The Dalai Lama's Cat (The Dalai Lama's Cat 1)

ed. Ears thoroughly washed and whiskers shimmering, I had also performed the cello with particular vigor—much more allegro vivo than adagio, for those of you familiar with Dvorák’s famous concerto.

No sooner had Lasya opened the door than I was out. I returned to the wall in a manner that tried to convey I had found myself there casually, almost accidentally. Once again, a soccer match was in full swing on the field below. From the rooms behind me there came the by-now-familiar sounds of family life. Lasya spent a few minutes sitting nearby, reading a schoolbook, before running back inside.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw it. The shadow appeared on the 40-gallon drum. Getting up, I stretched first my front paws, then my back with luxuriant insouciance before hopping off the wall and making as if to go inside.

As I’d very much hoped, this proved too much for my admirer.

Noiselessly, he slipped from the drum and walked in such a way that our paths must cross. At the accepted distance from each other, we paused. For the first time, I looked directly into those glowing, amber eyes.

“Haven’t we met somewhere before?” he asked, opening with the most clichéd pick-up line in history.

“I don’t think so.” I tried to inflect just the right amount of encouragement into my voice, without seeming easy.

“I’m sure I’ve seen you before.”

I knew precisely where he’d seen me but had no intention of telling him how enthralled I’d been by the glimpse of him.

Not right now, at least.

“There are a few Himalayans about,” I replied, confirming my impeccable, if undocumented, breeding. “Is this your territory?”

“All the way up to Jokhang,” he said. “And down the main street to the market stalls.”

The market stalls were one block short of my own preferred destination. “What about Café Franc?” I asked.

“Are you crazy? The guy there hates cats.”

“Best cuisine in the Himalayas, according to Hayder’s Food Guide,” I responded coolly.

He blinked. Had he never met an uptown cat before? I wondered.

“How would you ever get near … ?”

“You know that saying ‘It’s who you know that counts’?”

He nodded.

“Not true,” I smiled enigmatically. “Should be ‘It’s who knows you that counts.’”

For a while he paused, staring. I could see the curiosity in his eyes.

“Have you any advice for a tabby from the wrong side of town?” he ventured.

Oh, so sweet!

“‘Then wear the gold hat, if that will move her,’” I began, quoting the epigraph from the book Tenzin believed to be America’s finest novel—The Great Gatsby. “If you can bounce high, bounce for her, too, / Till she cry ‘Lover, gold-hatted, high-bouncing lover, / I must have you!’”

He twitched his nose pensively. “Where did that come from?”

“A book I know.”

He began to walk away.

“You’re going?” I called, marveling again at his muscular poise.

“Off to get a hat,” he replied.

There was no sign of him the following morning, but I felt sure I would see him again that afternoon. Never had I felt such romantic delirium, such a giddying, combustible mix of yearning and apprehension and inexplicable animal magnetism. I was so preoccupied that morning that I barely noticed when Chogyal arrived home at lunchtime instead of in the evening. I paid little attention when he produced the carrying cage from under his bed. It wasn’t until he’d lifted me into it that I realized what was happening.