpoint on display, listening to something or someone with rapt attention

People amongst our family and friends knew him by many names. An orange, domestic shorthair cat with a multilayered, fluffy coat, he was christened Pudge at the shelter in Miami from where he and his older brother Widget were adopted. That name, etched on his microchip, stuck with him through Falls Road Animal Hospital (our vet at that time) and Evergreen Fearfree Clinic (our current vet clinic for many years), at Trupanion (pet insurance), at Petco, Chewy and Covetrus (online pet store and pharmacy) and with our Dr. Barker (our wonderful and sole primary veterinary care for all our furbabies). But he was also Haluwa (to Auntie SKB), Clementine (to Auntie Indy), Gulaal (to Auntie Simu), Haaluprasad Yadav (in his Little Bacchus mode), Haalubaba and Haalumoni (to us, in general reference), Haangumoshai and Haammu (when his Adorability Quotient periodically went through the roof). And these are just samples from the more coherent appellations.

(L) Our Little Bacchus in repose, enjoying the day, taking it all in with the flick of a tail; (R) our venerable library lion hard at work, meditating on empowerment by knowledge
(L) Our Little Bacchus in repose, enjoying the day, taking it all in with the flick of a ail; (R) our venerable library lion hard at work, meditating on empowerment by knowledge

It is said time heals all wounds. Perhaps time will dull the pain of bereavement we have felt every single day of the year past. Even Widget, who has never lived apart from his brother until last year, seems to grieve in his own feline way. But I am more afraid of the other thing time does. Time often robs us of precious memories. We have armed ourselves against that eventuality by surrounding ourselves with visual memorabilia of both Pudge and Widget, photos (and a few sketches) on our walls and the screens of our electronic devices of daily interactions, the mobile phone lock-screens and backgrounds, the computer wallpapers, the TV screensavers. One of our bookshelves is adorned with a small collection of Haalu’s whiskers dropped over the years, the simple black string he loved to play with, a closed wooden box of his cremated remains, and a pawprint on polymer clay that the crematorium collected and sent us. In the past year, both my wife and I have surprised ourselves with the discovery of Olfactory Memory in us; I’m not sure if we are imagining it, but it does feel like we can occasionally still smell the distinct odors of Haalu’s head, the layered fur on his back, and especially his oh-so-soft furry underbelly.

Memorabilia for Haalu on a shelf of our bookcase. A collection of his dropped whiskers to the right, the plate which used to be held below his mouth while he ate his Gerber, his favorite string to play with, the pawprint on a piece of polymer clay and cremated remains in a wooden box with his name emblazoned, and orange marigolds, which always remind us of him and his bright presence in our lives
Memorabilia for Haalu on a shelf of our bookcase. A collection of his dropped whiskers to the right, the plate which used to be held below his mouth while he ate his Gerber, his favorite string to play with, the pawprint on a piece of polymer clay and cremated remains in a wooden box with his name emblazoned, and orange marigolds, which always remind us of him and his bright presence in our lives.

But will all that be enough? Who knows what tomorrow will bring, or more precisely, cause us to lose due to, perhaps, brain incapacities due to age and health. After all, none of us are getting any younger.

Anyway, I had promised myself I shall not get all maudlin. Until an aggressive lymphoma grew a tumor on his face and eventually caused his lungs to fail, Haalu has been a happy and curious baby. I am choosing to remember his life in snippets that are etched in my memory.

From the very first few months of their lives, our Widget (“Baaghu” to us) was the more adventurous of the two, first to jump onto countertops and window sills, climb onto dressers and bookshelves, and check out the insides of closets and cupboards. Haalu would typically telescope his neck and watch Widget carefully for about two weeks before attempting any of that derring-do. But as Haalu grew, his gibbous was always waxing, which increased his aerodynamic drag and made his projectile arcs significantly narrower, and so, his spirited jumps would often end with him hanging with both arms, claws out, from the cliff edge of various structures, dressers and bookshelves. In our family, we did not make fun of him, ever, but would rush to support his hindlegs on our palms or shoulders, so that he could do a quick clamber up with his dignity intact.

Haalu, our homebody, had a guard dog pose, sitting near the door as it opened but never venturing out. He did not love the outdoors. When held on our shoulders and taken outside up to our front stairs, just so that he could soak up the sunlight and breathe in some fresh air, Haalu would always resolutely set his sight on the door to the house, with a deep yearning to get back and stay inside writ large on his face. ONCE, early in his lifetime, when we lived in an apartment complex in Baltimore, a months-old Haalu had, unbeknownst to us, shot out through apartment door as it was closing, climbed down a flight of stairs, and was waiting for someone to open the building’s main door for him to escape in the urban wilderness yonder. Thankfully, the person who had opened the door and picked him up happened to work at the apartment office and brought him there. Just as we were about to leave for work, my wife received a call from the office manager and frantically rushed to the apartment office, only to find our Haalubaba situated comfortably in the office room soaking up everyone’s attention. I don’t know if the experience had traumatized him, but that marked Haalubaba’s lifelong self-imposed sayonara to the great outdoors.

