"That's right, we have missed you for hours today while you were gone! The time must be made up in the night," added Tirucub.
"I hope Med Tiger will let me," said Spotty.
"Our best chance will be if Mum Lioness puts it to him," said Tirucub.
Arunacub was very quiet. He had not recovered from seeing Spotty in tears. At last he found his voice.
"Spotty, did you seriously think I could possibly care even a hundredth as much about my turban as I do about you?" he asked. "Even a millionth?"
Spotty looked over at Arunacub, liking the way the conversation was going.
Om, who loved a good hypothetical question, specially a very extreme one, threw in, "Arunacub, if you could have all the good things in the whole universe, not counting creatures, or you could have Spotty for a littlest brudder, which would you chose?"
"Spotty, of course," said Arunacub.
Omcub kept making up more of these questions, because once he got started on this sort of thing, he did not like to stop.
"Arunacub, if you could have a cave on Jupiter and another on Satarin ..."
"Saturn, Om!" said Tiru.
"And another on Satarun, and another on Mars, and Bhagavan always went with you, or you could play with Spotty, which would you choose?"
"Playing with Spotty and Bhagavan!"
Soon they reached the cave.
"Mum Lioness, we finally found Spotty!" said Tirucub, and he explained what had happened.
"Spottykins, NEVER disappear on us like that again!!!" Mum Lioness said to Spotty in her fiercest, sternest voice, but since she could not stop hugging him, it was not a very scary reprimand. "You smell a bit like ... expensive cologne," she said, cleaning him up.
"The turban smells funny too .. like Spotty does today," said Arunacub.
"Jagaswami must have doused himself in that Polo stuff," said Spotty. "I have seen bottles of it in the mansion." Ooops! Too late to take that back.
"In the mansion?" asked Mum Lioness. "Spotty, what have you been up to?"
"Oh just a tiny bit of spying ..."
She gave him another very fierce look, but kept on licking his head clean, with special attention around the earses.
"Now," said Mum Lioness, before anyone had a chance to bring it up, "I must just dash over and tell Med Tiger that Spotty is having a sleepover here tonight. If that's okay with you, Spotty."
Spotty nodded vigorously.
"What if Unca Stripes says no?" asked Arunacub.
"If he says no, I will just tempt him over here with some pizza ... he really took to it the other day. He can hardly make Spotty stay back alone while he is wolfing down pizza at out cave! Now play nicely and don't get into mischief and I will be back in a few minutes."
The cubses began a high-spirited wrestling match as soon as Mum Lioness was out of earshot.
On her way to see Med Tiger, Mum Lioness came upon Jagaswami. He was taking bananas to a family of monkeys who had been injured by a human who threw sticks at them when they were innocently picking mangoes. And muttering to himself all the while.
Mum Lioness surreptitiously drew near so she could hear what he was muttering.
"Oh why oh why must I feel the hunger of those monkeys? Oh why is my leg aching in the place where the father monkey got hit with that stick? ... As soon as I have taken them these bananas, I will go back to the mansion and take a long hot shower and see if I can get that turban-ness washed off me ... Oh no!" His eyes fell on a sad bunny. "What has happened, little bunny?"
"I want my Mummy!!!" wailed the bunny.
Quite against his better judgement, Jagaswami, blinking back tears because he was suddenly missing his own mother, gently picked up the baby bunny and searched until he found the mother.
Mum Lioness watched all this, shaking her head in amazement. "How mysterious, the ways of Bhagavan!" And then she continued on to Med Tiger's.
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