Bonding with India's lonely Cat Ladies

Gayatri Menon, a 34-year-old product stylist, doesn���t find anything wrong with the view that Rhett, her cat, is ���like my boyfriend or whatever���. Menon says it���s mostly because ���I don���t live alone, I live with my cat.��� And cats have something most people don���t: a purr-sonality.Menon���s family and friends think she���sdotty. But she is what one would call as a ���cat lady���, women of acertain age with many furry companions. ���Cat lady��� took off as aterm after the popular American television show The Simpsons made repeatedreferences to one. And then, there was lonely Violet Stoneham andher cat in Aparna Sen���s moving and critically acclaimed film 36Chowringhee Lane. But a feline vocabulary can describe manydifferent kinds of woman, not just the one who likes cats. Catty signifiesmalicious or spiteful female behaviour; pussy is offensive slang for women andcougar, a large American feline resembling a lion, is what older women who dateyounger men are called.Cut to the hour-long Cat Ladies, cinemaverite extraordinary. An offering from four women, it tries to find the realstory of women ridiculed by society with feline terms. Cat Ladies draws us intothe lives of four women and their cats and leaves the audience tojudge.The filmmakers ��� director Christie Callan-Jones,creative producer Sally Blake, producer Jeannette Loakman and associate producerSuzanne Mullett say a ���cat lady��� is defined by a woman���sattachment ��� or lack of it ��� to humanbeings.That���s where Gayatri Menon and hundreds of young urbanIndian women come in. ���Cat lady��� is becoming a well-recognized termhere and increasingly, a condition, Indian women identify with. As the jointfamily crumbles and more women than ever before work and live on their own,���cat lady��� status becomes attractive. The cat provides companionshipwithout the emotional baggage associated with human relationships and theneediness of dogs.Take Margot, one of the women in the film. Herworld revolves around her three cats. She skips work to stay home with them; shere-designed her apartment for them; she says ���that���s who I am... Iam Margot and she���s got three cats. I don���t know what else tobe���. But her bond with her pets gets in the way of healthy relationshipswith human beings. Not so Jenny, who is in her mid 30s and seems tohave it all ��� she���s an attractive, fiercely independent sales agentwith her own home and many friends. She just ���happens to have a catproblem��� and on the verge of becoming a ���crazy catlady���.Then there is Diane, a vivacious former banker whoseearly and unwanted retirement made her turn to saving street cats. Thedocumentary finds her sharing her home with 123 cats. She wants to stop but thethought of a cat starving or suffering breaks her heart. Meanwhile, her healthis deteriorating and her bank balance, overdrawn. Sigi, like Diane,has turned her house over to hundreds of furry creatures and is unapologeticabout it. So too Gayatri Menon. The ���cat lady��� is on a roll inIndia.