Ninth Nap

It may seem incredible but even Catguru was once a kitten, a not-so-tiny orange puffball at the beginning of each of his nine lives — although beginning is only another word for ending.

It is said that once, in the ninth week of his ninth life, he was taking his ninth nap of the day.

He was sprawled on a windowsill behind a market stall on Sukhumvit Road, selling counterfeit Lacoste and Ralph Lauren polo shirts, authentic in their inauthenticity. To the left there was a stand with jasmine garlands, to the right a cart with freshly cut green mangoes, sold with little packages of chili salt for dipping.

Oscar's belly rose and fell in time with the haphazard market’s arrhythmic heartbeat. The air smelled of garlic and fish sauce, like samsara and nirvana arguing over lunch. The drone of Bangkok traffic was the constant musical score, each honk a motorized mantra nobody bothered to translate.

The polo shirt vendor, his arms tattooed with fading yantra patterns, glanced at the kitten and chuckled. "This one naps like a corpse at a funeral!"

(What is a corpse, Oscar might have asked, but one who knows the presence of stillness?) Oscar cracked one amber eye open, revealing a universe, then the other, revealing the same universe in green. But his gaze didn't meet the vendor. It landed on a gecko that was busy being a gecko down by the mangoes.

The chase began before beginning.
The end arrived early to watch.
The gecko froze.
Oscar froze.

The world stopped turning, then remembered it had never been turning in the first place. And with a burst of cosmic necessity, the kitten pounced — only to miss spectacularly and tumble into a basket of mango peelings.

The vendor laughed hard, slapping his knee like a temple drum. "Chasing your mother's tail, eh?"

Oscar emerged from the basket, wearing mango peel like a crown of temporary enlightenment, the mystery of knowing already glittering in his young fur.

He sat up. He licked a paw. The air licked back.

"What chases what?" he murmured, tasting the question on his whiskers. "What is missed when missing is perfection?"

The vendor only heard a kitten meowing — which was also correct.

With a sigh of budding enlightenment, Oscar jumped back onto the windowsill to dream the universe's dreams, or let the universe dream him — the distinction was already boring.

When the stray dog came, matted fur stinking of garbage and dog-ego, Oscar, napping deeper than napping, rolled onto his back, paws curled in the air like four question marks aimed at awareness itself.

The dog noticed something it couldn't fathom — a kitten-shaped hole in reality, perhaps — and hesitated. Here was something more than a kitten. Whatever it was, it was too sharp for teeth, too empty for biting, too full for swallowing. With a whimper that sounded suspiciously like guru, it trotted away. And Oscar's whiskers twitched the only applause the awake will ever need.

When the moon rose, it glanced at the sleeping kitten, soon to begin its adventures as Oscar and become known far and wide as Catguru.

"Nine lives," the moon mused, counting on fingers it didn't have. "Still your fur is dripping with ignorance."

Oscar, quarter-awake, purred in B-flat. "Ignorance is catnip," he hummed to the moon. "And what are you but the sun wearing a clever disguise?"

The moon had no answer to this and disappeared into the question.

With that, the soon-to-be-enlightened one curled into a perfect zero, dreaming of geckos that never ran because they were already there, mangoes that were never peeled because they were already eaten, and chasers who knew they were also the chased.

Somewhere, a temple bell rang nine times. Beings in nine dimensions showered the kitten with blessings. It was the most charmed beginning to his ninth life, the life that would go down in history as the life of Catguru — though history has a terrible memory for things that matter.