There was a shaded lamp in her salon, but the windows were open, and the light of the street, with its undisturbing murmur, as if everything ran on indiarubber, came up through the interstices of the balcony and made a vague glow and a flitting of shadows on the ceiling. All she had said on the way was that she was very tired of Paris. She took his arm and they went along the boulevard, on the right hand side, to the Rue de la Paix, saying little to each other during the transit: and then they passed into the hotel and up to her rooms. Her carriage came and stood there, and Nick asked if he should send it away to which she said, “No, let it stand a bit.” She let it stand along time, and then she told him to dismiss it they would walk home. She discoursed considerably about herself, mentioning certain things she meant to do on her return to town, her plans for the rest of the season. She talked about London, about the news written to her in her absence, about Cannes and the people she had seen there, about her poor sister-in-law and her numerous progeny, and two or three droll things that had happened at Versailles. DALLOW leaned back against the lighted glass of the café, comfortable and beguiled, watching the passers, the opposite shops, the movement of the square in front of them. “Cats, like authors, are solitary, and they love their independence, which is why they are a great pet for the author," says Aiyar.MRS. “The subtext, in all these references, is that of an animal that is all-powerful, even more than the humans around him," says Dutt. Bengali poet Jibanananda Das’ poem Bedaal describes a cat that gathers darkness and pats it into balls with its paws-that’s how night comes about. The Carroll-inspired Sukumar Roy’s Hojoborolo, a Bengali children’s short story, has a cat appearing out of a handkerchief, and slipping back to being the handkerchief at the end of the tale. Carroll’s Cheshire Cat in Alice in Wonderland is inexplicably powerful (even more than the king and queen, and prone to sudden disappearances, although uncomfortably enough, his grin always remains. Authors have paid generous tribute to this mystique with almost “every second cat in literature being extremely powerful, or magical (with the “vanishing act" being a recurrent theme), or a combination of both," says Ajanta Dutt, lecturer of English Literature at Delhi University. This duality may explain why it has simultaneously been worshipped (as in ancient Egypt) and considered a symbol of evil (black cats were associated with wizardry and witchcraft in Pagan Europe). The cat is perched between domesticity and the world outside, a pet that is its own master. “Cats slink around, watch from treetops, hide in garbage bins, eavesdrop in conversations, pick up on the air of changes: You can impute a richer psychological world to the cat," she adds. “Cats, on the other hand, work wonderfully for cross-over fiction that lends itself to a variety of layers, and can be read differently by children or adults," says Aiyar, whose book is an allegory about a rapidly modernizing Chinese society. “There’s a certain naïveté you associate with dogs, which is why having a dog in the story makes it an obviously children’s story," says Pallavi Aiyar, whose recently released Chinese Whiskers has two cats, Soyabean and Tofu, as protagonists. It goes from pondering the naming of cats to the tale of “fiend in feline shape", Macavity. Eliot, who debated extending his classic Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats (which inspired the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical Cats), to include dogs as well, told Paris Review in 1959 that dogs “simply didn’t lend themselves to verse quite so well, collectively, as cats." Old Possum’s Book is a delightful window into the schizophrenic world of cats, in all their narcissistic, lovable, lazy, fiendish glory.
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