Peripatetic Feline in the Phenomenal Penguin

Yes, this is a crazy cat lady post (and the cat lady has been crazier than usual these past few days), but I write it because it also says some things about Cambodia.

Meet Crumpet.

Hello! My green eyes are luminous, if somewhat vacant.

I agreed to rent out my guest room to an American college student who is doing a summer internship with an NGO. My tenant arrived on Thursday morning and underestimated the speed with which cats can move. On Thursday evening, he stood in the doorway to the balcony, holding the door ajar, and both my cats vamoosed.  Maneki, the more sensible and savvy of the two, explored the balcony and rooftop for 20 minutes and then sauntered back into the kitchen. I didn't see Crumpet again for two days.  My catty friends all tried to encourage and console me, telling me of wayward felines who'd returned home after three days, three months, three years...  I found it difficult to explain to them the exact nature of our dilemma here.  In the end, it comes down somewhat to Cambodian history.

I've heard from folks who were here in the late 1990s that Phnom Penh was a dangerous town. They routinely heard gunfire at night, and it wasn't a question of whether your apartment would be robbed, but when. The thieves usually broke in at night and ransacked the place while the residents cowered in their beds. This still happens, mind you, but less frequently now than before. The result, however, is that most of us live in walled compounds that are surrounded by iron spikes and grilles and concertina wire.

These are the gates in front of our house.
You can't see it in this photo, but above the gates are spikes, and above those,
coils of concertina wire.  

Inside  our gates is a leafy, pleasant little courtyard, completely walled off from our neighbours. My initial thought when I rented the place was that the cats, if they escaped the apartment upstairs, would be safely contained on our property. This was a clear case of failing to think like a cat.

Yee, my landlady, has a green thumb. In most of the neighbouring
houses, this front courtyard is given over to parking for cars.

To get to my upstairs apartment, I walk around to the back of the house and climb the spiral staircase. This is especially entertaining when I've either got heavy sacks of groceries or have had one more glass of wine with dinner than I should have. The cats, however, won't go near the thing. They've gone up and down it only in their carriers and show no inclinations to set their paws on it when they get out onto my veranda.

So much for my supposition that they'd stay in our garden...

Cats, I've now realised, don't want to go down. They want to go up, and that makes sense -- up above the ground, they're away from dangers like children and dogs and motos and such, so when the cats exit the apartment, they frequently head up the stairs onto the roof.

Now, if they stay on our roof, that's quite all right. Our house, however, is the first of three in a conjoined row-house.  If you look at the fence on the left side of the photo below, you'll see that there's a meter or so of concrete wall, topped by about two meters of chain-link. If the cats get onto the neighbour's rooftop, which they've both done more than once, they can't get back over the fence onto ours.  That chain-link thwarts cat burglars on two legs and four. More than once I have teetered precariously on a rattan chair while one of the panicked cats jumps up as high as she can, grabbing onto the chain-link -- high enough for me to grab her by the scruff of the neck and pull her over to our side.

This is a great spot for star-gazing, moon-watching
and cat rescues.

But how, you may well ask, do the cats get onto the neighbour's roof in the first place? Very cleverly -- by going from our back veranda onto the neighbour's and up their staircase onto their roof.  In the photo below, the mop is resting against another of those meter-high concrete walls at the back of my house. As you can see, there's a grille to stop the neighbours or their burglars from jumping from one veranda to the other. The cats, however, pass through the grille and into the neighbour's house. And from there into the next neighbour's, and so on. (The neighbours' houses have corrugated roofing over their back courtyards -- beneath it are their wet kitchens.)

The grille has precisely cat-width slots.

Once Crumpet had passed through this grille on Thursday night, I caught a glimpse of her scampering up the second neighbour's staircase onto their roof.  I could see her over there from our rooftop, but she wouldn't come near the fence dividing us. She was only at the beginning of her adventure, you see. At some point, she must have come back down onto Neighbour 2's back veranda and out onto their back roofs. When she turns the corner to pass behind Neighbour 3's house, she's gone from my view.  Remember, all of these properties are completely walled and gated. When she climbs, jumps or falls down into any of them, she's stuck there.

Cat's path to perdition.

To me, going down the spiral staircase and (when Yee's son, Sopheak, isn't looking) playing with the tropical fish seems much more desirable than scampering about on the blazing hot corrugated roofs, but again, I'm not a cat.

Our back garden

I began my routine of circling my veranda and the roof, and then up and down the streets, calling Crumpet's name. When she gets herself into a jam, she's very good about calling out for help, her normal contralto meow rising to a panicky, soprano mew.  This is how I located her when she'd landed in Neighbour 2's garage a few months ago; I got her back only by ringing their bell and explaining in my faltering Khmer, "Excuse me, but my cat is here. Could you open the gate, please? Ah, thank you very much! I take crazy-stupid cat home now..."

For two whole days, though, I neither saw nor heard any sign of Crumpet, and I began to fear she'd got snaggled up in some concertina wire and bled out, or that she'd gone down into one of the neighbours' compounds and come to harm there.  

