Bengal Cat Quotes

A good writer can watch a cat pad across the street and know what it is to be pounced upon by a Bengal tiger.

... the hybrid breeders dream big. "The end game is to create the most beautiful example of something that looks wild but is domestic," says Anthony Hutcherson, who breeds Bengals, a mix of house cat and Asian leopard cat lineage whose name nods to a type of endangered tiger. "It's great to win a cat show, but it is more rewarding to make something that looks like a little leopard or jaguar or ocelot that eats cat food and purrs on sight.

The big cat cages also stank in the heat. This was before zoos built natural habitats with boulders and waterfalls, and the cages back then were painfully small, the animals miserable. The Bengal tiger had flies creeping all over its eyelids, and he didn’t even blink. There was a kid throwing peanuts at him, and Lecia somehow menaced the boy into stopping. When I grew up and discovered the German poet Rilke, it was this zoo’s sorry-looking cats that I thought back to. As a young poet, Rilke had been sent by the sculptor Rodin to study zoo animals, and he captured in a few lines the same frustrated power that I sensed that day in the dull-coated panther: It seems there are a thousand bars; and behind the bars, no world.

But the fact was Millat didn’t need to go back home: he stood schizophrenic, one foot in Bengal and one in Willesden. In his mind he was as much there as he was here. He did not require a passport to live in two places at once, he needed no visa to live his brother’s life and his own (he was a twin, after all). Alsana was the first to spot it. She confided to Clara: By God, they’re tied together like a cat’s cradle, connected like a see-saw, push one end, other goes up, whatever Millat sees, Magid saw and vice versa! And Alsana only knew the incidentals: similar illnesses, simultaneous accidents, pets dying continents apart. She did not know that while Magid watched the 1985 cyclone shake things from high places, Millat was pushing his luck along the towering wall of the cemetery in Fortune Green; that on February 10, 1988, as Magid worked his way through the violent crowds of Dhaka, ducking the random blows of those busy settling an election with knives and fists, Millat held his own against three sotted, furious, quick-footed Irishmen outside Biddy Mulligan’s notorious Kilburn public house. Ah, but you are not convinced by coincidence? You want fact fact fact? You want brushes with the Big Man with black hood and scythe? OK: on April 28, 1989, a tornado whisked the Chittagong kitchen up into the sky, taking everything with it except Magid, left miraculously curled up in a ball on the floor. Now, segue to Millat, five thousand miles away, lowering himself down upon legendary sixth-former Natalia Cavendish (whose body is keeping a dark secret from her); the condoms are unopened in a box in his back pocket; but somehow he will not catch it; even though he is moving rhythmically now, up and in, deeper and sideways, dancing with death

Interestingly, the lion plays an important role in the Mahavamsa, a Pali epic, that is the foundation myth of the Sinhalese people of Sri Lanka. According to the Mahavamsa, the Sinhalese people are the descendants of Prince Vijaya and his followers who sailed down to Sri Lanka in the sixth century BC from what is now Orissa and West Bengal. The story tells us that Prince Vijaya was the son of a lion and a human princess, which is why the majority population of Sri Lanka call themselves the Sinhala—or the lion people—and the country’s national flag features a stylized lion holding a sword. Equally significant is the fact that the Tamil rebels of northern Sri Lanka chose to call themselves the ‘Tigers’. The ancient rivalry between the two big cats remains embedded in cultural memory even as the animals themselves face extinction. Excerpt From: Sanjeev Sanyal. “Land of the Seven Rivers A Brief History of India's Geography”. Apple Books.

It was ridiculous, I know. A great beast like me – a Bengal – not being able to hunt for himself. But I had to face the facts. I was domesticated, not bred to live in such a wild world.