Why did the mouse climb up such heights?

“Boring, boring, boringgg…..hmmm” sighed the black green cat. Afternoons were hot these days and members of the cat species preferred to stay at their respective homes. The black green cat had done the same and had landed itself into what it sophisticatedly preferred to call as ‘boredom’. Deboo’s views differed a bit, he called it ‘doing nothing useful’ instead. The cat naturally didn’t bother itself with such ideas and continued muttering vexedly, “What’s there to do anyways? Should I read him chapters from his stupid novels, or do his laundary? Or should I get a job and earn money for him? He is totally mad… he should be doing all these things himself. I hate Deboo, give me a mouse any day!” Suddenly the cat remembered that it had not seen the mouse lately. Eagerly it poked under the sofa, but the mouse wasn’t there. Where was he? “He doesn’t loiter around by himself like that… he is quite disciplined really. He looks cute too and that soft fur of his, how it tingles my nose…heee hehee heee…” the cat couldn’t stop laughing out loud. Deboo turned around and stared hard at the cat hearing this din.
Suddenly a suspicion crossed the cat’s mind, “He has taken my mouse, it’s him him!” it felt a pang of certainty and satisfaction in the deep of its stomach. It rushed into Deboo’s room to search for the mouse. And eureka! There it was, nice and velvety and pinned high on a rope??!! What was that? The cat came to a dead halt. The mouse was dangling high up in the air and droplets of water dripped from its tail, the tail that the cat had happily chewed on so many times.
The cat got furious at this atrocity and started jumping up and up towards the dear mouse and got more and more mad at Deboo with each jump. Finally one of its jumps brought the mouse down with it. The cat felt a little pacified seeing that the mouse had suffered no damage and it appeared like before. It started playing with the mouse, pushing it everywhere and getting amused and generally feeling very happy and much less bored.
The only thing that puzzled the cat for some days was why the mouse seemed whiter and softer than before!

The nothing that didn’t move…

It was a comparatively cooler night though the summer was on rampage. To make things even more comfortable Deboo was sprawled over a largish area on the top of the roof. It was a decently dark night and with some effort he had adjusted his vision so that he could see only part of the black sky and none of the other earthly stuff. There was the black-green cat filling up some portion of this heavenly sight of course, but there was nothing Deboo could do about that.
So, Deboo was filled with awe and stuff by looking at the deep endless expanse above when naturally some thoughts started creeping in his mind. “Wow I am filled with awe and stuff by looking at this space above! What is this deep endless expanse thing that we call the sky anyways? I would say it’s nothing really, I mean anything that’s left off after getting rid of the planets and stars and black holes that’s what would be the sky. In summary, it’s nothing and I am looking at a huge nothing … that’s cool” All this thinking gave Deboo a nice superiority complex and he started humming a smug tune quite loudly. But immediately one thing happened, the smug tune irked the cat hugely and it reacted by yelling harshly and removing itself to a far corner.
Again immediately two things happened, Deboo got startled and sat up by the sudden audio-visual event and secondly he stopped humming and recommenced thinking “What’s this crazy cat upto anyways? I had almost figured out a cat constellation but now I lost it. Why can’t it be still for a moment? ” The last question suddenly stopped him mid-track! “Why can’t it be still? Because the earth moves of course. But it means I move too, I am not still either. Oh God, I can’t even define where I am or how fast I am moving, the calculation’s too difficult and by the time I figure that out I will have moved! Have I heard this said before? I feel very uncertain now…”
All this heavy thinking sent his head reeling in different directions. The cat in the meanwhile was already in deep sleep crouched in the corner.
Later on Deboo spent a lot of time staring into the empty space which wasn’t moving at all.

The cat and the onomatopoeia

“Buzz buzz buzz” was going the big black bug. The black-green cat was surprised out of its meditation by the incessant buzzing. It watched the bug with curiosity for a while but when the bug got real closer, it was scared and tried to shoo it off by pawing fiercely at it. The bug was of course not deterred from its buzzing.
While the cat was fighting out of its wits with the strange bug thing, it was distracted by a sudden “hee-hee” coming from its left. Not surprisingly it was Deboo who was the generator of the stupid “hee” – noise. He was holding a black something and waving it everywhere while continuing with his “hee-hee”. The cat started wondering what new craziness was upon Deboo but unfortunately did not get a lot of time for its ideas to crystallize for the big bug was buzzing close to its head.
The cat was now very irritated and hence determined to get rid of the bug and climbed on top of the window sill before jumping on top of the bug. But the bug was clever and gave it a slip.
This game continued for a while as the cat got madder still and went on jumping over and over again. All this while Deboo had been getting crazier and was now doing a tribal dance of sorts still holding the black box thing. The cat was amazed with Deboo but decided to ignore him for now. With one final plunge, the cat landed on the bug and held it down under its paw. The bug whined for a bit and then died with a small “burr”. Now getting a chance to glance at Deboo, the cat saw that Deboo had stopped his acrobatics and was staring at the bug with his eyes as large as saucers. The cat ignored him seeing that he had returned to some sort of normalcy and immediately set to feast on the bug. But the thing tasted like no bug it had eaten before. It was hard and tasteless and overall disgusting. The cat flung it aside and went back to its meditation.
Deboo in the meanwhile dejectedly walked to the bug and set it upright. He then stupidly kept hitting the black box in his hand and kept staring at the bug. But all that the bug did was a lousy “burrr” “br” “burr”.

The flock in his viewfinder!

