So began our happy days with Perry Mason. Oh, the delicious sensation of having the tiny footpads of squirrel feet lightly scrape our arm as Perry scampered up to settle down in the hollow of the elbow. This king of squirrels frequently wrinkled his nose at the world as he nibbled on a peanut with quiet satisfaction, whisking his bushy tail that was nearly as long as his torso. He liked to chomp on fruit as well, often taking a few bites and sometimes even just a couple, leaving the rest of the fruit untouched as though he was on a weightwatcher diet. If he couldn’t get hold of food, he would nibble at other objects: cloth of any kind, the legs of chairs, the wooden beams on the ceilings. A strong silent type, he was more than adept in communicating with just his big brown eyes, through which he seemingly not only reached out to our minds but also read them. He scampered, he whimpered, he chibbled.
And like the rest of the family, he had his irritating side: he left his droppings behind him, slim brown-gray pellets bearing an uncanny resemblance to the pills that our uncle would pop down his throat as a nutritional supplement. It was a standing joke between my sister and me that our uncle might think that he had carelessly dropped one of his pills and then carefully pick up and gulp down Perry Mason’s poop. We gleefully imagined its slithery passage through our uncle’s throat and gullet and into his stomach.

When Perry first sprouted hair, acquired a brush tail and started darting around the house, we feared that he would present himself as a readymade meal for Datar-Chubby. For a while, we tried to confine them to different parts of the house. Neither liked it. Datar-Chubby until now had the freedom to roam as she pleased from this room to that, and around the yard and the neighborhood. She resented having to relinquish some of these rights, never mind that she spent most of her time curled on a chair, her nose buried in the tip of her tail. Perry likewise could tell when he was shut into a room; he sat by the door and shrieked his little heart out, attracting the attention of Datar-Chubby who moved on the other side of the door, her mind no doubt streaked with her drool.
“But why would Datar-Chubby think of Perry as food? We feed her well, she’s never starving,” my sister commented. My parents then told us about the instincts that animals are born with, crucial for their survival, and that cats had the inborn instinct to hunt. Even with a full stomach and without hunger as motivation, the hunting instinct would impel Datar-Chubby to stalk and administer the coup-de-grâce to what she considered her rightful prey. It was inbred in her; she couldn’t help it. A well-fed Datar-Chubby had sometimes brought in dead or half-dead sparrows and laid them at our feet as delectable offerings.
Then, one day, the unspeakable happened. Perry and Datar-Chubby managed to get into the same room at the same time. They were in different parts of the room, but Datar-Chubby could easily pounce upon Perry in a flash, and he, poor little thing, might not know enough to flee for his life unless that instinct was also inbred in him. I charged into the room, yelling, my arms flailing. I scared both of them stiff.
We couldn’t possibly keep cat and squirrel separate forever if they both lived in the same house. But instinct or no instinct, Datar-Chubby obviously realized that Perry Mason was part of the household as much as she was, and left him alone. Wisdom could overcome instinct. Ignored him would be a better way of putting it, for Perry could scurry right under her nose but she would sit, sphinx-like, staring straight ahead and not seeing him at all, as if he were not there or just a something that her imagination conjured. Or was Perry protected by his stripes?
As mentioned earlier, Perry had three white stripes running along his back from neck to tail, prominently standing out against his gray-brown fur. Hindu mythology offered an explanation of how the squirrel got its stripes. Lord Rama, an incarnation of the Hindu deity Vishnu and the hero of the Indian epic, The Ramayana, had marched with his army to rescue his wife, Sita, who had been abducted by Ravana, King of the island of Lanka (present day Sri Lanka). Having reached the seashore near the tip of India, they were busy building a bridge of stone and rock across the strait that divided the island of Lanka from mainland India. Legend held that a little squirrel wanted to help Rama, so it rolled in the beach sand, ran on to the half-constructed bridge and shook the sand off its back, returning to the beach to repeat the effort. Rama’s warriors were convulsed with merriment and contempt. But Rama, pleased beyond measure, upbraided them saying that no effort was too small or insignificant and, placing the squirrel in the palm of his hand, he gently stroked its back in loving appreciation. The pressure of his three middle fingers left their imprint on the squirrel, and since this was a divine benediction, the stripes were passed along to the squirrel’s bloodline.

