Rajah showed up in my neighborhood in the fall of 2000, obviously homeless. I never learned her story. Maybe she wandered off and nobody looked for her. Maybe she was dumped. The picture was made from this idea.
Rajah was a beautiful long-haired calico-tabby-point Siamese with turquoise blue eyes. She must have been an inutterly adorable kitten. But by the time I met her she was very old and very ill. She was constantly getting infections. They cleared right up, but another one followed soon after.
I named her “Rajah” because at first I thought she was a neutered male, mainly because Dixie as a young cat got along better with males than females. Until I bathed her, I did not realize her points were calico; she simply looked brown, or lynx point. She was too feeble to object to being bathed. Under the long hair she weighed only four pounds.
The other cats avoided her—wisely, it turned out—and would not eat from a dish she had touched. She would not use regular cat litter, but only shredded paper in a separate box. She never lived with me; she slept in the attic of an open garage nearby. But I knew she could never get through a second winter. That was when I brought her in for tests before looking into rescues.
When her test results came back, half the readings were out of “normal” range. And she was positive for FIV, FeLV and FIH. That’s cat AIDS, cat leukemia and cat hepatitis. She also had a sort of kitty Alzheimer’s, sometimes making it impossible to approach her except by stealth. This last factor put a “special needs” sanctuary out of the question, even if there had been one nearby. She is the only cat I have ever had put to sleep.
Rajah’s Parting View / created August 2011