Lola Swift

One Saturday, the 11th of November, 2023, my family waved our dad off to Mamit where he would spend the weekend on a Kohhran Pavalai programme with Revd. Maruata. Since mum would be sleeping alone, I decided I’d keep her company and sleep next to her. I invited my cat Nix along and the both of us slept in with Mother (read in Shakespearean English).

I hadn’t used a mosquito net in so long that I was very surprised when I saw their bed had a mosquito net installed. And utilised. I thought it was highly redundant since we don’t have mosquitoes, but I shrugged it off with a: hey, well, not my zoo.

When I climbed into bed, I noticed a weird shaped hole in the net. Large enough for a cat’s head, in fact. Which as you would know, lowkey defeats the purpose of a mosquito net. As in if there is a hole big enough to fit a cat (because if a cat can fit its head in a hole, more often than not, it will be able to fit its entire body into it as well), it is more than big enough for a mosquito. You might as well hang a Welcome Sign for mosquitoes – or moths – on the net because hello, big hole here!

In the morning, I asked mum if she knew there was a giant hole in their mosquito net. My mother’s face grew quite sad and resigned. She said: Yes, Scary Cat did it. When asked details, dad would eventually say: Simpuli is stupid, she ate our mosquito net. (Not just chewed a hole through, mind; my dramatic dad swears the tuxedo cat ate their mosquito net.) Scary Cat is Simpuli is our tuxedo cat is a cat named Lola Swift but nobody calls her that because she is a very simple creature but very fascinating and endlessly entertaining.

Apparently there was a time my parents kept chasing her out of their room because they didn’t want her fur leftovers. But she was just as determined as they were to claim their room as hers as well. If they chased her out three times, she’d return thirty times. If there was a window open, or a door left ajar, Simpuli was there in their room (sometimes hunting – and catching them too, feckin’! – birds on their porch). If one of my parents took a nap on their bed, Simpuli was there sleeping on top of them. After some time, you could catch one of them grumbling but fluffing up old blankets for Simpuli to take her catnaps on. Every time you caught them at it, they’d make it a point to dramatically and loudly tell us off about cats and dogs leaving fur everywhere and that being an embarrassment when we had visitors. But over time, they gave up and accepted fur as necessary evil for having companions so cute you can’t be mad if they chewed up your mosquito net!

So here it was. A cat shaped hole in my parent’s mosquito net that does nothing for the utility or the aesthethics of a mosquito net. But all of us creatures of habit, my parents would always let down their net even with the hole in it. Perhaps they add a line in their bedtime prayer to not let mosquitos in, I don’t know. And Simpuli would climb in through it some nights so she can lay on top of them and sleep through the night with them.

It is what it is.