Cats on Bags

Late at night, at an HDB (social housing) estate in Singapore – super friendly tailless black cat checking out my tote bag.

He thereupon sat on the bag and refused to move, putting me at risk of missing my last bus home. These situations always remind me of this drawing by Galina Zhiganova.

I made a video of me trying to coax him into releasing my bag and shared the clip with some friends, one of whom pointed out that I was talking to the cat in Bengali. "ওই, অনেক হয়েছে, এবার ওঠ।" (OK that's enough, now get a move on.)

I have a friend from Kolkata (now based in Colorado) who is Bengali, but mostly spoke in English with his family and friends. Our Bengali teacher once asked him, "দেবক, তুমি কি বিড়ালের সঙ্গেও ইংরিজিতে কথা বলো?" (Debak, do you talk in English even with cats?)

The tote bag in question has prints of various vintage cameras, including a Leica M3 (1954) – a camera that I actually own and sometimes carry in that very bag. My friends were travelling in Indonesia when they saw the bag in a random shop and said "We have to get that for Sroyon." I've got some good gifts recently.

And now here's an older photo of "my" cat in Kolkata, sitting on a changing bag (used for developing film and other analogue-photography applications).

I say "my" in quotes because she is really a stray cat, but likes to hang out in our backyard and sometimes in my room. Our flat in Kolkata is on the ground floor, so she can climb in through my bedroom window. The most sweet-tempered cat I have ever seen.

The other night I was sleeping in my flat here in Singapore – my fifth-floor flat, where no cats climb in through windows – when my bedside lamp toppled onto my bed. It made the exact same light bump as my cat makes when she jumps from my windowsill onto my bed in Kolkata. It woke me up, and in that moment, I missed her intensely.