Remembering Raja Kitty

Dear little Raja kitty, you are in kitty heaven now, but I still miss you lots. Here are some of the things that make me smile when I think of you.

Raja was my very first cat. Growing up, I was not allowed to have a cat due to my dad's and my sister's allergies, so once I became an adult, I went about rectifying that. I went down to the local pet shop and there was a cage with a few rescued kittens in it. The Richmond SPCA was trying to find these little kittens new homes. Of the three or four kittens playing around in the cage, Raja was the only one asleep. And he was sleeping in the litter box. The minute I saw him, I knew he would be coming home with me. He was a little ball of white fur with grey stripes and fearless. I named him after the tiger in Disney's Aladdin.

Over his life, Raja never did outgrow his strange obsession with the litter box. Whenever I changed out the litter, he'd run over, jump in, paw around a bit and then curl up to take a nap, tucking his front paws beneath him, contented kitty smile on his face.

Raja was a runt of a kitten, and even though the SPCA promised me he had had a vet exam and a clean bill of health, he did not seem to be as active as I thought a kitten would be. I took him to the vet and discovered he had an eye infection, a cold, an upper respiratory infection, and worms. I spent the first couple of weeks force feeding him medicine for his ailments and prying his eyes open to administer eye drops. (Even as an adult cat, he sometimes wheezed and I believe it was due to his early illness.) After just a couple of days, I came home from work to a changed kitten. He was so, so playful and mischievous. Poor thing, he must have felt really sick before that. He loved to paw at my hair and always had to be touching me, even if it was just a paw touching me as he napped next to me on the sofa. He never outgrew this habit. He wasn't big on taking naps on my lap, but whenever he slept near me, he had to have some part of his body touching me.