We are a cat

• I have a pet. It is a cat. His name is 'Teh Besar' because his fur used to be milky white, but now there are patches of milo brown on his body. Now, we only call him Teh.
  
• Actually we had a few cats in the house ; Abu, Teh Kecik, Tam and Teh Besar. Teh Kecik died after an accident in front of the house, and we buried him in the lawn, where flowers are blooming over his cemetary.
  
• Abu then got depressed, and caught hepatitis and passed away. Tam was more of a punk rock cat and was really rebellious. His body was found mummified in between the tall grass of the field in front of the house.
  
• And so, the only cat remaining is Teh Besar.
  

• The title of this post is borrowed from a translation of 'Wagahai wa neko de aru', a Japanese novel. Grammatically, it translates as 'I am a cat', but according to a friend's post, there's a tone of arrogance in the original Japanese, which may be properly translated as 'We are a cat', in royal plural form.
  
• As you can see above, the cat still has balls, literally. Mama decided not to castrate Teh as she predicted he might be depressed after the procedure. So right now, he might be inseminating a she-cat, at some cat club, in a cat town somewhere in a cat universe.
• And he likes to mimick sleeping poses of human beings. As you can see above, he is sleeping in this supine position, although nampak kurang sopan sikit. Few weeks back, my mum slept beside him on a pillow, and he went on to sleep on my mum's shin, which becamse a makeshift pillow for him. I saw my sis sleeping in the living room, with her back arched. And he went on to sleep in the same way beside my sis.
  

• The cat doesn't like me much. I still remember a time when i arrived back home from Langkawi, he saw me and made the jump for safety, only to end up hitting the sliding door which he thought wasn't there. But when i was in Malaysia last summer holidays, he became super friendly with me. At times, he even rubbed his back against my legs.
• Maybe because he was sick. He was dehydrated when me and mama brought him to the clinic. Some ticks were sucking his blood and when the vet sprayed some medicine on his body, those ticks came out in droves from the creases of his body.
  
• He is scared of males. He recognizes males as creatures who wear long pants. He would recognize me as a female everytime i wear a sarong in the last few years.
  
• However, this past summer, just as i thought he knows me pretty well, he proved me wrong yet again. I changed spectacles and in an instance, he thought i was someone else and ran away everytime i came close to him. But i don't really mind.
  
• He seeks for attention. As you can see in the picture above, everytime i start to read the newspaper, he will come over and sleep over the spread so that i could shift our attention to him.

There is a legend that our Prophet Muhammad PBUH had a pet cat named Muezza (When Cats Reigned Like Kings, page 4). According to a line of the book, 'He once cut off the sleeve of his garment rather than disturb the little fellow who had fallen asleep there.' Althought the validity of such story could not be confirmed through any hadith (or maybe i've yet to discover it), there is another hadith which instructed us to take good care of pets in general : -

Abu Huraira reported Allah's Messenger (may peace be upon him) as saying: A woman was punished because of a cat. She had neither provided her with food nor drink, nor set her free so that she might eat the insects of the earth.

Literally, Abu Huraira means 'father of the kitten' because he used to have a cat when he was small. He was a sahaba who was blessed with exceptional memory, whose name is mentioned in a lot of hadith as a part of the chain of transmission.

So please be nice to your pets, even though they don't recognize you once you've changed your spectacles.