viiMy Roomate's Black Cat

In the apartment, my roommate’s black cat is silent and watchful. That sentence sounds like a Google auto-generated line that gets longer as you add words:

In the apartment, my black cat is silent.

In the apartment, my roommate’s black cat is silent.

In the apartment, my roommate’s black cat is silent and watchful.

Time-lapse sentences like these unnerve me. There’s something about them that make me feel five again, in kindergarten, writing my Es backwards and adding an H to the word we (It took me literal years to figure out that whe was the wrong way of spelling it). Like when you put on an old shirt and suddenly realize how much you’ve grown, how much your body has changed.

Anyway, the other day, I fell asleep on the couch. At around 5 am, I awoke groggily, in phases, to a sort of steady, comforting presence by my side. Aries—my roommate’s black cat—tilted his head at me, softly twitching his tail in the rising twilight. Then, we locked eyes, and he blinked slowly, as if to say—according to that one TikTok I watched—I love you. I blinked back, and we sat side-by-side, watching the sun wake up and cast golden rays—long and searching—onto our living room floor, our coffee table, the couch.

That’s the best way I can describe how safe Anu ammakkaiyya makes me feel. Like my mother’s mango kulfi on a hot day or piping hot charu on a cold one.

Like how, in the apartment, watching morning settle on Los Angeles with my roommate’s black cat is quietly wonderful.

Amakaiyya always works on her art projects. Whether through crackling phone lines or rushed visits to Secunderabad on weekends between unending days in classrooms, her crafty side was our immediate point of connection as niece and aunt. Even now, when I dial twelve hours into the future—PST to IST—to talk to her, the first thing we do is a recap of the projects we’re working on. The other day, as her grainy WhatsApp video was blipping in and out, I told her about the sweater I was knitting. In return, she told me about the table runner she sewed and the dress she was working on for her youngest grandchild (Sridevi akka’s daughter), Shrestha.

Then, when my mom came back from India with a suitcase full of goodies in April, a cloth tumbled out: the runner I had complimented a couple of weeks ago, soft to the touch and sewed up seamlessly, with no loose ends.

Late at night in ammakkaiyya’s house, if you venture out into the dining room to grab a cup of water, the hum of the sewing machine—operated almost effortlessly by ammakkaiyya’s deft fingers—envelops you. The tight and precise jerks of her hands across the cloth, the way her lips purse around thread, how her wrists flick dramatically out and in, as if she is a showman putting on her own private act—it’s all etched into my memory now that we are separated by thousands of kilometers. The moonlight would veil the house, transforming it into ammakkaiyya’s personal sanctuary: the grandkids had finally dropped their toys and fallen asleep, the daughters and assorted in-laws had scattered to their homes or were curled around their children, there was no more cooking or cleaning or conversation-ing. In all my years of being her niece, sewing is the only thing I have seen amakaiyya do that is remotely for herself.

I would hop up onto the couch—upholstered three times over—and drum my heels in the darkened living room. We’d talk sometimes, amakaiyya asking me questions about how I saw the world, me asking her about what she was making or what it was like. She was my confidant, and I was another sewing project she stitched and seamed together: a patchwork.