The Hundred Names of Darkness Read online

  Mara still wasn’t talking to the she-Bigfoot, who had taken her to the healer just a few days ago, but that only made her more fond of the Chief Bigfoot, who was far too superior a human to use an unsuspecting cat’s very own catnip mouse against her as bait.

  As the Chief Bigfoot poured kibble into her bowl, Mara sat there unblinking, and raised her whiskers discreetly. This was an ongoing, and so far, unsuccessful, experiment. Some moons ago, she had been lying on the bed with her Bigfeet, and had wondered what their minds were like. “Could I link to them?” she had asked herself. It seemed possible; she had linked to the minds of monkeys, tigers, dogs, bulbul songbirds, mynahs and moths in the past.

  She would never in all her life forget what that first linking was like. Her whiskers had extended, brushing the she-Bigfoot’s fingers lightly, and she had tried to hitchhike her way into her human’s mind.

  It was like falling from the roof and rushing at extreme speed into the swirling rapids of a turbulent river. Within seconds, Mara had been plunged into a maelstrom of Bigfeet thought. Telling Southpaw about it later, she was still indignant: “They don’t think the same thought for more than one second! Their minds jump around like the monkeys at the zoo—and it’s just as noisy. Noisier! They don’t think in smells, either, just images and words, all muddled up so that you can’t make out anything!” She had spent hours afterwards shaking her head to try and get the sense of exploding fireworks out of it.

  For the last few moons, she had been trying a different tack. If she sent hard enough, could the Bigfeet hear her? Mara was dubious about this. She and Southpaw had discussed the issue, but he felt that the lack of whiskers made it impossible for them to hear cats. “No tails, no whiskers, poor creatures,” he had said. Mara hadn’t disagreed, but in her opinion, the reason the Bigfeet couldn’t hear her had nothing to do with the lack of whiskers. It was because they were so busy dealing with the incessant chatter of their own minds that nothing else could get through.

  She had tried very hard to train her Bigfeet, but given up: they were too easily distracted. But the Chief Bigfoot had shown promise. She listened to Mara, for one thing, even if she did forget herself and try to mew occasionally—she had no idea that she sounded like a sick kitten. And though her mind was every bit as loud and garrulous as the minds of the other Bigfeet, Mara had hopes of getting through to her someday. She was experimenting with sending simple images, the way a mother cat might do with her kittens—milk, fish, purring, that sort of thing. So far, she hadn’t got anywhere, but Mara told herself that the Bigfeet would take longer to train than the average kitten.

  Today seemed promising. She sat on her wooden stool in the kitchen and tried, patiently, to get the Chief Bigfoot to stretch out whatever Bigfeet had in place of whiskers. Mara thought it might be their ears, or perhaps their eyebrows, and she stared as hard as she could at the Chief Bigfoot’s forehead. “Hello!” she said to her. “I’m sure you can hear me. Would you like to stop playing with those dishes and the sink and play with me instead? Wouldn’t that be more fun?” The Sender waited hopefully, but there was no response. Perhaps she needed to go a little slower. Perhaps just a few basic mews, sent by whisker?

  The Chief Bigfoot looked up from doing the dishes once or twice, puzzled by the cat’s intense stare. “Ei, Mara,” she said. “You’ve had your food, no?” She went to check, but everything seemed fine in that department. She finished the dishes, and started to clean out the store cupboards. The cat swivelled around on the stool, and after a while, the Chief Bigfoot caught Mara’s eye.

  They stared at each other, and Mara felt a ripple of hope run along her whiskers. “Hello,” she sent patiently. “Can you hear me?” Her whiskers were trembling with the effort she was putting into sending to the Chief Bigfoot, while staying off the Nizamuddin link so as not to bother the other cats. She stared harder, trying to get the Chief Bigfoot’s eyebrows to stand up like her whiskers. “Like this,” she sent, not sure whether she had actually linked or not. “See? Watch my eyebrows.” She furrowed and unfurrowed them, hoping the Chief Bigfoot would catch on.

  Success! The Chief Bigfoot’s eyebrows were trembling, and they rose slightly. Mara strained, letting her whiskers unfurl to their maximum length. If she had been sending over the link, the force of her concentration would have carried her well over the Delhi Zoo, far beyond the Yamuna river by now. Was she getting through at last? Mara didn’t realize that her small pink tongue was hanging out, or that she was making tiny distress calls from time to time. “Eyebrows,” she thought triumphantly. “That’s the secret! Focus on their eyebrows, and you have them…wait, where’s the Chief Bigfoot going?”