Left: orange cat sitting in his alert guard dog pose on his haunches; Right: orange cat sleeping on his back with forepaws folded, toebeans out, and tail tastefully covering his empty coin purse. His grey brother is using his floofy belly as a pillow.
(L) Haalubaba in his alert Guard Dog avatar; (R) LOOK AT THAT eminently motorboatable floofy belleh!!

Not particularly nocturnal or crepuscular, Haalu preferred to sleep in our bed under the covers especially during winters. But he was particular about periodically shifting his objet d’affection between my wife and me, choosing to snuggle against one of us at the bed’s edge on either her side or mine. His only demand was two-fold: the cover had to be raised up to create what we called a “tent-city” for him to swoop under, and then his head, back and/or belly had to be gently scratched continuously until he drifted off to sleep. If the roof of the tent city collapsed or the scratchies ceased because we had fallen asleep, he would make his presence felt by digging his nails into whichever soft part of our bodies he had closest to him. Then again, for a few years in between, he had developed this regular habit of solo evening naps. Leaving everyone in the living room, he would 1-2, 1-2 upstairs to the bedroom on his own every day, take a nap on the bed for a few hours, and then come down at dinnertime.

And when he slept, it was magical with his uniform and soothing purrs. The decibel intensity of his purrs was high, in fact so high that early on, I once thought he was suffering from severe breathing difficulty and drove him post haste at 2 a.m. to the Emergency Clinic four miles away at the Falls Road Animal Hospital. I shall never forget either the look on the ER night nurse’s face when, having checked Haalu out, she asked me: “first time cat parent, right? The cat is fine” or the interminable 12 minutes of Drive-of-Shame (more like, embarrassment) on the way back with a now widely awake cat who had no clue why his sound slumber had to be disrupted by his human.

But… y’know what? I’d still do it a thousand times over if ever Haalu needed me. I would love to be able to again motorboat his soft belleh and kiss his head and wet nose and cheeks as he begins to turn his face away with his left lower lip curled down as if in disgust, exposing a single beauty spot there. I’d strain my ears to hear again his various meow intonations, most of which sounded suspiciously like “Ma” with a note of interrogation at the end. I’d plonk my butt on the sofa with my feet up for eternity if it meant Haalu and Baaghu would, as they did, compete with each other to run to the sofa and occupy the leg hammock space that was closer to me. This activity brought out the single-minded focus in Haalu. He had the same look of fierce focus when scratching on specific scratchpads around home with a most earnest posture standing on his two hindlegs.

(L) Haalu won the prime spot closer to me; (R) Baaghu won the prime spot closer to me.
The competition was always tough but fair; sometimes Haalu and sometimes Baaghu managed to reach their spot of choice first. Neither seemed to hold a grudge.

I could go on and on and on, of course… but I shall spare you. With one final mention. Haalu’s one and only food in life, to which he was dedicated, was the prescription kibbles (hydrolyzed protein + urinary S/O) that was prescribed long ago for Baaghu. He also occasionally liked freeze-dried salmon from one brand and one brand only, but he was finicky about it. Unlike Baaghu, Haalu was NEVER interested in human food, except—as we found out quite by accident—boy! Did he have some suh-weeet tooth, and a very specific one too. He was crazy for milk-and-rice pudding (what we Bengalis call “payesh”) from one Pakistani restaurant on the 26th street, but he couldn’t target his tongue very well. So, we had to scoop the liquid material in a spoon and chase the trajectory of his tongue to hold the spoon, by trial-and-error, right beneath. We also discovered that he similarly We also discovered that he similarly loved the top layer of tres leches cakes from Whole Foods and milk-based, plain-vanilla ice creams. That was the only human food that he deigned to put in his mouth a treat. Of course, in the final several months of his life, when the facial tumor no longer allowed him to chew his kibbles, he survived on Gerber baby food, one whole bottle at a time, fed slowly and gently by my wife. Despite the pain, Haalubaba never complained about any of the inconveniences, including the daily high dose steroid injections that, we had hoped, slowed the progression of the lymphoma.

