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eleven

"I don't know if you remember Officer Yamada from the accident scene, there was a lot going on so it would be perfectly understandable if you didn't."

"Was he the one there when it happened, the older officer on the motorcycle?"  Lucky offers, clarifying for Jin's sake - of course he knows who Officer Yamada is.

"Yes that's the one." Rika confirms. "Though it's kind of odd to me to think of him as 'older'." She smiles.  "Anyway", she continues, "back then, we lived in the same neighborhood as Officer Yamada and his wife. They actually lived three houses away from us so we knew them quite well. I think they believed that Reema and I belonged to them almost as much as we belonged to our parents. They didn't have any children of their own, I don't know the circumstances, but I can't imagine it was by choice. The way they doted on us, they seemed to really love kids. Then again, maybe Reema and I were just so amazing they couldn't help but be taken with us." She laughs lightheartedly at her joke, Lucky joining her.

"Back then," she goes on, "Officer Yamada drove a patrol car, parking it in front of their house overnight the days he was on shift. Well, he had this habit of rapping on the bonnet every morning as he walked around the car to get in, and one morning Reema and I happened to see him do it so we asked him why. His response was 'You never know what might take shelter and curl up on a warm car engine some cold night.' He explained that starting the engine all of a sudden would frighten anything that happened to be in there and it could get hurt trying to get out. Of course, as little girls with rampant imagination we thought he meant something magical like faeries or elves or small yokai."

Lucky laughs at this newly revealed bit of Rika history.

"What he was really referring to were small animals, particularly stray cats, that sometimes do that to survive the cold during the winter. A cat will curl up on top of a warm engine, fall asleep, then when someone starts the car, they panic and try to escape. Many times they wind up meeting a moving part of the engine. If they're lucky, they just come away missing some fur or a bit of their tail. A lot of times they aren't."

Lucky had never really given much thought to that aspect of the situation, and just how fortunate he was to have chosen Officer Yamada's patrol car engine to spend the night on.

"But, since it was his habit, he did it all the time, regardless of the season.  So it happened that on one not particularly cold, late spring morning he rapped on the bonnet and heard something afterward. He did it again and heard something again, very faint, but something none the less. On the third time he put his ear against the metal to listen. He wasn't a hundred percent certain, because it was so faint, but he thought it sounded like a cat. At the time he thought it might have been injured because the sound it made was so weak. He opened the bonnet as gently as he could so as not to startle it; he didn't want it to run off before he could get it some help. But when he got the bonnet up he didn't see anything. He hadn't seen anything run away from the car either so he thought it must still be in there somewhere. He tried banging on the frame, again a faint mew. He looked under the car, checked the tire wells, everywhere he could see: nothing.

About this time, Mrs. Yamada realized that she hadn't heard the car start yet and came out to see what was going on. When she saw the bonnet up and her husband checking under the car, she thought he was having engine trouble.

Instead, he told her he thought there was an injured cat trapped in the car somewhere so he couldn't start it until he got the cat out.

Mrs. Yamada, unfortunately, was very allergic to animals; she couldn't even get near anything with fur, so he asked her to go over to our house and see if one of our dads could come out and help him for a few minutes.  It wound up that both our dads went over, which turned out to be a good thing, because that seemingly simple task required the combined efforts of all three of them.

Reema and I didn't know anything until we came down for breakfast and our dads weren't there. Of course we were up from our chairs and out the door like a shot at the word 'cat'.  We got there just as they were about to bag their quarry, which turned out to be not an injured adult cat, but a tiny kitten around four weeks old. They finally had him pinned in a corner of the engine compartment with the three of them blocking any escape routes. And apparently even that wasn't easy, Reema's dad said he looked more like a monkey than a cat the way he had been climbing in and out of the engine compartment, the tire wells, anywhere he could fit, in order to evade apprehension. Unfortunately for them, they thought that since he was cornered the fight was over. The kitten however had other ideas. We couldn't really see much of what was going on, our moms had followed us out and made us stay well back out of the way, so our view was mostly just of our dads and Officer Yamada leaning over the patrol car. One of them would slowly reach in then suddenly jerk his arms out with a yell; as soon as one of them was within reach of the kitten, he became this demonic puff ball that was all teeth and claws."

Jin burst out laughing. "Demonic puff ball, nice description!"

"All three of them had more that a few nasty scratches before Mrs. Yamada thought to go in and get a couple of pairs of her husband's heavy leather gloves.

And that was when the game finally turned in favor of the human trio.

Once they had the gloves on it was just a simple matter to pluck him out of his perch and once officer Yamada had a good hold on him he was more or less submissive - not being able to inflict any more damage, the kitten had no choice but to surrender. He was still growling and every few minutes he would spit and hiss but at that point everyone knew it was more for show than anything else.

And when Officer Yamada hoisted him out of the engine compartment and into the air so that everyone could see their hard earned capture, Reema and I were completely in love. He was the cutest thing we had ever seen and of course we were going to adopt him and he was going come and live with us.

Well, that was our line of thinking at any rate.

The actual breakdown of household opinion was something like this:

Reema and I: YES!!! Our dads: sure, why not. Our moms: maybe, we'll see...

And Gran: absolutely, irrevocably, one hundred percent NO.

She would not live in a household where one of those 'horrible creatures' also resided.

Reema and I just looked at each other, our mouths open in astonishment. At the time, the kitten was on my dad's lap on his back purring while my dad stroked his tummy - once he had been fed and realized he was safe, he was completely docile.  What 'horrible creature' was she talking about?

But Gran was adamant; she would not be staying in any house with a cat and she was perfectly fine going back to India on the next available flight if that creature was going to remain.

So basically we were given the unspoken ultimatum of Gran or the kitten, and of course we knew we couldn't possibly choose a kitten over Gran – although I think Reema and I both were sorely tempted." She laughs again remembering the uproar in the household caused by that one tiny kitten.