Hardly a day passes without the news of an animal-human confrontation hitting our television screens or social media feeds. More than often, it paints a bleak picture of interspecies interactions. Not so with A Roof for Norbu, a deceptively simple and charming tale of a Ladakhi family that stumbles upon a family of Pallas’s cats in the storeroom located at some distance from their house. 

Suffused with tender and evocative portrayals of domestic and wild settings within the Himalayan landscape, this picture book begins with a young boy named Otsal who discovers a freshly-born litter of three Pallas’s kittens in the family storeroom and breaks the news to his elders. His brother Lobzang, a young nature guide, takes the lead in teaching Otsal how to confirm his sighting. Bringing out a ​“spotting scope” that a wildlife researcher had left in his care, Lobzang chooses a far-off vantage point to observe the daily rituals of the mother Pallas and her three kittens. Soon enough, the brothers start enjoying live shows of the small grey-furred wild cat slipping in and out of their storeroom, which shelters the family’s supply of rice, wheat flour and all kinds of rations.

Food provides a major subtext to the narrative. For, if the mother cat periodically exits the storeroom in search of smaller creatures to feed her young, Otsal and Lobzang also have the job of bringing home food supplies from that very place. But once they discover that its secluded location acts as the perfect setting for the mother-cat and her kittens, they decide to temporarily borrow provisions from other village folk without the knowledge of their beloved mother, Ama-ley. Obviously, all hell breaks loose when Ama-ley finds out the truth and reprimands her sons for ​“begging”.

It is at this point that the agency and thoughtfulness of children truly comes to the fore, especially through Otsal, who gently and persuasively explains to his parents the need to give the animals their own space to grow up. Drawing a parallel between his parents’ labour and the cat’s hard work in providing for her children, Otsal prompts a complete transformation in his mother’s outlook. The narrative thus metamorphoses into a warmhearted tale of care and intergenerational navigation, even as it remains committed to exploring the life of the Himalayan cat. And when the parents join the children in their ​‘scoping’, they themselves turn childlike, thrilled with the wondrous movements of the Pallas’s cat. As the father Aba-ley exclaims, ​“This is amazing! I didn’t realize that wild animals enjoyed themselves so much.”

As news of the cats travels far and wide, Otsal’s family dons the role of its guardians, guiding the new visitors to observe the animals from a respectful distance. But the most compelling aspect of the book is a series of interspersed double-spreads where a proud if somewhat peevish Pallas’s cat confidently inserts herself into the narrative. The details she spills forth in this first-person narration are all grounded in natural history, which adds to the fictional tale’s educational impetus. My favourite double-spread appears in the middle of the book, where the Pallas’s cat takes a sarcastic and humorous dig at human expressions in response to the cold comments it often receives for its own looks. 

Labonie Roy’s illustrations carry a soft painterly texture with pastel hues and a mixed-media palette. Largely deploying rectangular and circular frames, the illustrator is as much at home in evoking the cosy domestic interiors of Otsal’s household as the raw beauty of the Pallas’s wildscape. Despite chiefly focusing on a single human family and a single wild species, A Roof for Norbu assumes an aesthetic completeness larger than the sum of its parts. This is because in addition to the wild cat, it subtly piques interest in many other creatures from the surrounding terrain (Tibetan gazelles, Pallas’s gulls, black-necked cranes, golden eagles, etc.) and also draws attention to wildlife tourism and human-led changes in the environment. In this lies the success of the book, and one can only hope for more such wonderful productions to emerge in the future. 

About the reviewer:

Siddharth Pandey is a writer, photographer, musician and cultural critic from Shimla, Himachal Pradesh. He can be found on Instagram @shimlasiddharthpandey