I went to Kerala for a week and stayed for two.

The trip had already felt rushed when, the day before I was supposed to return to Bangalore, ₹25,000 disappeared from my bank account.

Someone had stolen my debit card details, and I watched in horror while the transactions happened in another corner of the world, as my phone pinged over and over.

What followed was twelve hours of frantic phone calls, complaints, cybersecurity, banking, police procedures and general chaos. I have a cop in the family - my brother - so I had considerably more help than most people would have had in the same situation. Everyone was trying to help.

It was still horrible.

And then, by the end of the day, the money came back.

That evening, I went out for dinner with my brother and sister-in-law. Somewhere between the relief and the exhaustion, I thought, I don’t want to leave tomorrow.

So I didn’t.

I extended the trip and eventually returned to Bangalore after nearly fifteen days away.

A couple of days later, my balcony began to smell like shit.

Literally.

It is a small west-facing balcony at the back of my apartment. It has my washing machine, a large areca palm, and a collection of smaller plants that help create the humid little microclimate in which I keep most of my orchids.

It is also enclosed with iron grills.

The neighbouring building is disconcertingly close, but both buildings are owned by the same person and I had never thought much about the gap. The balcony felt closed.

Nothing was getting in there. Except something clearly had.

The smell was unmistakable, although for a while I couldn’t find its source. Part of me wondered if something had crawled under the washing machine and died.

Eventually, I looked inside the enormous areca pot.

Cat shit. Fresh cat shit.

And when I looked more carefully, I found two older, dried deposits elsewhere in the soil.

Apparently my palm had been functioning as a litter box for some time.

I spent the next half hour in disposable gloves, armed with newspaper, garbage bags and improvised shovels, excavating cat faeces from a giant plant pot.

The next day, my maid and I removed much of the topsoil, replaced it, cleaned the exposed surfaces and wiped down the pot.

I thought I understood what had happened.

I’d been away for two weeks. An animal had discovered a quiet place filled with lovely soft soil. Fair enough.

Then I saw the adolescent ginger cat.

And I knew exactly who it was.

There is a beautiful ginger cat in the neighbourhood who seems to produce kittens with impressive regularity. I don’t know whether she belongs to anyone. She has been around for years.

She has also used my balcony as a nursery.

Once she hid a litter behind the washing machine. More recently, she deposited her kittens inside this very areca pot, where they remained completely invisible until one of them made a noise. I discovered them accidentally. Mama cat, understandably assuming that I was planning to murder her children, became extremely agitated and moved them elsewhere.

One of those kittens was now half-grown.

And apparently had returned to the ancestral home to shit in it.

Fine. This was solvable.

My first solution was to cover the soil.

I got plastic mesh and secured it across the top of the pot. No exposed earth, no litter box. I was rather pleased with myself.

It worked for approximately three days.

Then the cat returned and shat on top of the mesh. Part of it landed on the rim of the pot.

Cleaning this was considerably worse than cleaning soil.

Out came the gloves, the bags. Out came more soil.

Fine. Clearly I had underestimated the cat.

So I escalated.

I bought the kind of plastic mesh used to protect young saplings and covered the corner I thought the cat was using to cross from the neighbouring building. The balcony geometry made an L-shaped barrier fairly straightforward.

This time, I thought, I had solved it properly.

I knew almost nothing about cats. I had never had one. I didn’t know how well they climbed, how far they jumped, how persistent they were, or how seriously they took access to a preferred toilet.

But I had put up a net. The cat disappeared.

A week passed. And I relaxed.

Then one day I was hanging out the laundry when something familiar arrived on the breeze.

I turned around. Cat shit. Again.

But this time there wasn’t very much of it.

And something about that tiny quantity pushed me over the edge.

The previous piles had at least looked necessary. An animal had needed to defecate and had defecated.

This? This looked personal.

For perhaps five minutes, I became convinced that this cat was coming back to fuck with me.

It had defeated the mesh over the soil. It had defeated my makeshift barricade. It had waited until I believed the problem was solved and then returned to leave a small, revolting calling card in my balcony. It felt malicious and vengeful.

I have watched enough wildlife documentaries to know about territorial behaviour. I understand, at least in principle, that animals are not usually running elaborate psychological campaigns against middle-aged women in Bengaluru apartments.

None of that mattered.

This cat was an asshole. Specifically, an asshole out to screw my happiness.

Eventually sanity returned. And I called the professionals.

There was collateral damage.

My balcony had three clotheslines put up when I moved into the apartment. After eight or nine years, they had begun reaching the end of their lives.

When the first one frayed, I replaced it myself.

This involved learning two things I had somehow managed not to learn in four decades of life - a round turn and two half hitches for the fixed end, and a trucker’s hitch at the other end so I could use the rope itself as a crude pulley and get the line taut.

