In Which I Suspect Bombay’s Cats of Foul Play
Cat distribution system.
Feline domination.
World of cats.
One more sentence to safeguard my work against being considered AI.
These are conspiracy theories I usually ignore because I got over cats taking over the internet long ago. Oh look, a cat does stupid shit. After seven years of scooping them, the shit stops being cute. Yeah, okay, man. Cats and stuff. Woo hoo. Eat your cake and have mine too.
But I’ve been spending a longer-than-anticipated time in Bombay, and I can no longer ignore the cats.
Allow me to preface this by saying that I have one and a half cat companions. The half is a cat that my feline companion adopted overnight, without consultation, consideration for my living space, or regard for my unemployment status. I therefore have “skin (scratched) in the game”—the game being my own blog post and my annoyance at this term, overused by Bangalore tech bros as a placeholder for “I can’t ask you to, but please work overtime without pay on this AI product I’m definitely building that I definitely don’t understand.”
This piece is going to have unjustified, hoity tangents, and many arguments are going to be a stretch. It is about cats, after all.
My feline friend Kiboo is not “my” cat. I think pet ownership is slavery, and I am part of the problem. We’ve created an urban environment of learnt helplessness, and the only respite I feel is that it is herculean to get a cat to do something it doesn’t want to do. We all deserve to be scratched for what we’ve done to animals with speciesism.
I would like to think Kiboo is not my baby or insert infantilised endearment, but a lump of loaf that, against all odds, likes living with me. He is a cat who has entered into a mutually beneficial housing arrangement with me. He has the emotional range of a teaspoon and shares one brain cell with a Bandra landlord. I feed him and house him, and he chooses to sit on my balti (which is what I call my uterus) when it leaks. A good monthly trade-off, even with the poop scooping.
While the Supreme Court was issuing orders to capture Delhi’s stray dogs and put them in kennels and overflowing shelters as a way of “tackling” rabies (another bench walked it back eleven days later, after a very loud week), Bombay was quietly demonstrating what street animal control could look like.
Street initiatives and NGOs, working with the BMC, have carried out trap-neuter-release programmes to sterilise and vaccinate the city’s dogs. The effort has made Bombay an example for the rest of the country. By 2024, a BMC survey found that street dog density had fallen by more than a fifth since 2014, and that nearly two-thirds of the city’s street dogs were sterilised.
Now, when you meet dogs in Bombay, you see the familiar ear notch, an indication that they’ve been sterilised. The dogs are mostly bark-and-no-bite.
Cats, meanwhile, are a different administrative nightmare. They are infinitely more difficult to trap, which makes sterilising them on the same scale a rather more complicated proposition. It is easier to get Modi to do a press conference than to trap a cat in Bombay. In 2022, the BMC admitted it had sterilised about 5,700 cats since 2019. In the previous two years alone, it had done 33,166 dogs.
Which means that while the dogs have been systematically sterilised, the cats remain largely outside the machinery of population control.
And the cats have noticed.
Along with the BMC. Officials told the Free Press Journal that cat numbers were climbing in exactly the areas where dog numbers had fallen. “It is a natural phenomenon,” an additional municipal commissioner said. “If dogs are fewer, then the number of cats increases.”
With the dogs no longer the street’s undisputed muscle, the cats have realised they can move in. They have taken over the streets of Bombay in a way Kiboo could never.
On my way back from work to have a glass of wine at a nearby bar tonight, I saw three testosterone-cheeked alpha male cats perched on a stone wall, chilling next to each other in a way I thought impossible in urban nature. Yes, that is a term I am liberally using. No, you are not required to forgive me.
These three grown bouncers have better boundaries than most men. More importantly, they don’t own podcasts. Yet.
The cats have realised that the common enemy has been defeated without their having to lift a single paw. They just waited these fuckers out.
Now the cats get to chill on ledges, eat food outside meat shops, and procreate, procreate, procreate. Nobody’s mother is asking them when. The cats have won.
They have effectively learned what India should have learned after independence. Once the colonisers have left, you must learn from cats the art of coexistence. Sit on a wall, eat well, always remember who the real enemy is, mind your own business, and be the absolute piece of shit you want to see in the world.
