While my acquaintances were having a relaxing National Day holiday, I was squatting next to Sham looking at the white furball he’d just encountered behind one of the garden’s plant pots.
The Persian cat sat quietly not moving nor meowing, just plainly staring back at us with his one visible blue teary eye while we both were sniffling and sneezing due to his fine hair. I sighed fearing that it was another dumped cat case, but for the benefit of the doubt I asked Sham to go around the neighbourhood to ask if he belonged to any household.
Sham hesitated as he knew all the breed cats kept by our neighbours but went anyway and came back later saying that nobody was missing a white Persian cat. I took the cat and put him inside the cage not sure what to do, then decided that the next logical step was to widen the search.
I took a picture of him and posted it on the Omani Paws page with his description: “Male adult white Persian cat, uncastrated, badly infected eyes was found this morning in my garden. Please contact me if you’re missing one.”
For the next few days, the only response I received were emojis that weren’t helpful. Scrolling down the Omani Paws page, I saw many posts regarding dumped Persian cats found roaming on the streets of Muscat in heartbreaking conditions.
I remembered my friends rescuing a few and luckily finding them new homes. Now, it was clear that this cat was not lost but dumped in my house purposefully and I had to deal with it. The first thing was to give him a proper name instead of being called Goobbee by Mom (meaning big cheeks in Baluchi slang). I called him Abjar which I believed to mean pure white horse in Arabic but turned out to mean the horse with a bulging tummy (from big cheeks to bulging tummy. Progress!).
I took him to the vet for a checkup and a shave as it was hard to deal with him between a runny nose and sneezes. The vet looked at his face and announced that the eye that was shut was undeveloped and one nostril was so tiny that he had problems breathing, genetic defects caused by interbreeding.
Probably this was the reason behind him being dumped after an unsuccessful breeding attempt with kittens carrying the same genetic defect. Abjar was castrated and shaved before returning to Kitzania. I kept him in the cage for three weeks to get used to the cats and vice versa.
At the beginning the cats were hissing at him but when they noticed his silence and readiness to play — due to his stupid docile genes — they ignored him. It was time to let Abjar out and I had to keep an eye on him for weeks as his unintelligent reactions included running out of the garden when fights erupted between cats, trying to befriend Kitzania’s own bullies Abu and Fardan and climbing up the wall but not knowing how to climb down till Jassas the kitten-strangler was kind enough to show him down. However, his lack of survival instinct was replaced with such gentleness that’s rarely found in stray cats. This made me understand the appeal that his breed has which made people adopt them (and dump later when realising the huge amount of work that came along with them including constant grooming).
At present, I don’t know how long Abjar the silent, one-eyed Persian cat will be residing in Kitzania. I hope for long, as we’re getting used to his charming company.
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