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Meet the Community Cats #4: Raja

Meet the Community Cats #4: Raja

RajaIt amazes me how, often, a cat who lived as the ultimate wallflower in a suite of 17 rowdy roomies will bloom into a quirky, gregarious creature once you put her in a smaller pad.

No kitty displays this phenomenon better than our Raja.

Raja during her stint in Suite BAbout two years ago, Raja began her Tabby’s Place journey in the biggest suite of all – Suite B. In addition to chronic diarrhea and the strangest “snorkely” sounds perpetually squeaking out her nose, Raja suffered from…well, call it quiet-itis. She didn’t seem unhappy, exactly. It was just that, amidst so many other cats and so much hubbub, she slinked into the background and stayed there, in limbo between surviving and thriving.

Some even remarked that Raja “didn’t have a personality.”

Silly human beans. A cat without a personality? Bollocks. Raja was just trying to tell us something very important: she needed her own spotlight and her own regular audience of the non-feline variety.

She needed to live in the Lounge.

Happy lounge-lizard Raja, in a rare appearance on top of the blanket.Never mind that Raja’s severe inflammatory bowel disease means she needs to live in the Lounge so as to share Mittens & Skittles‘ prescription diet. Never mind that the Lounge affords easy access to the vaporizer that steams her snorkely sinuses every day. The Lounge is the place where this wallflower has burst into wild and wonderful bloom, and our little torbie is now as quirky as they come. To put it mildly, Raja flies her freak-flag very high – and very happy.

It’s hard to pick Raja’s single favorite thing about Lounge life, since she’s clearly quite blissed out, but it just might be the chair next to the door. Like clockwork, Raja will launch herself onto this chair each day around lunchtime (a.k.a. her audience with the human beans). She’ll proceed to vigorously burrow under whatever blanket happens to be on the chair, until she is a blanket-swathed lump of Rajitude. (She’ll take whichever blanket is available, but I personally think her favorite one is the Spider-Man blanket.)

Then she’ll wait.Raja relishing brusha-brusha time.

“Waja waja!” (Side note: something about this torbie girl makes everyone around her lose the ability to pronounce the letter “R.” I can’t explain it. I can’t defend it. It’s just one of her powers.)

“Brooooop!!” Raja will give an approving chirrup.
“Waaa-jaaah!” “Broooop!” This may be her favorite game.

Then again, there’s also “brusha-brusha,” the phrase that gets Raja worked up like no other. Have you ever known a cat who enjoyed being brushed? Multiply that enjoyment-factor by eight jillion, and you have Raja’s euphoria during brusha-brusha time.

Raja’s favorite things All this giddiness aside, Raja is still something of a slow-moving vehicle, and spends most of her day happily dozing in the men’s bathroom (again, some things just can’t be explained). But, around 1 pm every afternoon, she’ll blaze out of there like the proverbial winged mammal out of the underworld, and tear around the room at frantic speed. This makes all the human beans laugh, and that clearly pleases Raja.

Yes, this is a girl who knows her audience – and knows she owns us.

“No personality,” eh? From the funny pale ring at the tip of her tail to her infinite quirks, Waja Waja is everything a Community Cat should be.

4 thoughts on “Meet the Community Cats #4: Raja

  1. Angela, I always look forward to new post from you because they’re so well-written and make me feel as if I really know the cat (or cats) you’re blogging about. Thanks for sharing! I love all the cats at Tabby’s Place soooo much! Raja sounds just so wonderful. I wish I could be there to brusha brusha her!

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