Circus Cat, Alley Cat is fanciful and whimsical story. The storyteller describes how an imaginative child managed to weave a web of mystery and glamour around a woman who once worked as a lion trainer in a circus.

The narrator of the story for the first time saw Anna, as the new nanny of the English children who lived next door in a Pink Stucco House. ‘Hide and Seek’ is an exciting game among the children. When they were playing this game, Anna came to bound them out of the shrubbery where they were playing. The narrator crept behind a screen of bamboos and peered out at her through the polished bars of bamboo stalks. She was large and heavily built, with very black bright eyes and a lot of wiry black hair. She bent down to pick-up a neem switch and slapped it against her thigh as she called to them in a loud sharp voice. The little child saw switch in her had a long whistling whip that cracked in the air which was filled no longer with the talking of mynah birds and the barks of pet dogs, but with the roars of tigers and the gibbering of apes.

Being terrified the little child could scarcely breath and preferred to creep over the manure pit to her own home.

She had heard that morning that Nanny came from a circus where she had worked as a cat trainer. She became puzzled. How the staid, plain and entired unimaginative family of Bates could choose a circus performer to be Nanny for their children. The actual name of Anna was Shakti, ‘The Power’. But the bates preferred to call her by the more tame and domestic name of Anna. She was a Malabar who had been born into the circus and had trained the big cats since she was thirteen. Her special breath-taking, death-defying, terror-striking act was to drape a tiger over her shoulders and stand on the backs of tow lions whom she would then order to emit great, rumbling roars that made her large frame tremble all over and the tiger snarl. She dressed in parrot green tights and lilac shirt with silver spangles. She looked a sight. She married an ambitious boy who fed the cats in the circus. He had taught her that a woman’s place is her home and he was straddling the lions himself and wrapping the tigers round his own neck.

ADVERTISEMENTS:

Anna left, in a spurt of cat like temper. By that time she had a baby, when Mrs. Bates found her, she and her child were near starvation, begging on a Daryaganj Street. Mrs. Bates gave her a white uniform and put bath salts in her tube in order to wash off that special circus odour. The she installed her as her Children’s Nanny, put her baby in a cradle on the back verandah, and fed on milk and oranges.

As nothing had ever done before all this played real devastation on their imagination. She banged the knobs of the windows and doors to make them feel that they were being shut into their cages. They would no longer walk or run, but prowl. Even they voices changed. She would feel that the trainer had arrived at the room to practice the act and they would play the games she ordered them to play. She had only to sit down at the breakfast table and cut the bread into slices for them to make them think of it as a great hunk of flesh meat. No matter how hard Mrs. Bates tried to domesticate her and turn her into a tame alley cat.

Anna remained to them the breath taking, death defying, terror striking. They lived in a constant quiver of thrill upon thrill. The little child dreamt of cats all the night. They sprang soundlessly from dream to dream landing softly on her eyelids and from strangers of the jungle they became companions of the long nights of excitement.

Then Anna’s baby vanished. One day she came across Anna in the garden, her hair more disordered than ever, her eyes red from weeping. She was crying and begging God to give back the baby to her. Then the child joined whole-heartedly in the weeping to think that God had taken the child at a very tender age and left poor Anna alone.

ADVERTISEMENTS:

She ran back to tell her mother and then she equally shocked and immediately went to see Anna. Anna was weeping on her shoulders, looking quite thin and pathetic in her sorrow. Her mother pressed her hand and soothed her.

They were non-plussed that the mistress of the house should not have heard of the tragedy of Anna yet. Mrs. Bates said that Anna’s husband and her family came and took it away. It will be a bit difficult to get it back as the circus has moved to Bombay. They were sending Anna off to try though. That was the last they saw of Anna for a long time.

Several years later, when they went to see a circus and found Shakti’s name on the handbill, and a picture of Anna with a snarling tiger on her shoulders. They were so excited that they could not even applaud. They watched out for her baby and wondered if it had grown into the little girl who was somersaulting in the sawdust and tumbling around with a deeply preoccupied expression on her thin face. But throughout the performance they could not see Anna’s husband. They had a vivid picture of Anna in a great cage, growing upon a great bleeding hunk of flesh, Anna snarling at the people who came snatch it from her, she, throwing back her mane and giving a great roar of triumph. Anna, the queen of circus cats.