  Mara had to swivel again, her concentration broken as the Chief Bigfoot frowned down at her and then left the kitchen. “Come back,” the Sender sent, trying to see if there was any kind of link, “I’m sorry—was it something I said?”

  The Chief Bigfoot reappeared with both of Mara’s Bigfeet trotting behind. The Sender blinked. Had the Chief Bigfoot told her Bigfeet about their linking? But she hadn’t felt a response, really, just seen the eyebrows rise.

  She was turning the matter over in her head when the she-Bigfoot picked her up, making soothing noises. Mara stared hard at her eyebrows, wondering if she could make them twitch, too. But the he-Bigfoot was prodding at her nose, and she squirmed. “Don’t do that!” she said. “My nose is perfectly fine. Wet, as it should be…ooh! That’s my tummy you’re poking. Stop doing that, I might cough up a hairball. Wait. The towel! You brought out the towel! Not the olive oil. I hate the olive oil. No, no, I don’t need to be dosed. Stop wrapping me up—I’ll fight! I’m a warrior, I am! Blast the towel, I can’t move my paws, you horrible Bigfeet! Won’t open my mouth, so there…quit tickling, that’s really ticklish, that spot under my chin, mmmrrraaoowwwffff!” The olive oil went down her throat, despite Mara’s laments, and the Bigfeet deposited their wriggling, protesting bundle gently on the ground, watching in concern as the cat shot off, her outrage trembling at the tips of her whiskers.

  It took a long time to clean the worst of the olive oil off her fur, and Mara knew from bitter experience that it would take a while before the taste faded. The Sender’s flanks heaved as she hopped into her basket, resolving to ignore any overtures from the Bigfeet. She kept her back to the door, as a signal to the Bigfeet if they entered the room that they were no longer on speaking terms.

  “The perfidy of it!” she thought bitterly. Her Bigfeet were unpredictable, and prone to misunderstanding, but Mara hadn’t expected the Chief Bigfoot to let her down so badly. The Sender washed her whiskers to calm herself down, and decided to take a short nap.

  —

  SOMETHING WAS TUGGING HARD at her whiskers, so roughly that it was painful. She was out in an open field, unsheltered from the freezing cold. The ground under her was hard, the grass rough. Some things—more than one creature—were circling around her. Whatever was yanking at her whiskers stopped, mercifully.

  In her basket, Mara whimpered, turned over and went back to sleep.

  The creatures were getting closer. She was lying out in the open, looking up at the wide, endless twilight sky. On the far horizon, the turrets of an old mansion stood guard, as motionless and as massive as the elephants she had seen on her visits to the zoo. The harsh questioning call of peacocks ratcheted back and forth across the great gardens, and a clan of squirrels played games of tag around the massive trunk of a tree so large that its roots lay like thick ropes in the brown and green grass. Mara could hear whispers, as though cats spoke to her in the distance. Cold winds briefly stirred the sensitive filaments inside her ears, but she couldn’t make out what the mews said.

  Mara stirred, her paws warding off whatever was intruding on her dreams, but though her ears were alert, her eyes stayed closed.

  The sensitive tips of her whiskers were being brushed, lightly. It felt as though many shadowy forms had crept up, forming a circle around her, and that each one came up to her in turn, nu
zzling her whiskers as they passed. The cold seeped through her fur, reaching deep into her bones. The ground was damp as well as freezing. Through the mist, one of the creatures loomed closer and closer. She felt her whiskers being brushed, again, and then there was a sharp, unpleasant tug.

  “What a dream!” said Mara, waking with a start. It must have been the olive oil. She yawned, and her paws shot out, stiffly. The basket was cold underneath her, and hard, and prickly.

  “Finally,” said a sleek, purring voice. “That took longer than I’d expected.”

  Mara opened her eyes. She was in her room, in the basket; outside the window, the cheels swooped and called, almost finished with their sorties as night came down over Nizamuddin.

  And she was out in the middle of an open field, her fur damp from the chill of the spiky grass underneath. She blinked, and the unfamiliar red ramparts she had been gazing at, with their ornate curlicues and niches, wavered and vanished, revealing only the solid walls of home. She blinked again, and the air thickened.

