M A C V A Y S I A

Smokey, AKA Keymok, AKA the King of Club Hill, used up the last of his nine lives Monday morning. He lost his footing and fell from the window box just outside Al’s room. I was in the next room and heard him slip; the next thing I heard was the horrifyingly loud sound of his seven-plus kilos hitting cement 18 floors below. I tried to convince myself I hadn’t just heard Smokey fall to his death, but a search around the apartment and a reluctant look out that window confirmed the awful truth.

Smokey is gone.

Well, he had a long and interesting life, as cats’ lives go. He was born somewhere in Halifax, Nova Scotia on 20 Sept 1999 but didn’t come into our lives until almost two years later, in June 2001. We had just moved into an apartment in the South End and decided it would be nice to have a cat. In the pets section of the local paper we saw that someone was giving away a neutered male, almost two years old, with extra toes. Leen wanted a kitten but we thought we’d check this one out anyway. The lady who wanted to give him away was a single mother in Spryfield who had some other cats and dogs in the house and had been told to get rid of the pets or she’d be evicted. We took one look at Smokey and fell in love with him right then and there.

He hid in the closet for a day or two, but after that he warmed up to us. We quickly realized he was quite a character, with his quirky personality, dog-like intelligence, loud Siamese-like meow, and yes those extra toes. That last quirk was a genetic trait called polydactyly, relatively common in Halifax since back when Britain had an empire with a capital E. Polydactyl cats were thought to be witches in Europe, but sailors considered them lucky for some reason, so quite a few of them ended up making the trip from England to Halifax and Boston, where their descendants can be found today in somewhat higher numbers than in other areas because of the high volume of trade between those two very British outposts. As a genealogy buff, I thought it was cool that even a cat could have a fascinating family history.

When it was time for us to move to Malaysia, there was no question about what to do with Smokey: he would go with us. He’d already become a beloved member of our family; we simply couldn’t leave him behind. So Leen and Smokey went together, via London; I was to stay in Canada a few more months to undergo treatment for a recently-discovered cancer. Smokey’s journey to Malaysia was an adventure not too many cats would ever have to go through: he almost didn’t make it onto the Air Canada flight in Halifax because of a screw-up by the airline; he got on the flight, but quarantine officials at Heathrow Airport in London threatened to keep him from getting on his connecting flight because he was under sedation; when a worker at Heathrow opened his cat carrier, he shot out like a missile and hid, prompting a frantic search that resulted in his just barely getting on the MAS flight to Malaysia; he then spent some time sitting on the runway in Dubai before continuing on to Malaysia, where he spent the next two weeks at the KLIA quarantine facility. Then he went to stay with Leen’s family in Muar.

When I completed my cancer treatments and moved to Malaysia, Smokey had to spend a few more months in Muar, because Leen and I were staying in the doctors’ hostel at Selayang Hospital. Leen’s next posting was Tanjung Karang, where we would spend six months in a huge house in the clinic compound. So we brought Smokey to Tanjung Karang. Like in Muar, he occasionally escaped from the house to explore his surroundings. One day a neighbour came to the door to tell us that Smokey, who we thought was somewhere in our house, was instead in the neighbour’s house, watching TV.

Most of the time, fortunately, we managed to keep Smokey in our house. We also somehow managed to take in some other cats, beginning with a fat little character named Milo. After a few months Leen got posted to the clinic in Rawang, where we lived in a house almost identical to the one in Tanjung Karang, except that it was on a hill called Bukit Kelab — Club Hill. While there we got even more cats, mostly due to our inability to turn away cute, helpless, homeless animals: Chayna, Phoebe, Spike, Squeak, and several others. The house was pretty big, but with that many cats around the atmosphere was getting rather…smelly. So we decided to let the cats come and go as they pleased — including Smokey.

