“I smell something in the attic!”
Memories of big cats and the almost-cats of Khoundpara
By Koumudi Mahanta
Growing up, each summer at my maternal grandmother’s house in Khoundpara village, nestled near the sleepy town of Dergaon in upper Assam, gave me the chance to encounter a variety of non-human friends. Beyond the regular company of kittens, puppies, or other farm animals, there were a host of other creatures tethered to the surrounding land. Bortukulas (Lesser Adjutant Storks) would sometimes strut about the paddy fields like oddball aristocrats, while a gaggle of geese paraded arrogantly across the neighbour's yard.
One year, a pair of turkeys made a brief but memorable appearance - an event that filled me with childlike curiosity and mild terror.
After particularly heavy showers, vipers would slither onto the back verandah, inevitably leading to a communal, broom-wielding affair to gently but firmly evict the trespasser.
Birds of all shapes and temperaments gathered near the swamps, perhaps drawn by the proximity to Kaziranga’s wild expanse, about an hour away. Its wilderness seemed to press close, breathing gently against the daily hum of village life. Those days in Khoundpara felt like one long, drowsy summer afternoon, punctuated only by my endless, barefoot dashes in and out of the house.
But one particular summer—the summer of 2005—something unusual happened.
News broke that a leopard had been sighted close by in the pale hours of dawn, and with it came a palpable shift in the air. Rumor claimed that this same leopard had attacked someone days earlier, and the tension thickened like mist over the fields.
I remember Aita (grandmother) and my Mama (uncle) looking uncharacteristically grim.
The telephone, usually as silent as a sleepy pond, came to life, ringing incessantly. Mama stayed home from work. The front door, normally flung open to welcome the sun and breeze, was bolted shut. Its curtain, usually a cheerful thing that danced in the wind, hung limp and sullen. Outside, the street lay deserted—not a soul on foot or bicycle.
Khoundpara seemed to be holding its breath.
The next two days passed in a state of hushed, simmering panic. Conversations turned to whispered debates about the leopard’s movements.
“Has it been spotted again?
Did it return to the ridge forest?
Or to Kaziranga?
Is it safe?
Are we safe?”
My carefree romps through fields and bamboo groves came to an abrupt halt, as did my nightly attempts to coax Mama into taking me to see the sea of fireflies - junaki poruwa — after dinner. Danger had crept into our world, and adventure was no longer welcome.
Amidst all this heightened awareness of the wild, it took me longer than it should have to notice another familiar smell: the unmistakable, musky scent wafting down from the attic. It was the calling card of the Johamaal.
“What does it look like?” I asked Mama, not for the first time.
“Almost like a cat, but not quite,” he answered.
“Does it have stripes or spots?”
“Maybe. Some have stripes around their faces or tails. Others might have spots.”
“Have you seen one?”
“A long time ago…”
He trailed off, as if reaching for a memory that darted just out of reach.
I had never seen a Johamaal. In the pre-smartphone, pre-WiFi days, I let my imagination paint it into being. I pictured a jungle cat from an old encyclopedia, its legs banded with stripes. Or perhaps it was like the lynx I’d once watched on Animal Planet. Unlike the leopard, which inspired outright terror, the Johamaal seemed a creature of the in-between.
A shadowy, secretive being.
Not dangerous, not exactly.
But present. Watching.
Years later, I learned that the Johamaal is a civet cat, closer kin to mongooses or skunks than to tigers or tabbies. Its Assamese name comes from the fragrance it leaves behind, reminiscent of Joha rice. Sleek, sharp-sensed, and nocturnal, it moves like a whisper through the night, hunting in the dim glow of starlight.
I started thinking about the leopard and the Johamaal again a few years ago, after reading Nayanika Mathur’s work on man-eating big cats. She wrote of the deep entanglements between human and non-human lives in the Anthropocene — the strange dance of fear, awe, and misunderstanding that binds us. Her words stirred something in me, a memory of those two tense, quiet days in Khoundpara.
Later, I discovered a world of myths and stories about creatures like the Johamaal — animals that defy easy categorization. They exist on the fringes of the domestic and the wild, slipping between shadows. While the leopard is a ‘terror’, a thing of fangs and claws, the civet, burdened with its strange smell and nocturnal habits, becomes a ghost.
Now, I understand why Aita’s Assam-type house, with its fruit-laden trees, made a perfect haunt for civets. But back then, as a child, the Johamaal was more mystery than reality, a secret written into the walls and roof.
In those two strange, still days, I felt sure that the Johamaal lingered longer in the attic, its movements more frequent, its scent more pungent. Was it hiding from the leopard, too? Could it sense the predator’s presence, just as we did?
On the third morning, the leopard was finally caught. The air of tension lifted, leaving a fleeting sigh of sadness for a creature displaced from its home.
Years later, Aita’s house was torn down and replaced with an RCC structure. Sometimes, I wonder about the Johamaal. Did it find a new refuge? I like to imagine it did, slipping quietly into some other story, somewhere between the wild and the almost tame.
Koumudi Mahanta is a researcher and writer from Assam, currently based in New Delhi. Her work explores the intricate intersections of development initiatives, governance mechanisms, and sociopolitical identities. A storyteller at heart, Koumudi is pursuing her doctoral thesis, delving deep into these themes with a keen analytical lens.