  “Hello!” said several other voices, all of them sleek, but none quite as rich as the first one. A chorus of mews rang out, like a feline call to worship, and the air around Mara filled with the shadowy shapes of a dozen cats, their flickering outlines silhouetted against the rising yellow moon. “Now that the Sender of Nizamuddin is here,” said the first voice, the rich husky one, “shall we start?”

  This was no dream. Mara scrabbled, pawing the air as she swung for a sickening second between the cold earth outside, the warm blankets at home.

  “Don’t fight it,” said the smooth, purring voice she’d heard first. “Make a choice, and tell your whiskers to stay where you are. I’d suggest you stay with us, because we’ll just have to summon you again if you go away. Now that we’ve figured out how to get you here, we’re not letting you go so soon.”

  Mara took in her surroundings, the quiet lawns, the ancient statues, the peacocks in the distance, the birdsong drowning out the sounds of traffic far away. There seemed to be no Bigfeet about, though they had left traces of their presence. The ancient, mossy bricks of an old wall held birdseed, and some grains and nuts; flocks of crows and mynahs pecked at this banquet at one end, while the squirrels chased each other round and round, their tails fluffed into perky grey fringes against the cold. Doves added their persuasive, soothing crooning to the air, softening the brisk hammering that the woodpeckers produced as they went about their business. A hoopoe trod gingerly along the grass, its bright stripes warming the winter. Two parrots flashed by, leaving brilliant green trails in the sky as they called to each other in eloquent screeches.

  “Summon me?” said Mara, wondering if that was what she’d felt—the tugs on her whiskers, the sense that she’d been forcibly lifted through the air and brought here.

  “The way you did with that tiger,” said another purr, a lively, sparkling voice. “We heard all about it here in Mehrauli!”

  “Enough with the chitchat,” the first voice said sternly. “Umrrow Jaan, wait for your turn to speak. Mara, stop wavering between Nizamuddin and the Garden of the Cheels, you’re making me dizzy with all that shimmering in and out. We have a lot to say to you, and about the way you’ve been sending in your sleep, but that will have to wait until after the meeting of the Circle of Senders of Delhi. Senders, raise your whiskers, where are your manners? Say hello to the Sender of Nizamuddin, it’s her first time inside the Circle.”

  There were fewer of them than she’d thought—perhaps seven in all. The Speaker for the Circle of Senders was smaller than the voice had led Mara to expect. She was a neat calico, her fur combed down despite the tendrils of mist that clung to it, with sharp, deep brown eyes.

  “Begum, look at her tail, curling into a question mark,” said a plump tabby, with jaunty and slightly crooked whiskers that gave her a cheerful air. “We’re so used to the Circle, but it must be strange for you, Sender of Nizamuddin.”

  Before Mara could speak, Begum cut in, her whiskers brisk. “There’s nothing to it, Mara,” she said. “Each Sender comes from a different part of Delhi, and we take it in turns to share about our neighbourhood. Listen to the others, and you’ll soon catch up with us, never fear. Shall we start, Senders? We’ll go by area, starting with Chandni Chowk—Jalebi, you go first.”

  Mara took a last, wistful look back at her warm blankets, and told herself to stay with the circle of cats. There was something in the voice of the Sender that made her think there was little point in leaving; the cat’s whiskers told her that she’d meant it about summoning Mara again.

  “Business as usual,” Jalebi was saying. “We had some trouble with the outsiders—this year’s railway cats—and the birds, but they listened when Gulab and Jamun explained that the Bigfeet’s homes and workplaces were off limits.”

  “Any incidents?” asked the Speaker.

  “Yes, unfortunately,” said Jalebi. “Two of the railway cats sneaked into the Jain Bird Hospital and killed a few pigeons before we could stop them.”

  “That’s a risk,” said the Speaker, and Mara felt a ripple of assent run along the whiskers of all the cats.

  “We were lucky,” said Jalebi. “The Bigfeet thought it was the rats who’d done it. But the railway cats have promised they’ll do their hunting elsewhere and leave the birds at the bird hospital alone. I don’t expect more trouble from them, they’re quite sweet, especially Catmandu’s crew from Nepal.”