Smokey loved the outdoors. He didn’t roam too far from the house and usually avoided cars and people, spending most of his time on Club Hill, ruler of all that he surveyed. And then the dogs came. A pack of strays began coming around, terrorizing the cats. One day they got Milo, who was too fat and slow to run away. They left his body on the front lawn. One day soon after, with the sun just getting ready to come out, they came after Smokey. I heard dogs yelping in the yard and ran out to find six of them in a big snarling, barking, yelping pile, with Smokey on the bottom, all claws and fangs.

Smokey was kind of chewed up and more than a bit traumatized by that experience, and had at least one other like it. But he always bounced back and went back outside to rule his kingdom. There were a lot of animals in the area, but Club Hill belonged to him. He took out any animal that got too close to our house: rats, lizards, bats, even a small dog. Smokey was the undisputed King of Club Hill.

When Smokey was five I started a new job as an English lecturer at UCSI; Leen got transferred to the hospital in Kajang. We moved into a small terrace house between Kajang and Semenyih and decided Smokey and the other cats — the ones who hadn’t met various untimely ends in Rawang — would have to stay indoors. Smokey apparently wasn’t too happy about being exiled from his kingdom. One day while we were at work, he opened a window and escaped, leaving the other cats behind. He had things to do.

Until now I have no idea where he went. I searched our neighbourhood and the ones around it; I put up posters; I checked the veterinary clinics; I walked around for hours at a time, calling Smokey’s name. I wrote about his disappearance in my blog; other bloggers even took up the cause. But Smokey was nowhere to be found. I feared he might have been trying to return to Club Hill, a treacherous journey for a cat. As days turned into weeks, I began to lose hope, but refused to let go. I shuddered at the thought that he could be hit by a car, bitten by a snake, or ravaged by dogs. I tried to think that maybe someone had found him and taken him in, that he was being well taken care of. I was comforted by that thought, and the fact that he was damn smart. But still I despaired. My little buddy was gone.

And then one evening, we heard a meow at the back door and there he was, skinny and full of scabby wounds but very much alive. He had been gone for almost a month. We couldn’t believe he’d made it home. I can’t think of too many moments in my life when I was as happy as I was that night.

When Smokey turned six I was in China to set up an English program at a private college. It was a six-week project but the college administration asked me to stay for a whole year. Leen’s bosses refused to let her take unpaid leave, so she quit her job and went to China to teach English with me. I returned to Malaysia to help make the necessary arrangements for our move. One of the remaining cats, Squeak, had died while I was in China; we gave the two other cats away. This time Smokey would fly with me, while Leen would arrive later with our friend Azlin and her son Faaris. I managed to get Smokey into China, and even managed to get around the mandatory three-month quarantine by arranging for ‘home quarantine’. Leen arrived soon after and we began our family’s adventure in China. We stayed in a small apartment on the campus of the Guangzhou International Economics College, just outside Guangzhou. Smokey escaped once or twice but returned quickly each time, a relief to everyone because of the fact that cats are a delicacy in that part of China. Smokey had a girlfriend for a short time, a white stray named Snowy, but after we’d fattened her up she mysteriously disappeared. We did our best to keep Smokey inside for the remainder of our stay in China.

The following year we returned to Malaysia and it was back to KLIA’s quarantine facility for Smokey. We had bought an apartment in Kajang but its completion was behind schedule, so we had to stay at the home of Leen’s aunt Bibik in Kampung Melayu Subang. We were still there, together with Smokey, when our son was born. A few months later, shortly after Smokey turned seven, we all moved into our new apartment in Kajang.

Smokey would never leave that apartment, except for a few exploratory missions in the hallway, and of course his final fall. In his last couple of years of life I tried to give him the attention he deserved, not easy now that we had a human child to take care of as well. I continued to joke that Smokey was my first child, and I continued to refer to myself as Daddy when talking to him. But really, I think I had long since stopped thinking of him as a child, as a lot of pet owners tend to do. He was more like a best friend, almost an equal in his own way. He was a loyal companion, one with his own personality, a personality I knew better than anyone and respected him for. That was why I would let him go out into the concrete window box outside Alisdair’s room, even though the sight of him perched on the ledge always made my heart skip a beat. That window box was the one place he could go where no one could bother him. We had an iron grill put on the window and kept it locked so Alisdair couldn’t fall. But Smokey could fit through the spaces in the grill, and I always kept the window open so he could come and go as he pleased. I worried he might slip and fall one day, but he enjoyed going out there. He was almost ten years old and had experienced more life than most cats. I figured he’d earned the right to that one pleasure, even if I didn’t like it. He was, after all, my friend.

