Basmah-Pastora

Adopted 26 June 2007 in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia – died 19 September 2022 in Fayetteville, Arkansas

Saving the best for the last

Basmah-Pastora died by my side on the couch, watching the televised funeral of QEII. The time was 15:15 on a sunny afternoon. Basmah is the last of 23 Cats I have had the privilege of rescuing since in 1974 Bob Monforte brought LaPrecious into our life. Previously I avoided cats as much as I courted Dogs, but that first Cat and the uninterrupted line of rescuees who followed (up to seven in residence one time, plus Dogs) bolstered my appreciation for felines. 

Basmah was the repository of that vital stream flowing uninterruptedly since LaPrecious through Miniman, Achilles, Barfly, Paquita, Petunia, MiReina, Esmeralda, Pomponia, Mimosa, Pandora, Perla, Calpurnia, Violeta, Sultana, Pertinax, Antares, Montecor, Minutia, Rocky, and Simba. With Basmah ends the continuance of singular lifes who lived on in those who survived them. Their stories are elsewhere in the ProubastaReader. Here is Basmah’s:

While Chris and I worked for Saudi Aramco in Dhahran, I regularly fed a yellow tabby who lived in a culvert near 122 Falcon Court where we resided. Rufino was one of countless abandoned and feral cats who eke out a living in the streets and jebels of the Kingdom. Like all strays regardless of species their life is short and miserable; wily survivors are trapped by “animal control” and drowned in the trap.

One morning I noticed a flash of white darting from bush to bush near where I always placed the kibble. Hunger won over fear and a small white and black Cat fearfully approached the food. Having seen all manner of desperate conditions among the animals of that land, this one surpassed them all: her face was half shattered, maggot-ridden, and with one eye dangling from tendons. The toughened survivors of the culvert ran her away.

Rescuing is a noble way to complicate one’s own life, and still I ran home, grabbed a carrier and a can of Tuna, and ran back to the bushes where she, I hoped, had taken cover. I hunkered down in wait. Not a minute later, the desperately hungry Cat darted into the carrier and I slammed the door shut. That was the easy part.

Dhahran’s two expert veterinarians agreed that the injuries were due to a crushing blow with a blunt object, like a club or a board. The right cheek, eye socket, mandible, and teeth, were broken. The luxated eye was irreparable and the remaining eye’s vision was but 20% due to an old lesion.  She was also emaciated and in a state of panic, making euthanasia seem like the kindest course.  

But death was what her attacker had intended and I would not abide. I persuaded Rory Cessford and his partner (Kiwi and Scott DVMs) to go for broke to save her. Three hours of reconstructive surgery later, against all odds, the frail Cat was alive.

Elusive and nearly blind she had nowhere to go but to our home in the Dhahran residential area, where two large, behaviorally challenged dogs – one Okie and one Saudi -- resided. Oddly enough, this Cat, who was justifiably afraid of people and of her own kind, was attracted to dogs. While in Dhahran, however, she remained confined to the top floor much as she wanted to befriend shy Magnus (12 OCT 2018) and Farhaan (31 JAN 2011) who scared even the local bomb-sniffing Dog handlers.

Every day I went home for lunch and sat in her safe room. It was there that a few weeks later she first let me touch her ever so briefly and I felt we had come as close as possible to avenging her without the eye-for-an-eye justice I so vehemently wanted – and always will. And so Basmah (Arabic for “smile,” because of her partial absence of lips, and Pastora for her similarities to Pandora, 20 MAY 2017) steadily began to enjoy life, even meeting the dogs almost nose-to-nose on the stairs -- which Farhaan dared not climb due to his own past traumas in Al Khobar. 

In late 2007 Chris accepted a teaching position at the University of Houston. Little did my American Cats in Tulsa know that their 9/11 was coming.

A long trip with three “special-needs” nonhumans requires devotion to duty. Maybe that’s why so many people move chattels at great cost, leaving their living, feeling companions behind in a dastardly betrayal of trust. Much can go wrong in the handling of live “animal cargo” on airplanes. (Note: Always talk to the Captain in person [!] when traveling with pets to ensure the cargo hold is pressurized and conditioned like the cabin.) We researched the best airline for nonhuman travelers – then it was KLM—and initiated the process of obtaining health certificates, exit visas, USA Embassy permits, etc. All was ready.  

The luggage was loaded in the SUV of a friend who came to drive us to the Dammam Airport intoxicated (a double jeopardy in a country where alcohol is strictly forbidden). A taxi was also waiting for the extra luggage, me and the Cat’s carrier. It was a long drive to Dammam and we were behind schedule; missing our flight meant enduring again the strict bureaucracy required for expatriates (i.e., aliens, i.e., anyone not born Saudi) to enter and exit the land of the Prophet, pbuh.

