A tale of two kitties.

It’s been some time since the urge to mother someone has been burgeoning (I love this word) within the bosom of my roomie, i.e. the urge to mother someone other than the his many child women and other than his employees (though mentor would be his choice of words – but he does mother them 😉 …)

and finally the means to give in to this burgeoning urge presented itself in the (I must say lovely) form of Alisha – an ahstraliyan (supah) model who loves cats (of course you realize – if someone were to read burgeoning urge and super model in the line above they would get a completely inaccurate picture of Gaurav’s desires). Sadly, her roommates do not share her passion for animals feline. Therefore when the cat she had, gave birth to a lovely litter of 4 – she was forced to start looking for a good home – only for the kittens.

And that’s how we ended up sitting on the staircase, playing with 4 kittens, on a Sunday evening. And there was a lot of heart ache, which ones do we take. The lovely French lady, who had been appointed as the official kit picker fluffed her lines and we spent our time debating the merits of the aggressive brown one, the elegant grey one, the rowdy black one and the equally quite black one.

I have a simple philosophy – I let the kittens pick me,(doesn’t work as well with women) and pretty soon I was sitting quite comfortably with two kittens in my lap. Gaurav had his heart set on the brown one and the grey one and the black ones in that order, and was all for taking all four home. Which is fine, except for the fact that he would be traveling quite a bit – and the mom would be heartbroken without any kittens at all.

Finally after lot of hemming and hawing, and tearful pleading we picked the black and the grey – and headed home.

And of course you know (if you have ever taken care of kittens)… this was the easy part.

The trip back was pretty painful as the black one kept mewling, while mr grey was all cool, calm and collected. My co-passengers were off the opinion that this was mainly due to the fact that I was holding mr black. Which is obviously untrue – it was just mr black’s reaction to Mumbai traffic, which I guess is no different from yours or mine. Especially 7 pm between bandra and mahim on a Sunday.

We finally reached home around 8 and started the difficult task of de-licing them. Marielle bravely volunteered to help us with the procedure, having had prior experience.

– Prepare tub of warm water. Add savlon. Shake. Dunk kitten. Spray with nozzle(only cold water ..brrr). Dunk in another tub of clean warm water. wrap in towel. mutter kind words and comfort kitten that the end of the world is still some distance away. (come to think of it this is how management trainees in sales are treated…..). Spend considerable time picking of lice. add more warm words, love and affection. hug gently. put in large cardboard box with lined with old turkish towels. keep saucer of warm milk in front.

repeat procedure for kitten # 2.

I preferred my solution – pop into oven and heat just enough to fry the lice. (come on – I was kidding)

Spend rest of night comforting them, rest of week toilet training them and rest of life – loving them.

More on Mr Black and Mr Grey later. We are currently thinking of names such as
a) Zee and Zou
b) Dolce – Vita ( Inspired by Marielle)
c) Joe – Black
d) Dolce Gabbana
e) Mr Black and Mr Grey
f) Jaggu and Taraana ( they really make our mornings 🙂 )

Any advice?

ps: this was worth writing, just for the title *huge grin*