Our British Shorthair

There was this gray-brown thing that seemed to stay permanently under cars in the parking lot.  I first saw it after feeding the alley cats in a nearby building construction.  It slowly went out from under the car, looked up and assessed me, and rubbed its head against my leg.

This isn’t an alley cat, I concluded.  The typical stray avoids people.  This one behaves like a domesticated one, comfortable and trusting.

I knew on sight that he was a he.  I gave him cat food that he at once gobbled up.  He then became part of my feeding routine in the next three weeks.

No one touched the two bowls of cat food and water placed beside the wall of the grocery store at the ground floor of the building where our flat is.  Better still, I wasn’t alone.  There were instances when some passerby left extra fastfood fare beside the bowls.   Once, a little Indian girl played with the cat and begged her mother to take him home.  The mother didn’t.

The thought of the tomcat bothered me.  What if he’s run over by one of the cars that serves as his home?  This is it, I thought.  I’ll home him temporarily, keep him safe and clean and presentable as a lost-and-found tomcat that potential takers couldn’t resist.  I thought of putting up his picture on posters at the grocery store and the nearby pharmacy.

We cannot take one more cat.  I am missing our fifteen loveable cats back home.  We wanted to bring two of them, the most that we could tolerate inside a fifth floor flat.  Selecting proved difficult.  So we left them under the care of a trusted help whose love for cats exceeds mine.

We ended up with two cats here in the UAE anyway.  We picked them up as dehydrated and thin kittens.  One more cat then would mean three cats too many.

So this gray-brown was just “Tomcat” to us.  We kept him inside a bathroom while we waited for the two other cats to slowly get used to his presence.

Then our tyke cried when she learned that Tomcat had to be given away at the first opportunity.  He stays then, I declared.

I have a surprise for you, I told the husband, sounding like someone too aware that barbarians of old killed bringers of bad news.  But how else could I sound when I was telling him that once again, we have one more unwanted cat?  Luckily the husband said nothing but “wow” (at least it’s not “meow”) when he saw this wide-eyed homeless cat.

The expenses followed.  We prepared him for neutering and the necessary vaccinations.  Don’t feel bad if the vet comments about his ordinariness, the husband warned.  The last time he went for the neutering of Bertix, our other cat, he was told that there are better looking cats.  I couldn’t care less of course, if the beholder has no eyes.

He’s not a street cat but a British Shorthair, the vet said in surprise. I’ve raced her to the draw by saying that ours is a stray cat.  He must have been lost, she added.  She showed us pictures of different breeds of cats.  Indeed, Tomcat, who became Tommex to us, and who turned out to be less than a year old and colored black-and-white instead of gray-brown (a result of lack of hair due to anemia and the desert dust) is twice as big as any alley cat.

We had to laugh.  After years of picking up street cats we deemed most endangered, we had inadvertently picked up this expensive breed.

There’s the rub.  Our female Emirati alley cat couldn’t accept Tommex the British Shorthair and has succeeded in terrifying him.  He wouldn’t eat or drink or use the litter box unless I stand by him.  And he prefers to stay in our bedroom and had to be brought along when no human is left at home.  He’s but a gentle giant, the husband said.

Hey, Brit, I said in jest, learn to stand up and fight; remember, the British colonized Arab countries before, including the UAE.

(18 Nov 2007)