As Perry grew into a full-blooded adult, he spent an increasing amount of time outdoors, climbing up and down the trees in our and the neighbor’s yard. We could sometimes hear the high-pitched screeches — chip-chip-chip-chip — that he belted out whenever something excited him or when he scented possible danger. One day, we saw him seated on a branch of a tree in our yard with another squirrel. Both of them were squatting on their haunches, sharing nuts and engaged in animated squirrel talk. My sister and I, along with our mother and grandmother and the ayah, watched them from a bedroom window. Had our Perry Mason found his very own Della Street?
“Whisper a silent goodbye to Perry from here.” My grandmother was whispering herself. “Blow him a goodbye kiss.”
“He’s left us for good?” My sister and I cried out.
“I’m afraid so.” My grandmother sighed, and my mother explained that squirrels were really meant to live in the wild. Circumstances had brought Perry under our roof for awhile, but now it was time for him to return to his natural home. We nodded, with drooping faces. On the tree, the two squirrels chattered on, completely oblivious to our sorrow.
But Perry Mason came back to us, to our unmitigated delight and to the adults’ astonishment. He ran in circles around the long-suffering Datar-Chubby. He skipped up our welcoming arms and begged us to curve our fingers to form a tunnel so that he could slither in and out. Thereafter, Perry spent most of the day out on the trees with his squirrel friends but returned home after sundown, striking a happy balance between humans and nature. Our house was his home; the trees, a place for adventure and maybe romance.
“Perry is ours, and we are Perry’s!” I cried. “And we’ll have lots more of happy days with Perry Mason.”
My grandmother gave a wry smile that had overtones that indicated that there was sadness in this world and we should learn to live with it. She cautioned me, her words reinforced by my mother and Chechi, that a squirrel’s lifespan is much shorter than ours, and Perry would leave us sooner than we might think, not just into the trees with the other squirrels but permanently.
My grandmother’s words turned out to be prescient but not in a way that any of us had anticipated. At the back of our home, we had a small terrace, part of which was shaded with an overhanging roof. It was a languid summer’s day and I lay sprawled on my stomach under the overhang, reading a comic book. Perry scampered around from the shade into the sunlight and back. One minute he was frisking in the sunshine, the next minute he was gone. And no, I was not imitating Datar-Chubby’s gaze, staring through him as though he was not there. He really had vanished.
It happened right before my eyes: a flash, a loud whirring of wings, brown wings with feathers as soft as squirrel fur, and then an empty terrace. I leaped to my feet and ran out. The hawk, with Perry in its talons, was rapidly ascending into the sky. In one second, it had become a blob, in the next a mere speck. I was stunned, petrified, and could feel my chest heaving. I looked at the terrace. It was pristine: not a shred of fur, not a drop of blood, not a feather to be seen. The execution had been clean and swift, so swift that Perry had had no time to shriek. His brief and chipper life had come to an abrupt end.
I ran into the house, finding my voice at last, hollering one minute and subdued the next, convulsed all over with a heart-stopping sense of panic. I was more disoriented than a stranger in a city whose local language he did not know ─ for I was the sole witness to Perry’s departure from life to afterlife, and it was well beyond me how best to convey to others the horror of what I had seen. Eventually I and everybody else calmed down.
For the next few days, we spoke of nobody but Perry Mason. Thereafter, we continued to think of him until eventually, other matters claimed our attention. It was strange and even outrageous that during his entire lifetime with us, we were so concerned about his safety from hostile creatures that prowled the locality: cats (domestic and feral), bandicoots and other large rodents, even some of the cruel-minded neighborhood children ─ but we never thought that danger could descend and strike from that most unlikely quarter: the calm, pale blue, tranquil, sheltering sky.