Nandini Bhattacharya

Homage to Kafka

PUBLISHED IN FOLIO 2025: VOL. 40.

My Persian cat is lying in my bed. Let me rephrase. My Persian cat Atossa is lying in my bed impersonating—flawlessly—me. A promising sight. A beautiful thing. 

I, on the other hand, am perched on the windowsill. It’s daybreak. 

I’m looking at my cat fixedly from my perch. I find myself transfixed by her, by her every slight twitch and sigh. My tail—a soft exuberance, a misty waterfall—wags lightly in anticipation.

That’s the thing. The tail. Thereby hangs a tale. This is a tale of a tail that I’ve never had, till this morning when I discovered it on my behind. My cat is in my body; I’m in hers. At least I’m not a bug, helplessly skittering on its back. Neither is she. She looks quite comfortable in my bed, sprawled, snoring lightly, her feet sticking out from under the blanket. 

I am, however, thinking of breakfast. I must face it, my situation—our metamorphoses—has not made me averse to cat food. In fact, I’m remembering a few times when I’d be just home from work, ravenous, and think cat food didn’t smell so bad. Salmon or chicken flavor? Not bad, not bad at all.  Turkey? Ugh. Beef is okay, though it raises metaphysical questions about ontology, as in how a cat can eat a cow. I mean, just look at them side by side. I have wondered this at times when considering—theoretically, just home from a long day’s work, ravenous, maybe a little spacey-er than usual—the darling round aluminum cans, at least in principle, from a Great Chain of Being perspective.

Enough daydreaming and speculation for now. When will my cat get up and pull open a can and lower it down to whimpering me, crouched on the floor in stricken joy? But till my cat wakes up and reaches for my cellphone even before her eyes have opened, I know I’ll have to perch on the sill, look at her, and wait.

Nandini Bhattacharya is a writer, Professor of English, public speaker, reviewer, and blogger. Her first novel Love’s Garden (2020) garnered critical praise as “a fascinating and well-crafted journey into India's complex past” (Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni), and “a sprawling family saga set against a background of some of the most momentous events of twentieth-century Indian history” (Clifford Garstang). Shorter work has appeared or is forthcoming in Chicago Quarterly Review, Bellevue Literary Review, River Styx, Rumpus, Notre Dame Review, Another Chicago Magazine, Oyster River Pages, Sky Island Journal, Bangalore Review, Raising Mothers Journal, the Saturday Evening Post Best Short Stories 2021, Funny Pearls, Bombay Review, PANK, and more. She has attended the Bread Loaf Writers Workshop and VONA, and had residencies at the Vermont Studio Center and Ragdale Arts Residency.