My Story

The first thing you should know about me is that I once fainted for cats.

I grew up in the far south of Iran, where summer afternoons reach fifty degrees and the whole world sleeps through the heat. My mother had allowed me a puppy. A cat was out of the question. So I found my cats elsewhere. I knew every garden in the neighbourhood that had strays, and I knew exactly which ones had kittens. One afternoon, while my parents napped, I slipped out into that furnace to go and look at them. The heat won. I woke up on the ground, was carried home, and felt no regret at all. I would have done it again the next day. I probably did.

I am telling you this so you understand that what follows was never a hobby. It is a condition.

Years later, in Toronto, I trained as an interior designer at Ryerson University (now Toronto Metropolitan University) and started the way most designers do, as an intern in developers' sales offices, learning how a room persuades the people standing in it. Then I went back to school, to York this time, for psychology. The two turned out to be one education. Design taught me how spaces work. Psychology taught me how people do. One built my career. The other let me live anywhere on earth.

And I did. For years I led visual merchandising within the world that brings the great European luxury houses to the Middle East, and that work sent me to Paris, Milan and London to be trained by the masters themselves. The crystal makers. The porcelain painters. The fashion houses. People who have spent centuries deciding what beauty is.

Later I crossed to the other side of the table and ran whole building projects, watching towers rise out of drawings in India, in Africa, in Dubai.

And through every chapter, in every country, there were cats.

In Dubai I drove the streets after work to feed the strays. Hundreds of them, over the years. I brought the pregnant ones into the cool of my design warehouses to give birth, until the kittens quietly outnumbered the staff. Seventeen lived in my garden at one time. I rescued and fostered in Cape Town, under the long shadow of Table Mountain, and in the layered, fragrant chaos of Bangalore. I have loved many animals in my life, parrots, dogs, and I loved them completely. But cats reached me somewhere else. There is a dimension to them I have never found in any other creature, and after twenty-eight years I am more fascinated now than I was the day I fainted in that garden heat.

When I came home to Toronto, I brought one question with me. Why do some cats simply refuse to age? Why does one cat keep the light in her eyes at sixteen while another is old at ten? I stopped calling it luck. I started looking at what my whole career had trained me to see. The water. The air. The materials. The room itself.

I called this place Feline Lore because lore is the old word for knowledge gathered slowly, by people living close to something, long before anyone thought to write it down. That is exactly what this is. My notebook, kept in public, after a lifetime of watching.