When another old line snapped, I did it again.

Then I installed my makeshift anti-cat net and had to partially take the new lines down and put them back up.

Then the professional netting team arrived.

Down came the clotheslines again. Down came the orchids.

Pots moved. Plants moved. Laundry supplies moved. Everything except the washing machine had to get out of the way.

The men drilled into the concrete and installed netting across the entire balcony.

They did a thorough job.

They also left behind dust. An astonishing amount of dust.

The electrical point they had used was inside the room adjoining the balcony - my study and home office, a room that had recently been deep-cleaned.

Fine concrete dust had travelled everywhere. Across both desks. Across the windowsill. Into the rug even though I had rolled it up. Onto the open bookshelf. Onto the books. Onto the small day to day objects across my desk.

I ran a damp cloth over one of the books and could feel grit dragging underneath my fingers.

At that point, something in me gave up.

What the actual fuck.

The cat had shat in a plant. I had cleaned the plant.

The cat had shat in it again. I had covered the plant.

The cat had shat on the cover. I had netted the corner.

The cat had returned. I had professionally netted the balcony.

And now a recently cleaned room was coated in concrete dust.

The next morning my maid would come and clean the whole thing, and after she left I would probably have to wipe things down again. Vacuum. Rearrange the plants. Rehang the clotheslines for what felt like the four-hundredth time.

This was too much work.

Surely it couldn’t all be for nothing.

And that was when the universe entered the story.

The balcony faces west. In some versions of feng shui, the west is associated with creativity. I had also been feeling creatively stifled.

Nothing dramatic. I hadn’t lost some magnificent artistic gift. I had simply been feeling that I had nothing much to say. The juices weren’t flowing. Things felt a little stuck.

And now, thanks to a persistent ginger cat, I had been forced to dismantle, clean, rearrange and reconstruct an entire corner of my home adjacent to the room in which I do most of my thinking and working.

I made myself a cup of tea. I sat down. And I began connecting dots.

Maybe this was a forced reset. Maybe the disruption was clearing something. Maybe this absurd sequence of events had arrived because something in this part of my life needed to move.

The west. Creativity. The study. The cleaning. The rearrangement. The cat.

For about fifteen minutes, I seriously entertained the possibility that this was cosmic intervention. And it was surprisingly satisfying.

Because suddenly none of the work had been wasted.

The gloves and garbage bags hadn’t been wasted. The replaced soil hadn’t been wasted. The first mesh hadn’t been wasted. The second mesh hadn’t been wasted. The repeated clothesline dismantling hadn’t been wasted.

The professional netting, the concrete dust, the cleaning, the disruption - none of it was merely an annoying sequence of consequences produced by a young cat repeatedly returning to a familiar place.

It had an arc. A purpose. It was going somewhere.

I think human beings find meaningless cost unusually difficult to tolerate.

If something hurts and makes us wiser, the pain bought something.

If something falls apart and redirects us towards a better life, the loss bought something.

If the same irritating thing happens repeatedly, surely it is trying to tell us something.

Otherwise, sometimes the answer is simply this: Something unpleasant happened. You dealt with it. Then something else happened. You dealt with that too. There is no dividend.

The fascinating thing is how quickly the mind can begin writing one.

I had already done it once with the cat.

When I found that small third deposit, I briefly gave an animal an intention it almost certainly didn’t possess. It was doing this to me.

Random animal behaviour had become intention. Then repeated inconvenience became pattern. Pattern became meaning. Meaning became a message. And finally the message acquired an author. The universe.

The scale of the story had expanded magnificently, but I remained at its centre.

The cat had an agenda concerning me. The cosmos had an agenda concerning me.

Apparently everyone was extremely invested in my balcony.

There is a distinction here that I don’t want to lose.

I like rituals. I like symbols. I like nibbling at the edges of the metaphysical.

I think there can be real value in deciding that an ordinary event will mark a transition, or that cleaning a room will mean clearing something else, or that an object will represent an intention.

We create meaning all the time. Meaning doesn’t become worthless merely because we created it.

But there is a small, interesting slide between creating meaning from something that happened and deciding that the thing happened in order to deliver the meaning.

I can decide that an involuntary deep clean of my study will become a reset. That is mine to do.

It is a rather different proposition to believe that the universe dispatched an adolescent ginger cat to repeatedly shit in an areca palm until I addressed my creative stagnation.

For about fifteen minutes, though, I was there.

I drank my tea and contemplated my freshly netted balcony and my dusty study and the strange possibility that all of this had been orchestrated for my benefit.

And then I started laughing. Really laughing.

The spell broke. The universe disappeared. The creativity corner became a room that needed cleaning. The netting became netting. The cat became a cat.

Perhaps there was a message in all of it. But if there was, I was the one who had put it there.

The cat had only shat in a pot.

Everything after that was me.