I caught Cats the musical in Mumbai at last, years after I missed it elsewhere. My daughter had prepared us for it. She knew the songs, claimed to have seen the film, and was entirely untroubled that a poet called T.S. Eliot had anything to do with it.

The cats came down to us

All evening, the cats came down into the crowd. They walked the aisles. They sat in the rows. One of them stopped a metre from my face, locked eyes with mine, and recited a poem about the naming of cats while I sat frozen. You freeze like that when a strange cat decides you are furniture. Immersive, to put it mildly.

These performers did not act like cats. They turned into them, right down to that long, bored stare a cat keeps for people it owns.

We have cats all over our complex, asleep on warm bonnets. I thought I knew how a cat moves. I learnt it properly only here, by watching people pretend to be one. It takes a person working hard to show you a thing you had stopped seeing.

One performer leapt right across the stage, and the whole row gasped. The songs followed me home.

The set never changes all through the evening. One giant junkyard. At first I thought it was economics. Then I looked closer, and home turned up. Deep in that pile of giant rubbish sits an Exide battery, a name I recall from under the bonnet of the old Ambassador my dad persevered with. An English show, built on an Indian junk heap.

The interval brought something I had never seen at a show. People queued up to clamber onto the stage and be photographed with the head cat. I stayed in my seat and watched the watchers. It is a habit. It is also cheaper than the merchandise, and lighter on the calories than the vada pav they sell outside.

Cats the musical comes to Mumbai

I saw Cats the musical at the Grand Theatre, inside the Nita Mukesh Ambani Cultural Centre. The same hall has given us The Sound of Music, Wicked, Matilda, Phantom of the Opera and many more.

Phantom, I learnt, is the show that took the longest-run record from Cats. Cats ran eighteen years on Broadway. Phantom ran thirty-five. I had seen Phantom in this very place sometime ago, so it felt right to now meet the show whose record it broke.

For years, an evening like this was the preserve of London or New York. Not any more. And the Grand Theatre, I would say, holds its own against the best I have seen abroad.

Aftereffects

A good show has a way of staying with you after the lights come up. I play the songs. I read around it. And talk about it to anyone who will listen. Now and then, I write about it. This one had me do all four.

I even asked an LLM what Cats was really about. It answered almost word for word what my daughter had told me. The funny thing about Cats, it offered, is that millions have seen it, and plenty still walked out wondering what it was about. You no longer have to be a cat to be hard to work out.

So I went looking for where it came from. Cats is an Andrew Lloyd Webber’s show. He is the man behind Phantom of the Opera, Evita and many more. If a show has run somewhere for twenty years, there is a fair chance he wrote it. I first heard his name years ago, when he made Bombay Dreams with A. R. Rahman.

The poems go back further. In the 1930s, a poet wrote silly verse about cats and posted it to his godchildren in letters. He signed himself Old Possum. The poet was T. S. Eliot. By day he wrote serious, hard poems. At night, he wrote about cats.

The verse sat in a book for forty years. Then Lloyd Webber set some of it to music, mostly to see if he could. He could. The book became a show that ran twenty-one years in London and eighteen in New York. Night after night, grown adults dressed as cats, singing a dead man’s letters to children.

Here is the part I liked best. The song that drew the loudest applause, is the bit Eliot left out. He had written a sad old cat and dropped her, judging her too heavy for children. The show brought her back and gave her the famous tune. The best loved moment of the night is the piece he threw away.

The cat who wasn’t there

It came up again when I spoke to an old classmate. She reminded me that we used to recite one of these poems in our school assembly. It was Macavity, about a cat who is never there when you look for him. True to the poem, he was not there in my memory either. He had slipped out of that too.

A poet in England wrote that verse for his godchildren. Somehow it reached a school assembly back home, and a child recited it without a clue who Old Possum was. Sunil Shanbag put it well a few months ago. Stories travel further than the people who write them.

A tyre, and home

Towards the end, a tyre rises. I will leave the rest for you to see. It reminded me of an old MRF Zigma commercial, the one that tried to sell a tyre with a spaceship.

The tyre rising on stage had reached into my memory and lifted the saucer out with it. A Madras Rubber Factory tyre, climbing on a Mumbai stage, under two English cats, watched by a man from Madurai.

Nostalgia usually lifts me clean off the floor. Tonight it managed only a gentle tug. The show had already carried me a few feet higher.