I have started to believe that every neighborhood cat has marked our home as a animal treatment facility. One night, a couple of months ago, a young pregnant cat who used to frequent out house for food came to our kitchen window with a huge cut on her belly. We immediately rushed her to an emergency vet clinic and got her stitched up. One of our earlier neighborhood cats had already adopted us and decided that our house was her maternity clinic. She gave birth to five cute kittens. Fortunately four of them got adopted and one of them is yet in our house.
And now in this lockdown – we have this ginger colored cat – aptly named as Warfield – as he gets into fights with my Mario (black cat) all the time. He has a serious injury and has decided that the kitchen window is his home. He sits there all the time. We have tried applying medicine on his abyss. Luckily, a vet lives in our colony and we could get some medicines for him. Being a wild cat, our challenge is how to get him to have those medicines.
It’s not only cats, time and again we have rescued dogs, birds, squirrels, mice and frogs and have helped them in the best way we could.
Last morning, our cats tore open the milk packets of one of our neighbors and they were very nice about it. C thought of replacing the damaged milk packets and called our milkman –Augustin, only to find out that his bike had a puncture and he was stranded on the road. C went to where he was and picked up more milk packets and then offered our bike to Augustin. He told him to take our bike and finish his deliveries. ‘When you are good to others – it brings out the goodness in them too. Augustin realized that C would have to walk quite a distance back home and said that his brother was on his way to help him. He would come to get the bike along with his brother – or would send his brother to pick up our bike. Promptly today morning, he came home with our bike and thanked us for our help. Our small help saved Augustin from a lot of trouble and many families could receive milk without too much delay.
If we open our eyes and see things around us, there are ample opportunities to help. However somewhere we humans have started letting fear take over our nature to be helpful. We don’t need to go in search for NGOs or charities that are helping people, if we just look around us – we will find so many people in need of some support or other.
Today, I would therefore like to express my gratitude to all those who are providing timely help and support to people who need it the most at that time. I thank C for doing most of the handy work in such situations. I thank all my mom’s neighbors, friends, society members, the building security and the housekeeping staff – everyone who is looking after my Mom’s needs while she is in Pune without us being around her. I thank everyone who is looking after the wellbeing of senior citizens and people with medical difficulties. I thank everyone, who is working hard to ensure that the basic needs of people are being fulfilled and that people are safe.
And I do not believe that people need to leave their homes to buy candles…Maybe they could look around their surrounding and express their gratitude by giving timely help to someone in need.
Originally posted on Facebook on April 4, 2020
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