A Short, Endless Biography of Tushi

Tushi was a cat who could have been an ocean.

She could have been other things as well like – a blanket that smelled of warmth, a puddle in your green yards, a broken wristwatch, a collage of photographs never taken together, a pair of socks or even, a grey, cloudy afternoon.

But she must’ve been destined to be an ocean. It’s unquestionable.



Tushi wasn’t always a cat. Before becoming a cat, she had been a balloon. Red with yellow-freckles. Hydrogen filled. After the kid had left the string that connected the balloon in a child’s hand with the eternal call of the ether, calling Tushi. After the kid had let go of that divine connection, like children always do. After the inflicted independence. Tushi had flown higher.

The breeze playing with her artificial, rubbery skin. Carrying her hither and thither. Over many fields, cities and their adjacent court-houses. And one endless blue sky that encompasses it all with snowflaked clouds. She had flown through the clouds too. Learnt that above the clouds the earth’s eliminated. And nothing remains but the cloud.

She had seen the rains too. Above the clouds. A rain of animal children. Cubs, puppies, calves, piglets and kittens. They all fell from the skies above. Tossing and turning. Trying to grab the free air with their claws or their paws. Or if they were close enough, trying to hold on to each other. Instictively fighting against an impending hurt.

What the babies never knew was that their fall was just like Tushi’s flight. And in the end you never get hurt. Because the end is not sudden but continuous.

Tushi will be a cat who could’ve been an ocean.



Tushi was a cat. And her voyage to become an ocean is entirely arbitrary.

Cats aren’t meant to be oceans. Or any water-bodies, for that matter. Cats are meant to be afraid of water itself. And therefore, stay far away from it. And not become one. Themselves.

Once upon a time, when Tushi was small, she had wanted to become the apron that her mistress wore. She had discovered magic in that piece of cloth. Its shape. Smell. And the way it wrapped around her mistress. She had even tasted it once. That was the first time she had dreamt of the ocean. An endless salty wetness.

She had never been to an ocean as a cat. But she remembered seeing the ocean once as a balloon. Times when she had been flying high in the skies. She remembered the distance. And the vastness.

Tushi was surprised that that taste of her mistress’s apron would remind her of the ocean, once again. She couldn’t think of a connection. But the feeling was overwhelming. She had sat in one corner of the room for the next few days. Shell-shocked.   With a gathering of images that were much too dense for her little head. A torture by indecipherable images.

And sounds.



She had found the sounds recurring a few months later. Outside herself.

She was woken up that afternoon by a cool breeze that rushed into her fur. Tushi woke up to find her mistress sitting in a place where Tushi had never seen her before. Her mistress had pulled up her study chair beside the window and was sitting staring outside.

Tushi looked out too. It was a grey, cloudy afternoon outside. Dark and calm. The storm had only just begun. Dry leaves that had been swept to a corner of the garden were reclaiming their original positions. And it was time when you could see the wind. Rushing towards you. Crashing on the walls. You could see too, your mistress’s hair fluttering as she keeps sitting unmoving into the storm. Like a spirit. With the storm invading the room. Shouting itself. Noise. Frightening.

Tushi remembers fighting for a place to hide before the storm subsides. As does the noise. Making way for a melody.

A rain. From beneath the clouds. Of droplets. Jostling and mingling with each other. Dense. A foggy rain. And a music of continuity. Oddly recognizable for Tushi. She has been acquainted with it for quite a few days now. Continually. The ocean. It was there inside her head. Now it seemed as if it had sprung outside herself. Outside the room. Into the open air.

All had become an ocean.

It was the sound. The melody. Tushi knew she had to be an ocean. Unmistakably. Sooner or later. Sometime.

After the rain had subsided and sound of the ocean had vanished from the world outside Tushi; when the same sound had become even denser inside her head, Tushi had followed her mistress into the garden. Stepped into the wet grasses. And found the puddle.

It was a matter of no small significance for Tushi to be walking inside a puddle. The puddle had hidden in its core the sensation of the ocean. For every step that she took, and her tiny paws merged completely in the waters, she could feel the ocean surge inside her head.

Tushi wondered if her mistress too could feel the same sensation for she saw her covering her face with her palms. Then, her shoulder shook twice before she knelt down in the puddle itself and started to cry. Tears flowing down her cheek.



Tushi had gone missing for a few months from her mistress’s house, once. Or that’s how her mistress thought it to be. During all these days, Tushi’s mistress would wander off to unknown places every evening in hope of finding Tushi back. She even took some of the darker alleys thinking she’d find Tushi sitting in some dimly lit corner.

But dark alleys are like a parallel universe in our existence. You’d find there only what you’d never expect. Jeering men and indecent women, drunken beggars, their pet street dogs and a poverty you’d never known existed. And remembering the fact that you are walking through these alleys might just bring tears in your eyes. Warm.

Tushi could not be found though. Tushi was never lost at all and her mistress might just as well had seen her if she had known to see. But she was too clever to imagine. She suffered from the same disease that most human were born with: rationality.

Tushi had chosen to be her mistress’s tears.

It had begun that day after the rain. When Tushi had for the first time seen her mistress sit in the puddle and weep. She had seen her tears sparkle as they traced their way down her cheek. Tushi didn’t understand the reasons. Nor the attraction she felt to be those teardrops.

It was only after she had transformed into her mistress’s tears that she became conscious of the taste. Teardrops that tasted of the ocean. Was her mistress too, a constituent of the ocean? Living all the different lives that Tushi had been living? And does that describe all the photographs that she had been working on?

Tushi had thought it was just a hobby for her. Going out with her camera. Walking through the unknown streets. Taking pictures of perfect strangers. Returning home. Making a collage of all the photographs. Of people. Such that it would seem that they were all part of some huge family. Sect. Culture. Such that it’d seem that they had all known each other for years. Intimately. In her photographs they readily shared a life, together, with each other, which they wouldn’t have known otherwise.

