Random thoughts by Punya
This is me on the balcony of my flat in Via Circo, Milan. I am wearing a Marimekko dress – pure, heavy cotton with red and orange stripes (that’s the 60s for you!) The cat was also orange. He looks freaked out because it’s four stories up. Once he must have fallen all the way down, probably jumping after a bird, because the owners of the restaurant on the ground floor had found him in their al fresco garden. So, that’s a cat with only 8 lives left… I remember when he arrived – in my rawhide weekend travelling bag. Marco opened the zipper very slowly and cautiously; he expected the cat to jump at him as soon as it saw the light of day. But there the kitten was, crouched in a corner. So small – he fit in the palm of my hand. I remember hearing something like, So you have some company.
I needed company! It must have been about the time when Marco started his relationship with Bianca. I never suspected anything of the sort as we were not married to each other, in fact, he was still married to his wife. We were actually living in sin according to the Catholic church (and it may have even been illegal by civic law). He could have easily said goodbye to me and moved out, but he did not want to live with this Bianca (as I found out later). I had thought only married people cheated on each other.
The cat WAS great company. When I was working on translations, he would sit flat on the paper. Or, after much convincing to leave my desk alone, he’d place himself on my back, bum on my right, and head on my left, shoulder. The purring in my left ear (my best) was constant background music to whatever I was doing. In the morning I’d wake up from a slight tickle on my nose. When I’d open my eyes he’d be sitting on my chest, paws neatly tucked under, looking straight into my face with his big turquoise eyes. What, you are still asleep?
The cat never got a name. I never thought that it needed one. He was the only cat around. I would just call, Gatto! (Italian for cat) and he would come. I rarely had to call him as his hearing was excellent; he heard the opening of a can before I even reached for my Swiss Army knife. He loved cauliflower. Miaowing and jumping up on the stove where it was cooking. He could hardly wait for it to cool down in his bowl. Maybe cats love fish because of the stench and not so much for the taste.
In Italy they say that ginger cats are a bit mad. And this one was mad indeed. Sometimes he would look at something invisible to human sight (was it a ghost?). His eyes would widen to disk-like orbs, he’d make an unexpected jump at the invisible object and, bewildered, walk away as if nothing had happened. The moment he understood I was getting ready for bed, he’d hide under it and, when I walked past, jump at my feet combat style, but with withdrawn claws. I never got hurt.
When I came back from my 6-month au pair stint in London, Gatto did not leave my side for the whole morning, making little noises, tail straight up in the air, trembling with joy. He must have loved me, too. After I moved out, the cat remained with Marco, as I could not move into my father’s with a cat. Maybe because of the lack of cauliflower – or me – the cat died one day, without apparent reason. Marco told me about it with quite some regret.
Another red cat came into my life much later, in Corfu. He had a name: Moritz. He was one of Ganga’s cats we looked after for a while. He once had mites in one of his ears. He scratched the ear so badly that it was bleeding. A horrific trip to the vet. Creams. I was dying of anxiety. What, I thought, if I had to look after someone’s KID?
Just a few months before I flew to India with a free ticket from Air India, I thought I was pregnant with João’s child. (Marco, who had a child with his wife, had been ultra careful to not impregnate me – but coitus interruptus is not so much fun, though it has its advantages.) João’s parents had already sent us pieces of baby clothing, but it turned out to be a false alarm. A later curretage showed that nothing had even been there in the first place…
When I started travelling back and forth to India from Italy, and later from Switzerland, I was happy that I did not have to take care of a child, a husband or anyone else. I would not have wanted my child to go through such a physically uncomfortable, unhealthy lifestyle, without any security whatsoever.
I had finally found what I felt was my destiny, to be with a Master, but above all, to be with a group of people whose priority was finding out who we were. I wanted to be involved 100% in this. It was important that I would not become pregnant. It would have taken me away from my chosen path. I could not take the pill because of my varicose veins, so for me it was an IUD, then the cap, and later a tubal ligation (the latter almost killed me as the surgeon pierced my guts – and even left me unsterilised).
(Apart from ‘no kids!’, another motto in my brain was, ‘no fixed boyfriends!’ I had seen so many friends leave the commune because the boyfriend had to work in their business at home. The woman would leave, go back to Italy, get married, have two kids, and I would never see her again. That was not what I wanted. I had finally found what I truly wanted.)
If I look around at all my friends my age, I know that many of them had also opted not to have kids. Some say that it’s selfish not to have kids, particularly in 2024 electoral parlance. But here is my understanding:
A child, and rightly so, wants to be No 1 in your attention. Less will not do. If a Master, or a spiritual path, or an art where you might have to decide between putting bread on the table and playing your viola, it’s maybe best to leave that task to someone else who can do it much better than you (is it so important that your fantastic genes are propagated into the future? Is it our fear of death that urges us to have something of ourselves live on? Or is it that we long for someone to love, or to be loved by?). (At present we talk much about climate change, but the word ‘overpopulation’ seems to have been ‘cancelled’, maybe due to surging Christian fundamentalist world-views. And, when a child is born, everyone is full of congratulations, whilst never seeming to enquire from where will come housing, food, and everything else that child will need.)
I have chosen the spiritual path as my No 1 priority. I cannot give attention to a child at the same time.
In the commune there was a small minority of sannyasins who had kids. In Pune One they all lived outside the ashram, in the neighbourhood, maybe with their parents? I never went to see the school the ashram had created, as I had no friends with children, and it was not part of any of my tasks. I would sometimes see kids on the main path of the ashram, exuberant, loud. I envied them for that, and that they had avoided the strict Catholic Swiss upbringing I went through.
On the Ranch I met and spoke to some of the kids on the buses, saw them in the cafeteria sitting at a long table where they were served special kids’ food, lovingly prepared by our beloved Jivan Mary. There were lots of French fries my eye could spy. Some of the teenagers were already working in the temples, the departments, and were given responsibilities. That seemed to me very ‘empowered’. I spent a night or two in the kid-house, when a lover, who had two kids there, was on night duty. Again I felt jealousy to see the tree-house atmosphere. Ah…
But as a Twinkie, a tour guide, I was never sure what to tell visitors about the kids’ house, so when we drove past on the other side of the valley, I engaged them in other topics. I did not really know what to say. I could brag about the dam we’d built at the lake, the new mall with its shops, restaurant and ice-cream parlour, the townhouses where we lived, but the visitors would not have liked hearing that our children lived separately, away from their parents. And I did not know if the children were happy with this arrangement.
* Note: The expression Childless Cat Lady comes from a 2021 interview with Fox News host Tucker Carlson, where then-Senate-candidate and today Republican-nominee-for-vice-president in the 2024 United States presidential election, JD Vance, complained that the U.S. was being run by Democrats, corporate oligarchs and “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable in their own lives and the choices that they’ve made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.” (www.npr.org)
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