My Dad's Legacy

back when we were kids, one day we were woken up with incessant mewing on the roof, when me& my brother went to check,it was a strange rather ugly hairless creature crying non stop. my father told it was a kitten abandoned by its mother. he said somebody must have touched it & its mother would not take it back. we took milk to it, built an enclosure around it with some clothes & kept it in roof thinking its mother would take it back, but she would come around, watch from a distance & never take the kitten.
we bought it down after 3 days & sort of adopted it. as we were grown ups & had no small child at home, this kitten became the child , mummy even bought a small milk bottle with nipple to feed it
The kitten was the centre of attraction among all the neighbour kids & daily, many small kids would come in the evening to play with it. we would talk to the kitten & you could actually see it responding as if it understood everything. in its entire life of over three years, it would roam around in the house, but never did it enter the kitchen.

it would sleep with my brother in his bed & since i would scold it if tried to climb the bed from my side, it would take a round & then climb from his bed.
and talking of embedded programming, even though it was not taught by its mother, it would hunt mouse & birds with ease.
it died after three years & it was so heartbreaking. some other big cat had bitten it & even though we took it to vet, it couldnt be saved.

 

yes, you are right, till the time we had that poor cat, some three four big cats ( we call them bilauta in hindi ) were almost always after her. the cat was rather a a pet of the entire neighborhood, she would go around to other houses, but invariably come back to our home, .
she did survive one attack, but the second attack spelled her end.
after she died, for many months, these bilautas would come & mew loudly outside for milk, but we were so angry at them, we shooed them away.