Compatibility. A question which would have otherwise hounded them in their real lives, was always absent in her photographs. And that’s exactly what her photographs always did: eliminate questions. Distance. And prejudice. As if the world could have begun, all over again, like a new day, from her photographs.

And after the collages were complete, each time, Tushi would find her mistress staring at those photographs for a long, long time. All this while her eyelids not falling for once. Until tears appeared in her eyes. Making her manipulated images turn hazy. Tushi didn’t understand, even as one of those tears in her mistress’s eyes, why was it that your eyelids must fall, every now and then, to restrain the tears?



Tushi was a cat who could have been an ocean.

Was that too, a question of compatibility? Were she and the ocean like the pair of socks and her mistress’s feet?

The winter had brought questions. Like the mist that it’s destined to bring. The winter. That makes you want to hide within yourself in search of warmth. That ascertains an annual baptism of the grasses in dew. That challenges you.

The pair of socks, which Tushi’s mistress wore in the room, seemed to have been made just for her feet. Stitched across her feet. With careful analysis of the structure. Tushi wondered who made those socks for her. Someone who knew her mistress too well? Or her feet?

Later, Tushi would have to learn that they didn’t need to know her mistress at all. Humans had come up with a solution that fitted much easily into the current crisis: elasticity. A perfect solution. Robbing an object of its innate structure. Such that it’d take the shape of that which it shall contain. Elasticity: A careful alternative to individual acquaintance.

Tushi would wonder if her mistress’s collage of photographs were elastic too – for they did the same thing to the world.

And then, Tushi shall realize that she herself was elastic too. She had the powers of taking the form of that which shall contain her. And someday, soon enough, she’ll contain an ocean.

Thinking of the ocean in the winter often brought into Tushi’s endless mind, the blanket that contained her mistress. A blanket that smelled of warmth. In a winter that had brought questions. Like its mist. Too dense.

Her mistress would often call Tushi to sleep under the blanket that smelled of warmth.  But Tushi was always afraid. The darkness underneath the blanket had seemed endless to her. She was frightened of getting lost in that darkness. Or probably even melting into it. Becoming the darkness.

Tushi never wanted to be darkness. Darkness brings with itself a promise. And a somber music of melancholia. Tushi had heard her mistress weep many a times under the blanket that smelled of warmth. Tushi had learnt that in the wintertime you may only weep underneath a blanket that smelled of warmth, because it would be the warmth itself that’d restrain your tears from getting frozen.

On one such night, when Tushi’s mistress pulled Tushi under the blanket to keep her warm and Tushi revolted against the darkness, trying to runaway, she had dragged with herself a photograph. It was a photograph of darkness with a wristwatch glowing in its center. The time couldn’t be seen because its glass was cracked. And the crack seemed endless in the photograph. Spilling out of the watch. Flowing through the darkness beyond.



Tushi never wanted to be darkness. But it was the mystery of the broken wristwatch in the photograph that called her. In the darkness that shone beyond. Tushi didn’t believe that there was nothing beyond the darkness. She was certain of finding the source of all the photographs by her mistress. Of all her tears. Beyond the darkness.

After Tushi had become darkness, she chose to melt in a corner of her mistress’s mind. Things become too bright when you become darkness. Tushi saw many things and most of them hurt her eyes.

In the beginnings, it was like the oceans. Images faded in and out like the sounds of the perpetual waves. A few flowers in the garden; two meals on the dining table; a camera; a few men in robes darker than Tushi had become now, as darkness; one man whose face blinked like your eyes; puddles; dirty shoes; dirt that spilled onto the darkness.

Gradually, those images started becoming like the depths of the ocean. Slow, silent and continuous. That’s when they took some form.

She saw, for instance, the blinking man, now more prominent and continuous, with a camera in his hands, taking photographs of her mistress who was tending the flowers, playfully in the garden.

She saw the two of them play with each other under the blanket that smelled of warmth.

She saw the two of them play with each other in the rain, in the green yards, into their skins.

She saw the two of them holding hands.

And above all of these, Tushi saw something else that she didn’t quite understand. Or like.

Tushi saw the same man falling. On the ground. Being pushed by a hand. Of someone who didn’t even matter in the end. Neither did this man. To the frenzy. The madness of fear. A stampede. Stampede: a forgetting of the pride of being human. A stampede that had lost its beginning and its end. Seemed like a tail that went on forever. Of people shoving against each other. Of scared people. Of people who’d never know each other. Living in an elastic world. Exercising their powers of elasticity.

Tushi saw the man falling. On the ground. A thousand feet stepping over him. Diminished to just another stone. A hurdle that needs to be crossed. To save yourselves. Against the scare. Against the mob. Against death. People covering him. Shoes. Of many colors. Shapes. Sizes. Only the dirt common betwixt them. Ruining his neatly pressed shirt. And him.

Tushi saw the man falling. On the ground. Lying. His face smeared with blood. Long after the stampede. When nothing remained but the emptiness. And a defying silence. Tushi saw the man lying. On the ground. Unrecognizable. For all his features. Except for a wristwatch that lay beside him. Just like him. Broken.

Tushi saw all of it fade too. Returning to the darkness. A certain feeling of claustrophobia, gradually taking over her. She wanted to become a cat again. But she couldn’t differentiate herself from the all encompassing darkness. She had become like the stampede. Uncertain of her beginning and her end. A form of shapelessness. Elasticity. Tushi wanted to become a cat again. Her mistress’s apron. Her tears. A balloon that rose up. And something else too. Something more.

Tushi was a cat who could have been an ocean.