Our hospital is very stray animal friendly. Some of them behave as if they are pets. We used to have a lot of dogs awhile ago. Now they are fewer, though not by virtue of any measures taken by the administration. The administration is still friendly towards them, animal activists please note. Now the cats are in greater number. They keep having babies, and the babies are quite cute. One such cat, who is fondly called Kalu by those who have seen him, is such a resident cat. We could have called him our sitting cat, but he never sits anywhere for long. He keeps roaming the corridors, the wards, the pantries, and outside the building. His territory is quite wide. At one end it extends to the canteen. At the other end it extends to the new tower.
Kalu actually reigns over this territory. No other male cat ventures in his territory. Looking at his photograph above, you can make out he is a veteran of many a war. His right ear is stumpy, not due to a congenital malformation. His right eye is almost gone. His right foreleg was fractured some time ago, when he used to climb the steps not like normal cats, but all four feet on one step before proceeding to another step. Now he is healed. Rumor is that the dogs are less in number thanks to terror established by Kalu.
When Kalu goes through the antenatal ward, the pregnant women close their eyes, out of fear that their babies will be born as ugly as Kalu if they look at him. Such superstition! When babies in the pediatrics ward refuse to go to sleep, the mothers tell them, "go to sleep, baby, or Kalu will come." Then they go to sleep. When babies of visitors trouble Kalu's progeny by pulling their tails, Kalu arrives and just looks at them sternly out of his one and half eyes, and they behave.
When a visitor remarked that Kalu seemed to be a pet cat in the hospital, Kalu was angry. He just glared at the visitor, saying in his thought bubble (like Garfield does) 'I am not pet. These people around me are my pets." That visitor shut up immediately.
