Popular Culture Review 29.2
was because we took a kitten to be adopted there , the second time was because one of the students I had given two kittens to spoke to her parents , who invited us for dinner . Other people bonded over their children , the experience of the schools in Doha , the difficulties of raising a family in an alien culture . We rescued cats and made friends by finding homes for them . In the compound the builders called me the cat lady . I didn ’ t mind at all . My husband tried to grow flowers on the rectangle of sand at the back of our house and became the Garden man . They were affectionate terms in a social sphere where I was far more commonly the poor woman without children , the woman with the kind husband who hadn ’ t taken a new wife .
Neither of us had become accustomed to our childless state , perhaps we even had some vestige of hope still , despite the medical pronouncements on the fallibility of my body . Some days were sad , weighed down with the weight of a future that seemed so much less bright than it had one or two years before . On one such afternoon , tired of the continual traffic jams and of trying to be polite to each other when we were both restless and unhappy , we drove into a supermarket car park . I was tearful . A doctor had told me earlier in the day that my hormone count was more like someone in their seventies than someone in their thirties . My mind replayed his pronouncement over and over in my head . I couldn ’ t think of anything else . There , outside Carrefour , between the cars was a tiny , scrawny , half dead kitten with a voice that somehow , incongruously , filled the air . A woman was dragging her toddler away from it , saying firmly that it was diseased , he mustn ’ t touch . The child wailed , the kitten got louder . ‘ Alan ,’ I said , all dissent forgotten , suddenly juddered out of my misery loop . ‘ Let ’ s take it , at worst we can give it to that woman who has all the cats on the edge of town .’
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