  “Right,” said the Speaker. “Anything else? How are the litters doing this winter?”

  “There’s enough food for them,” said Jalebi. “Some shortages in the Jama area, because they had a sudden rise in the number of stray dogs, so there isn’t enough food, not even in the garbage heaps. But the Kashmere Gate side has ample feeding, prey and trash both, so many of the Jama cats have shifted there.”

  “Thank you, Jalebi,” the Speaker said. “The Sender of Hauz Khas, next—anything to report, Baoli?”

  At first, Mara listened carefully to the Senders’ reports. For a brief space, she couldn’t tell whether the cats were actually there, or whether they had been summoned, but after she had heard two or three of them speak, she noticed that most of the Senders had a shimmering outline, and that their whiskers seemed to flicker in the breeze. Jalebi appeared to be present, and so did the Speaker, but she would have said that none of the other Senders were.

  Umrrow Jaan’s report held Mara’s interest: some of the cats had moved after the Bigfeet had built yet another market, Umrrow said, but a few had come down from the Qutb Minar and become market cats, attracted by the prospect of easy feeding from the trash cans, instead of the daily grind of hunting and killing. The Sender from the Embassy area, Spook, was droning on and on, and Mara’s attention began to wander. I wonder, she said to herself, why summonings have to feel so real. Isn’t there a way to hear and see the Senders without sitting on this prickly patch of grass, in this cold? She tried to wrap her tail all the way around her for warmth and overbalanced, because she’d stretched it too far. But if she wrapped her tail halfway around, the unwrapped flank stayed cold.

  “The Sender of Nizamuddin?” said the Speaker.

  Mara experimented with wrapping her tail around one flank for a little while, and then switching to the other side, to see if that would work. But all it did was to make both flanks feel cold.

  “The Sender of Nizamuddin, we’re waiting for you,” said the Speaker.

  Mara shuffled backwards on the grass, looking for a warmer patch, but the ground was even colder, so she shuffled forwards again.

  “Mara!” said the Speaker, huffing.

  The Sender flicked her ears at Begum, startled.

  “Your report, Mara? As Sender of Nizamuddin?” said the calico cat, her tail beginning to switch back and forth. “Weren’t you listening to Umrrow Jaan and Jalebi and the rest of us?”

  Begum’s fur was fluffing up in annoyance, and Mara thought that despite the differences between the two in terms of their colouring, there was
more than a slight resemblance between Begum and Beraal.

  But her mews were gentle enough, as she prompted Mara. “Just the basics, then. How are the Nizamuddin cats doing?” said Begum. “On your rounds of the neighbourhood, what have you noticed? Is there any trouble with the Bigfeet? We haven’t had any news from Nizamuddin since Miao’s death, and we’ve wondered whether the cats were back to normal after the battle.”

  “I didn’t know Miao was a Sender,” said Mara, momentarily diverted.

  Begum said, “She wasn’t, but she was a good friend to all of us, a keeper of the old histories. She had her ways of sending news across, through the mynahs and the cheels. But we haven’t had news of Nizamuddin for a long time.”

  Jalebi said, “We’ve been so worried, especially when we heard about Datura and the ferals. Why, there was a feral outbreak once in Chandni, and it took down so many of the clan before they left. Are your cats all right?”

  The Circle of Senders waited for Mara to respond, and she found her whiskers twitching nervously.

  “I think so,” she said hesitantly. “Southpaw doesn’t say much, but he drops in every few days or so. The last time we met, he was in trouble, though—he’d gone hunting in the Bigfeet kitchens and injured his paw.”

  Begum waited expectantly, her whiskers raised in receiving mode.

  Mara stared at the Senders, not sure what to say.

  “And?” prompted Umrrow Jaan, her crossed eyes squinting in a kind way at Mara.

  “Well,” said Mara, “he got away, though it was such a big risk. I scolded him, but he doesn’t listen to me much these days, he thinks he’s as good a hunter as Katar, even though he’s half Katar’s size.”

  Begum’s tail was twitching uncertainly. “Mara,” she said, “I don’t understand. Who’s Southpaw, and why was he raiding Bigfeet kitchens? How’s the rest of the clan? Is Katar managing as clan leader without Miao’s guidance? How’s Beraal doing with her litter—she was pregnant, wasn’t she? Have the Bigfeet reacted in any way after the battle?”