And so when I heard the sound of his claws scratching at the ledge, I knew what sound I would hear next, even as I tried to tell myself it wouldn’t come. But it did come, and soon I was putting Smokey’s lifeless body — intact, except for blood trickling from his mouth — into a bag. I knew he was dead but I talked to him anyway, apologizing for having to pick up his broken body. Shhhh, I said. I know, I’m sorry. It’s going to be okay.

I took Smokey to Bibik’s house in Kampung Melayu Subang and dug him a grave. I took him out of the bag and laid him onto my favourite kain pelikat, the blue one, the one I’d been wearing when he flopped down on the bed with me and Leen and Al the night before. Now, too, he looked like he was sleeping. I petted him one last time, then wrapped him up in the cloth and gently placed him into the grave and buried him there, among the sugar cane, the same place I had buried Alisdair’s uri (the placenta and umbilical cord) according to Malay custom. Two of Leen’s young cousins put colourful flowers on the fresh grave, including a bright red hibiscus, a symbol of Malaysia.

Smokey had a long, interesting life. He had some exciting adventures and got a lot of love, and gave it all back to us. He was around, always there somewhere, when Leen and I got married, when I went through the cancer, when we moved to Malaysia, when Al was born, when we changed jobs and moved around. He was there when we laughed and cried; sometimes we laughed and cried for him. Monday morning we cried for him.

He was special, but not just because he was from Canada, and bigger than most Malaysian cats, and had extra toes, and had been around the world. No, he was special because of everything he was, everything he did. If I called his name he would come to me. I never had to make little sounds, just say his name. He always greeted me at the door when I came home. He usually answered me back when I said something to him. He understood both English and Malay. He drank coffee, and really loved cappuccino. He picked food up with his front paws, easy for him because he actually had thumbs. He had a unique meow. He was just unique. Special. He was a majestic animal, never more majestic than when he was in his domain, his kingdom.

More than anything, he was my pal. I knew his rhythms and he knew mine. It was a level of familiarity and comfort that makes his loss hard to bear, hard to even understand. His presence was such that his absence is being felt in a way that I’ve never felt about losing a pet before. As I go through the various stages of the grief cycle, I find myself feeling somewhat angry. I mean, Smokey survives a trip around the world, gets lost on three continents, once for an entire month, fights off packs of dogs, lives to be almost ten years old and then dies because he slipped? I can’t help but be angered by the unfairness of that. And then there’s the bargaining stage, where I say come on, let me have that day back, and I can just close that window. Come on, please. After all, I bargained like that when he was missing four years ago. But of course, it’s not up to me. He’s gone, and that’s it. He was there one moment, then fell through the air and then he was just gone.

I really don’t know what else to say, except that I loved him and I’ll miss him. So will Leen. She almost always kicked him out of our bed because of her asthma, forcing him to wait until she was asleep before snuggling in between me and Al. But the night before Smokey died, Leen let him sleep with us the whole night. I think that made him happy.

Yesterday I had lunch with some friends and managed to have a few laughs. I know I’ll get over this loss and move on and live my life. I know I didn’t lose a parent or a sibling or a child. I know he was a cat. I know that. But honestly, this loss hurts at least as much as the loss of my father-in-law less than two years ago. It’s not the same, I know, and doesn’t affect as many people, doesn’t paint the air sad the way Ayah’s passing did, and I shouldn’t — can’t, really — compare the two. But this loss is painful for me, because I just lost one of my best friends. I’ll get over it, but I’ll always miss Smokey.

Smokey, wherever you are, I love you buddy. I miss you. You’ll always be the King of Club Hill.

Tagged: Smokey