The Circle of Life

'Chiquita' is a Spanish word for 'little one', sometimes also used to refer to 'pretty little girl'. But that was not why I chose to call her Chiquita when I first saw her that morning, dirty, hungry and hoarse from crying for food. There was a ring in this word and there was a ring in her spirit that made me want to call her by that name the moment I saw her. Evidently she was an orphan, not looked after, not been taught the tricks of survival that were so characteristic of her species. Infact she did not even know how to lap up the milk that I offered in a bowl. 'It would be challenging,' I thought, but she looked up to me with such large promising eyes, that I knew she would make it.

She did make it... into my house, into my garden, into my life and into my heart. Well, into a lot of things actually. Most mornings even before I got the chance to read the newspapers, it was in shreds. The sofa cushions and all forms of upholstery began to look tortured after a few days and almost all my curtains began to smell of cat pee. If I was lucky someday to get to the newspaper before she did, she would come and sit on the page I happened to be reading. In few days she mastered the art to such an extent that she could actually sit on the exact paragraph which I would be reading at that time. There was no way I could win, she would have it her way every time. Soon I began to feel bullied in my own house... perhaps the only time I enjoyed it! Soon I realised that we could work out our own equation irrespective of what others in the family thought. My husband loved her when she performed her antics and put up a show, but not when his shoes ended up being her litter box! My son loved her when she purred but not when his mother's attention was divided. We all loved Chiquita and we were all tormented by her! There was too much of a 'I dont give a damn' attitude about her. She came in as a scrawny, little thing, absolutely true to her name and eventually blossomed into a gorgeous girl. Neighbours began to envy me when we used to sit out in the garden sipping tea while Chiquita ran around being her nastiest best, killing every form of inconsequential life. Cockroaches were her favourite and though mice scared her, she tried to impress me sometimes by wounding them to the point of no recovery but not killing them either. I, off course, was not impressed by such savagery, which when I made clear to her, she listened to me with droopy eyes, half sorry but half resolved that she would perhaps try again!

Chiquita turned out to be garden friendly. There was nothing she loved more than rolling on the grass and romping around till the outdoors got unbrearably warm. However for some reason unfathomable to man, she had a particular malice towards my beautiful White Ginger Lily shrub. 'Why' is the question I could never answer. From midsummer through autumn the stalks are topped with clusters of wonderfully fragrant white flowers that look like butterflies. The flowers eventually give way to showy seed pods chock full of bright red seeds. The lance shaped leaves of this shrub are even lovelier. Yet Chiquita would leave no stone unturned to see to it that some harm was done to the shrub. Somedays I found the leaves savagely mauled, somedays it was the flowers and on some other days the plant just looked very very sad. I could understand that Chiquita had given it her share of rancour.

It was shortly after we celebrated Chiquita's second year with us and life was beautiful. She grew up to be quite a lady, with large beautiful eyes and lush fur. Misfortunes have a subtle way with life. It strikes hardest when you least expect it to, worse still, it will strike you when you have begin to think that you have safegaurded yourself against it. One morning I woke up my husband in panic. "She is urinating blood" I gasped...... The look on the vet's face was not very good, he didnt seem to want to mince words. Something was definitely wrong. The following week passed in a frenzy of visits to the vet, ultrasounds, and medications. The week following that brought us the bad news. Chiquita had contracted ulcers in one of her kidneys, some of them cancerous. And what followed after that I do not remember. I was much too dazed, much too angry, too full of questions to remember how long that ordeal lasted or how worse it got each day. Chiquita took it all, with patience. She had this indomitable desire to live. She never retorted or complained about the horrible medicine, she went through all the therapies possible, just thumping her tail when it got too painful. She got weaker, unable to romp around the garden. And then we suddenly noticed her bonding with her arch enemy, the White Ginger Lily shrub. She would lie beneath it the entire day without harming a single leaf. The plant regained its previous vigour as we watched our beautiful girl wane away.

We knew this day was coming. The vet told us that Chiquita would not get any better and she was in greater pain than we could imagine. It would be best to let her go. That morning dawned usual, sunny and uneventful. My girl was already in the garden beneath the Ginger Lily shrub soaking up the sunshine. I fed her, her favourite breakfast, and put her in the car. She was excited about the car drive as always. After we reached the clinic, the vet lead me to a quiet room. It was very peaceful in there and he left the two of us alone for a while. I stroked her for as long as I could and she off course didnt know what was coming. As I kept stroking her neck, the vet injected her. I looked deep into her beautiful eyes and whispered in her ears, "Goodbye my friend. We will meet in the great hereafter." She looked up to me and smiled. I think she said, "Dont worry. I will be back soon.. and you would know." It was only a few minutes and she was at peace.

We had a dry autumn that year and a colder winter than usual. I could not tend to the garden as often as I was used to and most of the shrubs looked sad and unhealthy. The Ginger Lily looked worse than usual. All its flowers had dried up, the leaves were pallied and I had to attend to it immediately or it might have died. Nothing changed much other than the seasons. And as is the cycle of life, Spring arrived with warmth and a riot of colours. The garden looked greener, happier and in full bloom. The Ginger Lily shrub bore bunched of beautiful white flowers after a long long time. I went up to it and plucked one. It smelled sweet and exquisitely pretty. I put it to my cheek, looked up at the blue sky above and whispered, "Welcome home, girl"!