To most Cambodians, the idea of keeping cats as pets is as foreign as... well, as I am. As my friend Malcolm discovered when he rescued a friendly stray at his coffee shop, some Cambodians do refer to cats as "my cats", but that "possession" simply means the cats hang around the house. Give them food? Why would you do that? They catch stuff. And if the people are poor enough, they catch the cats. Although my neighbours are well-off enough to avoid eating cat soup, their domestic helpers have a definite lean and hungry look. My concerns for Crumpet, once she lands in a neighbour's compound are, worst case, she ends up in a stewpot.  Slightly better case, the neighbours just toss her out their front gates onto the street. Best case?  I hear her in time, ring the bell, and start blathering in Khmer about my crazy-stupid cat.   

She escaped on Thursday night. On Saturday morning, I made a flyer with a photo of Crumpet and text in Khmer, saying "Lost Cat:  If you see, please call xxx.xxx.xxx.  $$ REWARD $$"  I made copies and stuck one in every gate on the street. I also handed one to each of the gaggle of tuktuk drivers who routinely hang out on our corner. Great excitement ensued. One of them pointed to the picture, then to the dollar signs.  "You want to buy a black cat?" he asked. "How much you pay?" It took some doing to explain to them that I did not in fact want to buy a random black cat, but I was seeking one particular black cat -- the one in the photo. Their faces fell. My reputation as the Lunatic on St 95 sky-rocketed.

By Saturday afternoon, I was exhausted and grieving, pretty well convinced that I'd seen the last of Crumpet. I came back through our front gates after my umpteenth trek up and down the street, calling out "Crumpet! Crumpet!" Even the street vendors peddling coconuts and fetal ducks in eggs were eyeing me with a combination of familiarity and bewilderment, as if to say, "There she is again, calling out as we do, but what is a crumpet, and where the hell is her cart?"  

As I entered our front courtyard, Yee came out her front door, talking excitedly. This is problematic, because I struggle to understand Yee on the best of days. Here's what I could grasp:  She'd spoken to the people in the big yellow house (Neighbour 3 in the photo above). They'd seen a black cat on Friday, but not today. They have a dog. I should go and speak to them, because they'd be willing to talk to a foreigner but not so much to another Khmer. Because they have such a big house. Translation: They perceive Yee to be of a lower social class, because our house is certainly less grand than theirs, and consequently, they treat her rudely. 

I had spoken to the young male servant at that house on Friday morning, asking him if he'd seen a black cat. He'd said no, and I carried on. I can only assume Crumpet hadn't landed in their compound yet. On Saturday afternoon, I rang their bell. The dog went ballistic. The servant answered and let me into the front courtyard.  The lady of the house, in her 70s, came out and greeted me cordially. I explained that my landlady had told me that someone in her house might have seen my black cat. She told the servant to lead me around behind their enormous house, where they have a shed containing tools and a pile of lumber, at which he pointed. He told me that the cat is afraid of the dog. I called, heard a few familiar meows, and sure enough, Crumpet peeked out from between the planks. The lady came round and told her servant to put the dog inside, and once it was quiet, Crumpet emerged. In true made-for-TV-movie style, I started to cry, and the lady of the house patted my shoulder as she escorted us out. 

So why, I wondered later, hadn't they rung my number on the flyer? Then it hit me. Those flyers lodged in the gates were most likely found by domestic helpers, few of whom can read. (The CIA Fact Book says Cambodia has a 75% literacy rate, but Cambodians guffaw when they hear that. The ones I've spoken to guess that 25% is a more accurate number.) Circulating or posting flyers is a long-shot.

It doesn't take long for white expats to notice that how one is treated in Cambodia is directly proportional to one's perceived wealth. The Khmers generally treat us very politely but treat a less affluent Cambodian like rubbish. I can only assume that it was a very humiliating experience for Yee to ask the lady in the big yellow house about Crumpet, and I expect she did so because she saw how distressed I was. How do I repay something like that? What kind of gift can compensate for being treated like dirt by one's wealthy neighbour?  

I believe Crumpet spent her whole visit to the Big Yellow House cowering in the woodpile, terrified of the dog, and rightly so. They may have a heap of money, but they're sure not sharing much of it with their guard dog, whose ribs were jutting. I have no doubt he'd have made a quick meal of my cat if he'd caught her. This country has experienced such dire poverty and violence in the last three decades that now, while a few are acquiring vast wealth, the mind-set of deprivation and self-preservation hasn't changed. I see very few signs among Cambodians of charity in its truest sense, yet Yee has been very gracious to me, which moves me deeply. 

So here's Crumpet, back on my bedroom floor after thoroughly cleaning herself of two days of dust and grime, oblivious to the ruckus she caused. Yee is probably downstairs right now vowing never again to rent to a tenant with cats.  

If the Crumps hasn't tallied the balance of her nine lives
lately, she should.