We miss Mimi, a stray cat who once found a home in a pile of old furniture kept by our haris  under the stairway leading to the second floor of the building where we live. We first discovered Mimi’s existence when we found the feline asleep on the doormat on which we wipe our feet before entering our rented home. We knew she was a she because she had kittens hiding under the discarded pieces of furniture.



Although she was a stray cat, she did not act like one. Unlike common stray cats which avoid humans coming their way, Mimi would come near us with a cat’s usual greeting “meow” as if telling us that she was a friend.



Over time, we became fond of her and christened her “Mimi”, the generic name of endearment Filipinos give to cats they are fond of. One day after driving my daughter to school and my wife to the hospital where she works, I saw Mimi sleeping on our doormat. “Mimi, get out of my way,” I told her.



She did not move. But when I opened the door, she spritely entered the house ahead of me, her tail raised high, and walked with a regal gait as if she had springs on her feet. She reminded me of the pampered cats in the animated film “The Aristocats” which my wife and I had bought for our daughter when she was in nursery school.



I shouted at Mimi and told her to get out of the house. She strutted past our living room, which also serves as our dining room, and went straight to our bedroom where she seemed to be sniffing for something.



Was she looking for a rat to catch? I would have no way of knowing. I can sometimes read the minds of people, but it’s difficult to read the mind of a cat. Knowing that she would not listen to my pleadings, or even scolding, I opened a can of sardines that I took from our kitchen cabinet, allowed her to smell it and lured her out of the house. She followed me and I led her to the parking area where our occasional feeding sessions for her took place under some plants where I had placed a plastic plate.



My daughter and I often talked about Mimi and how different she was from common stray cats. We speculated that perhaps she was a domesticated cat abandoned by her masters. The topic reminded me of the problem of overpopulation in a growing metropolis like Jeddah where sprawling home backyards have to give way to high-rise buildings to accommodate more people.



Our daughter once suggested to her mother that we adopt Mimi as a pet but my wife firmly put her foot down. “Where do you think she will sleep?” she asked. My wife added that cat fur strewn all over the house could cause asthma. Besides, I told our daughter that taking cats and dogs for pets is prohibited in Saudi Arabia and that we have to abide by the Kingdom’s laws and respect its culture and traditions. I have read somewhere that the mutawas consider cats and dogs to be symbols of the decadent Western culture.



So I just kept on feeding Mimi under those plants beside the parking area whenever we had table leftovers. We did not feed the kittens as they would hide under the discarded furniture every time they saw us. I think Mimi was breastfeeding them. We found out that there were six of them when our haris, a Pakistani, collected them by force and left them to live on their own elsewhere. Mimi had eluded the haris and, from then on, she would scamper in fright every time she saw him coming her way.



We did not like Mimi sleeping on our doormat because of her habit of entering the house ahead of us when we opened the door. So we would always keep her at bay outside the building’s main door, although she would often find a way to our doormat when some tenants left the main door open. Mimi would always run toward me each time she saw me or the three of us coming home, usually rubbing her body against the legs of my trousers to my consternation. “Mimi, stop it, go away!” I didn’t know if she understood, but she would go to the other side, allowing me to open the door which I would then close hurriedly.



Once, my daughter asked me if we did not appear to be weird people for feeding the cat while the other tenants of the building did not seem to like her. I told her not to mind what other people think of us. “What others think of you does not change what you are or who you are,” I told her, happy over the thought that I was able to impart the virtue of being one’s self, without sounding like I was lecturing. “As long as you don’t step on other people’s toes, don’t let other people’s opinion bother you; you have to hold on to what you believe in.”



Although Mimi often annoyed us, we began to miss her when we could not find her for several days in a row. When I asked our haris where the cat had gone, he told me that one tenant shoved her into his car and dropped her somewhere. “I miss Mimi,” our 16-year-old daughter would often say whenever we saw stray cats rummaging through the rubbish of the ubiquitous big blue garbage bins.



I have little compassion for stray cats, which are part of the symptoms of urban blight. In fact, I hate to  hear them quarreling loudly outside our house in the wee hours of the night. But I feel a tinge of sadness and a sense of loss every time I think of Mimi. She reminds me of how urbanization is forcing us to sacrifice core values for our own convenience and well-being.

 

Casiano Mayor Jr.

Jeddah