The cat’s whiskers

The cat’s whiskers

A few pages into Nilanjana Roy’s The Wildings, you’ll wish you had whiskers and could mew. The world as imagined by Roy in this remarkable debut is filled with marvels, not the least of which is the feline social media network which makes Twitter look witheringly banal. Roy is a cat-, cheel-, mouse- and mongoose-whisperer and this is the animals’ story, unhampered by human interference. Set in the neighbourhood of Nizamuddin, which is neatly divided between different wild and semi-tame animals, The Wildings begins with a threat named Mara. You wouldn’t think that an adorable orange fuzzball could endanger an entire colony of cats, but Mara is no ordinary kitten. She is a Sender, which means she can dominate the telepathic network through which cats communicate. The problem is that Mara doesn’t belong to Nizamuddin and has been adopted by humans. Stray cats, or wildings, don’t think much of house cats and to have a Sender who transmits messages about “the fell captivity of the fearsome sock drawer” is downright embarrassing. Fortunately, Mara has a few friends among the wildings, namely Beraal, who becomes Mara’s tutor, and Southpaw, a kitten with a gift for landing in trouble. Unfortunately, despite the fact that Mara and Beraal are the most finely-etched characters in The Wildings, the novel is not about the Sender. Mara’s appearance in Nizamuddin is the appetiser while the entree is a clash between the wildings and the ferals, a group of crazed, bloodthirsty cats led by the vicious Datura. With the ferals taking centrestage, Mara’s story is set aside (presumably for the sequel), which is frustrating. Roy also makes you hunger for more back stories, particularly since the few she offers, like that of Ozzy the tiger, are delightful. However, despite these disappointments, The Wildings is a pageturner and a charming read. Apparently, Roy wrote the novel by treating it like non-fiction. No wonder, then, that it feels perfectly real.