It was a lovely morning after a nightful of rains. Deboo had cleaned up his digi-cam’s lenses and had formatted the memory. Feeling all set, he started pedaling off on his bicycle with the cat happily perched in a basket. Soon they crossed into the countryside and Deboo left his bicycle by a tree and started walking. The cat immediately set to explore the surrounding, which mainly contained a large expanse of beautiful grassy land and a flock of sheep with a shepherd in it. Deboo got into a conversation with the shepherd and soon learned everything about him since the shepherd was a bit talkative. The shepherd readily allowed Deboo to click pictures of his flock. Deboo got to work and did a fine job of it. He clicked the sheep in ones and twos and in groups from every angle that was there. Then he made the cat pose in between two motherly looking sheep, which needless to say was hugely embarrassing to the cat.
Deboo looked at the pictures he had taken and was excited to see the result. He started thinking, “…may be I can pass these on to the newspaper, they print nature snaps in their Thursday supplement… I think I should also do more of this, eventually I can hold a nice exhibition … people will buy my work… may be I can approach National Geographic one day!” Deboo’s excitement fed itself and he was almost jumpy when the shepherd looked at him kindly and said “this is a nice hobby you have, some people do like to take pictures of the animals… but sometimes there are people who don’t even like to look at such pictures… you have a nice hobby nevertheless…” Deboo came out of his reverie, he himself knew many people who didn’t like to see pictures and who never visited any exhibition… he suddenly felt less enthusiasm and turned to leave. The cat at that moment was busy trying to challenge a decently big sized sheep in a duel. It had to unwillingly leave its occupation and follow Deboo back.
Bicycling back, the soft cool breeze hit Deboo and made his hair fly smartly. The trees lined the road and occasionally he saw a cute calf tugging to its mother. It was indeed very picturesque and Deboo started thinking about the people who did like to see pictures of animals!

How a hideout followed a hard day’s work!

Deboo had worked very hard for a very important project that week. After submission he started waiting anxiously for news on the submission. First he felt hopeful, then when he heard nothing more about this he got worried then he ended up feeling very much cornered. He started thinking “It’s so uneasy… I am getting too stressed, I feel too jumpy even the cat is jumpy these days, I think I need an outing, may be the cat needs an outing too… someplace nice and green and airy and may be black, the cat could feel camouflaged, which could make it happy, you know sometimes feeling that nobody can see you could make you feel relaxed…”
After a couple of week an article in the company newsletter announced that a nice submission had gone through for the company. The company gave credit to all the hard working employees. That weekend Deboo visited a nearby tourist place, ruins of an old fort exhibiting its magnificence in remains of dark rocky walls, surrounded by a lovely green forest. The cat romped around and Deboo relaxed under a canopy of trees covered in a texture of shades and light.

The cat and the reflecting frame

A lot of Deboo’s stuff was lying sprawled over the floor and rising over portions of the wall. It was like fungus, a single jacket or shoe lace on the floor could multiply and cover all the surfaces in the room. As a part of this stuff, the black-green cat’s sleeping box was lying upturned, alongside. Outside the big window, the Gulmohur was rustling its compound leaves with the wind and inside Deboo was moving all over the room doing some daily activity things.
The black-green cat was looking at this composition through the mirror. It all seemed very strangely attractive. The myriad clothes on the chair formed nurbs and the sharp lines of the sleeping box seemed exotically contrasting them. Deboo for once didn’t seem bizarre and in fact he appeared to be oscillating within the frame of the mirror. Suddenly Deboo appeared to grow bigger and bigger and bigger so that the cat thought he was climbing out of the mirror. But just when he was supposed to raise his knee to make the crossing, the cat saw itself in Deboo’s arms inside the frame. For no reason, the cat felt slightly dizzy at that moment.

The adventure of the labeled fruit

Deboo was munching on some fruit right in the middle of the afternoon. Meanwhile the black and green cat was feeling drowsy and tried to ignore Deboo’s onomatopoeic eating activity.

So, Deboo first gobbled up a couple of custard apples which were his real favorites and then he started with an apple. He was not especially fond of apples so naturally his mind wandered off from its concentration on eating to other things. He started wondering where this particular apple had come from… he turned the fruit around and was glad to find a label on the fruit. It claimed that the apple was a product of New Zealand. Suddenly he felt very uneasy thinking “Was there a label on the custard apple as well? Did I chew it off with the fruit??!!” Hurriedly he checked the remaining custard apple for a label. There was no label. He felt relieved for his stomach but now started wondering where the custard apple had come from.

Suddenly he got a wonderful idea. He stripped the label off the apple and fixed it on the custard apple. Now feeling triumphant he stared at the custard apple and got to eating it (avoiding the label of course). The cat now sufficiently irritated with this din was romping off the room when Deboo offered it a bite of the New Zealand’s custard apple. But the cat who never had had any affection for a custard apple, New Zealand’s or otherwise, just jumped off the window after throwing a vey disgusted glance towards Deboo. 

The transformation

Deboo was in a partial slumber, i.e. the state before he woke up normally. In that sub-slumber state he was already thinking about the future of mankind and what possibilities were possible for its evolution and survival. Just as he was arriving at the key question of the existence of life, he felt a bang, not a big one but just a small one. He was startled out of his reverie to find his black cat exhibiting a white mouth romping around. Deboo got really puzzled since he was sharp to realize that though his cat was black and green it normally did not have a white mouth. Logical thinker that he was, he immediately cracked the riddle “The cat has drunk out of the milk bowl!”

That instance marked the transformation of Deboo’s thoughts from the question of humanity’s destiny to the color of his cat’s mouth. Consequently, Deboo ended up not being a great philosopher but just the owner of a fidgety black cat.