Knowing the consequences of my delay but incapable of crating a crazed Cat, I shreaked so the men waiting outside could hear: “I’m not leaving without Basmah, g—dammit! We’ll live in the desert! You all go, go, gooooo!!”

Clearly, I needed help. Without responding, Chris flew upstairs, burst into the bathroom were Basmah was yowling and puffed up behind the stool, grabbed her by the scruff of the neck, and dumped her in the carrier. We were off.

The three pet carriers bore stickers: “USA OR BUST!”

Thirty hours later, on 16 December 2007, we landed in Houston. Dogs and Cat were alive, surprisingly calm (or catatonic, hard to tell) and no one had soiled his or her kennel – a feat Chris and I could not equal. About Basmah’s composure I surmised that airtravel and its attendant horrors were a picnic compared to life in the mean streets of Arabia.

While Chris was getting settled in his new job and looking for a house in a reasonably safe Houston barrio, I squated at my old Tulsa home with Lanette, her pets, and the Cats I had left behind (Sultana, Pomponia, Calpurnia, Pertinax, Antares, and Montecor). Surrounded by Cats, Basmah’s pinned up aggression against her former tormentors exploded, particularly against Antares and Montecor who, like her, were barely socialized and hid in the basement for as long as she was there.

Finally, on January 2008 we were all reunited and settled in a pleasant neighborhood, albeit encircled by habitats where taquerías and neglected animals were the norm.  

Basmah came to ignore the female felines and fell in love with Pertinax (1 JAN 2021). Unable to be relocated, the five semi-or-unsocialized cats remained in Tulsa, well cared for as usual by Lanette.

At one of our then frequent house parties, Basmah got out of her safe room and bolted out of the main door. I saw it happen and from that moment on nothing mattered to me, nothing, but finding her. Only similar events with wayward companions (Majo, Maximus, and Achilles – all found) caused such distress but worse with Basmah because scared she was unapproachable.  

The details of my 24-hour/5-day quest to find Basmah would require time and wine to be told, but because the radius of territory a Cat is likely to travel was plastered with plasticized (mea culpa) posts and I roamed the area every three hours day and night wailing her name, a neighbor finally called with coordinates.  When Basmah and I spotted each other on Sylmar Road I was spared the impossibility of catching her because she ran home ahead of me! I have never been so elated … and probably so where the neighbors.

There was one more move in store for Basmah in 2012 to Fayetteville, Arkansas. By then the household Dogs were all Houston rescuees --Mago, Astra, and Janowitz (new arrivals Argos in 2016  and Tobias in 2019 didn't bother her) -- and the only Cat still alive was her beloved Pertinax. This perfect set of companions sped up her progress toward trusting us and even sharing our bed sometimes. (Oddly enough, in Dhahran, before I could touch her, she sometimes sneaked in bed and slept wrapped around my head.)

Dhahran 2007; Fayetteville 2012; Pertinax & Basmah 2019.

When Pertinax died in 2020, Basmah’s delicate psyche could have regressed but he Dogs, I believe, saved the day. Given her attraction to them, she associated with them as much as they let her, culminating in “the running of the Dogs” – a civilized version of the Spanish running of the Bulls.  At 5:30 am she would be poised at the bedroom door and when the dogs trotted out to go potty, Basmah ran in front of them making sure they caught up with her to form an odd quadriga. 

Her exclusive time with us -- for she never accepted other people -- was during the “Chris Crises in the Morning” – i.e., coffee and news read aloud by Chris -- when she climbed on my lap to be “messed with” (bouncing, squeez’n, kissing …) which she bore with pleased indifference.

When Basmah began losing her apetite in late August 2022 Dr. Rob Jones agreed that given her intractability, obtaining a blood sample could irreparably damage 14 years of built up trust for an uncertain diagnostic and treatment.  Nature would decide. She ate some Gerber’s baby food for a few days, but kept losing weight and energy.

Contrary to logic, as Basmah weakened she grew bolder. One morning she curled up on Chris’ lap during the “Crises” – first time ever. Increasingly toward the end she slept between us. Two nights before her last we noticed she wasn’t on her pad. On her wobbly legs she had left the comfort of our bed to lay on a corner of Janowitz’s – who was too shocked to move. 

Like octogenarians who skydive for the first time, Basmah had satisfied her main desire: Sleeping with Dogs. 

Basmah’s courage inspires. One has to marvel at someone born in adversity -- her capacity to trust brutalized from the start— who, cast unto incomprehensible scenarios would, by the sheer power of her Will, not only perform well but shine brightly for those with eyes to see. 

I have mourned many companions. In Basmah I grief for her and, again, for the 22 Cat friends who preceded her and whose legacy she embodied.