The cat has found the warm patch

Every flat has one square of floor that the sun reaches at four in the afternoon. In ours it is a patch of about forty centimetres by sixty, between the sofa and the bookshelf, on a rug that was bought for a different room. It took the cat eight days to find it. It has taken us three months to stop standing on her.

She arrived in March, from a shelter off Bannerghatta Road, with a name we did not use and a cold she gave to nobody. For the first week she lived behind the washing machine. For the second she lived on top of it. Somewhere in the third she worked out that the machine is warm only sometimes, and that the floor by the bookshelf is warm every day at the same hour, and she has not made a serious mistake since.

We are not the first people to notice this. Every flat in the building has a patch, and every cat in the building has found it, and the two families on the east side have the same argument about it in the morning instead of the afternoon. What is new to us is how exact the cat is about it. She is not warm-seeking in a vague way. She is early, she is repeatable, and on the two days in June when the sun did not come out at all she went and sat on the router and looked at us.

What follows is a short account of where a cat sleeps and why, with numbers we made up and pictures we did not. It is also, if you are reading this inside the Sandbox, an article built out of nine kinds of block, one after another, with words between them. Both things are true at once, which is rather the point.

Warmth first, comfort later

We assumed, before we had a cat, that a cat sleeps where it is comfortable. This is wrong in a way that took a season to see. A cat sleeps where it is warm, and she will take a great deal of discomfort to be warm: a laundry basket with the handles pressing in, a windowsill nine centimetres wide, the top of a router.

Comfort comes second and it comes late. Once the warmth is settled she spends two or three minutes turning, folding a paw under, pushing her spine against something solid. Then she is gone for four hours and the flat belongs to her.

You can test this, if you have a cat and no plans. Put a folded towel on the cold side of the room and she will sniff it, sit on it for ninety seconds out of politeness, and leave. Put the same towel on the hot water pipe and she will be on it before you have straightened up. We have done this four times. The towel is not the variable.

The one exception is the warm patch itself, and the exception teaches you the rule. She does not turn on the warm patch. She arrives, she drops, and she is asleep in under ten seconds, because the patch moves. It crosses the rug at about the pace of a minute hand, and a cat who spends two minutes arranging herself on it wakes up in the shade.

Priya has kept cats for eleven years and finds our surprise funny. Her flat in Jayanagar has a west-facing balcony and three cats, and she says the same square metre has been fought over since 2019 — in the way cats fight, which is to say by arriving earlier.

She also named the thing we had missed about the four o’clock patch, which is that it is not the sun. The sun reaches the rug at about half past three and leaves it before five. The patch stays warm until nearly seven, because under the rug is a slab of concrete that has been taking the afternoon in through the west wall since one. The cat is not lying in the light. She is lying on a battery.

We checked this with a kitchen thermometer, in the manner of people who have run out of things to talk about, and Priya was right to within twenty minutes.

A cat keeps a portfolio

There are four places in this flat that she uses seriously, and she rotates them by the hour rather than by mood.

The sofa is the morning. The windowsill is late morning, and only on days when the neighbours have washing out, which we cannot explain and have stopped trying to. The laundry basket is early afternoon, and it is the only one that can be unavailable, which she treats as a personal slight. The warm patch is from four.

What makes it a portfolio rather than a habit is that she moves before she has to. She leaves the sofa while the sun is still on it, walks to the windowsill, and is settled there a good ten minutes before the light arrives. Whatever she is doing, she is not following warmth. She is expecting it.

The rest of the flat she uses tactically: the desk when somebody is working at it, the doormat when somebody is expected, and the second shelf of the bookcase exactly once, in June, for reasons that ended a lamp.

How we counted, and why you should not trust it

We started counting in April, which is not a thing we are proud of. The method was simple and bad. Whenever one of us walked into a room and found her asleep, we wrote the place on a list on the fridge. No fixed times, no attempt at covering the day, and two observers with different working hours and a strong shared wish for the warm patch to win.

What follows is therefore not data. It is a tally kept by supporters. It is also, we think, the honest way to put a number on a website: say who counted, say how they counted, and let the reader decide what it is worth.

The obvious flaw is that we walk past the warm patch to reach the kitchen and we walk past the laundry basket almost never. A cat asleep in a basket behind a door is a cat nobody writes on the fridge. If we were being careful we would have walked a fixed route at fixed times, and we would have found fewer warm patches and more baskets. We were not being careful. We were making tea.

The chart below is drawn by the site itself, from four labels and four numbers typed into a form. Nobody built a chart for this article.

Sixty-one is a large number for a patch of rug that exists for three hours a day, and it is the finding, such as it is. The sofa is bigger, softer, available at any hour and nearer the people. It loses by twenty-seven.

The other thing the tally shows, which we did not expect, is how little the sofa is used after two in the afternoon. It has the best view in the flat and it is where the people are, and from two o’clock she treats it as furniture. Warmth beat company by a distance we are trying not to take personally.

The chart under this paragraph is here for a different reason: it comes from somewhere else. The one above is drawn by this site, in this site’s colours, from numbers in a field. The one below is a chart made in another tool and dropped in with a link, which is what most teams actually have.

She is on the patch now. It is twenty past four, and she has about two hours before the rug goes cold and she moves to the router, which is the least dignified part of her day and which we have agreed not to photograph.

The winter question is still open. Bengaluru does not get cold enough for the concrete to stop working, but it does get cold enough, in December, for the afternoon to end at half past five instead of seven. We are told by Priya that this is when a cat starts negotiating for a lap, and that the negotiation is not subtle, and that we will lose it.

If you are here to look at the Sandbox rather than at the cat: this page holds nine kinds of block, and every one of them was added, filled in and reordered in the CMS, with no engineer involved after the block was built once. Turn on Inspect at the top of the page, and each block will say what it is and open itself for editing.

Under the listing is a box for an email address. It collects nothing. No message is ever sent from the Sandbox, and every address typed into it is deleted overnight — the form says so above the box, in words no Editor can write away.