After months and months of anergy and pain which seemed to sap him of vitality, on the evening of August 8th, he walked upstairs to my home office just as before and jumped straight on to my lap while I was working and lay there silently for about 10–15 minutes staring at my face. Did he know? Did he understand that it was to be his final night with his humans and his brother? Because at some point past midnight, in the early hours of that fateful day, he started audibly gasping for breath because his lungs were shutting down. We knew this day would come, didn’t know when, but we had held this difficult conversation already with Dr. Barker. We were there with Haalu as soon as the doors of Evergreen opened at 8 a.m. The clinical opinion was unambiguous, but the final decision was up to us. We did not want him to writhe in pain and gasp for breath one second more than the circumstances decreed. As my wife held him in her arms one final time wrapped in a towel, we all, including Dr. Barker and the nurse attendant, said our tearful goodbyes, he received the intravenous bolus of some high dose anesthetic that would help him fall asleep peacefully and still his heartbeat.

I wish he had stayed with us a little longer. Memories are but a poor substitute for his oversized presence, but those are all that we have now. At least, he is freed of his pain and suffering. Sleep well, Haammu. Perhaps we shall meet again somewhere in the multiverse. I shall bring payesh, okay?

Illusion-schmillusion, if I fits, I sits.

June 9, 2021 / / 0 Comments

Engaged in a cupboard reorganization spree, we never anticipated it. S, my wife, was folding her purple woollen cardigan in order to stash it in a drawer. The cardigan has a woollen belt that runs through a solitary buckle at the back of the waist. The belt was on the bed, and I happened to lay it out in form of a closed circle. Whoosh! Our cat baby Widget Greything (a.k.a. Baghum, the bitty hauspanther), who seems adept at Disapparating and Apparating at will, appeared right at the center of the circle, nonchalant, in a statuesque manner.

“Whoa! It’s true, what they say about cats and geometric shapes,” I exclaimed.

“Of course. There are studies that show this too,” S said. “But not all cats, though, you know. . .”

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Red And Green Mingles At Tsavo

August 12, 2020 / / 0 Comments

[FOREWORD: In commemoration of the World Elephant Day 2020, August 12, here is a nature essay I had written earlier in the year for coursework.]

The brilliant azure of the sky adorned with cottony cumulus would strenuously belie that fact now, but it did rain by the gallons throughout the night, continuing the trend of the past few days at the Tsavo East National Park.

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Of COVID-19: Immunity, Vaccines, Herd Immunity

July 15, 2020 / / 0 Comments

Today is the 15th of July. For more than half a year, humanity in the entire world has been witnessing the ravages of a deadly pandemic, caused by a respiratory virus that belongs to the ‘Coronavirus’ family and is named SARS-CoV-2. Currently, we are practically defenceless against the disease, termed COVID-19, caused by this virus. In clinical studies, limited effects, in overall small number of patients under special conditions, have been seen with an antiviral medication (remdesivir) and the use of an anti-inflammatory medicine (dexamethasone), while a few other medicines fell off the wayside when rigorously tested for efficacy against COVID-19.

But that situation may change. All hope is not lost.

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When Hype Meets Medicine: the Curious Case of Dexamethasone in COVID-19

July 1, 2020 / / 0 Comments

“Evidence-based medicine requires evidence. It’s not optional.”—these golden words in science- and evidence-based medicine were re-emphasized by Dr. Angie Rasmussen, virologist at Columnbia University and prolific science communicator, on Twitter recently.

For proper appreciation of the magnitude of this quote, let me elaborate on the fascinating context in which Rasmussen wrote it.

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Pseudoscience of Homeopathy Exacts a Tragic Cost; What Would Science Advocates Do?

January 8, 2020 / / 0 Comments

The mood in New South Wales State Supreme Court was somber that early June day in 2009. Seven years earlier a little girl of nine-months from Earlwood, Sydney, had died under tragic circumstances, and in the dock for medical negligence were her Indian immigrant parents, Mrs. Manju and Thomas Sam. The jury heard, from experts and other witnesses, how baby Gloria Thomas suffered from significant malnutrition early in her short life, which compromised her immunity; how she was diagnosed with eczema at four months, and through her broken skin, disease-causing bacteria entered her bloodstream, attacking her lungs and one eye; and how throughout the entire, extremely painful ordeal, her father—a homeopath—steadfastly, repeatedly refused medical care, electing instead to treat her with one homeopathic remedy after another, until she passed away. The jury returned a verdict of manslaughter, and the judge sentenced the couple to up to 8 years in prison.[1]

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On Being Protected and Served… with 36 Scratches

October 31, 2019 / / 0 Comments

It was not a dark and stormy night, just a regular one. My workday had ended a little later than usual. Having worked all day standing at the laboratory bench, I was looking forward to getting home, plonking myself on the sofa and putting my feet up, a position which invariably serves as open invitations to both our cat-babies to jump up on my extended legs and immediately fall asleep. In other words, bliss.

Our Cat-babies on my leg hammock

My familiars and I, in bliss mode

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