I have been told that if there is one thing my family knows well it is to live with a dog. Hmm…the fact of the matter is that there have been more than just dogs in our lives. (One of the reasons perhaps that I never travel without George Durell's My Family and Other Animals.)
It probably begins with my father’s boyhood pet cat Rin Tin Tin. I loved the stories! She displayed a rare high on the loyalty quotient than the usual feline is capable of. Not only was she was fun to tease the younger sister with (who even in her adulthood resorted to looking under beds for cat people, just in case) but she was friend and playmate. Rin Tin Tin went everywhere Daddy went. Which meant that when Daddy got in a train, so did Rin Tin Tin…in a basket. She was told to keep as quiet as a mouse about which she must have been pretty affronted by, because she stayed mousy till the train rolled into the station, and then she let out a protesting “mia-aow”! I believe the entire family jumped out of the train and on to the platform, basket, cat and all, just as the ticket collector turned towards them.
Grandfather P(aternal) had a way with animals. Grandfather M(aternal) kept animals away. Between them both though, they had kids who loved either flora, or fauna, or both. The dog was the perennial favorite (from where it is gleaned that if there is one thing my family knows well it is to live with a dog). On the paternal side I have heard about Kukuli—a dog who often addressed as brother by an uncle who even offered to trim his whiskers. Then there was Toby who was a bumbling brown friendly fellow who was so friendly that Grandfather P replaced him with the ferocious Bhima—obviously named after the Mahabharata strong one. Bhima bared his teeth generously and had us kids toe the line out of pure fear. He showed respect to only my mother (which speaks volumes for her imposing personality), who till this day blames him for pulling too hard on the leash, necessitating my grandfather to tumble and endure a knee surgery. The whole neighborhood was mortified by Bhima’s presence. I am still unsure about how I felt about Bhima’s passing. My grandfather decided to stick to cats after that and Jhumri entered the household as this supercilious, self-centered feline who felt she had sole ownership of my grandfather. Everything that was his was hers and both of them forged an enviable friendship. Until she got lost. My father and friendly neighborhood people scoured the by-lanes, alleys, and even went up to the highway. I am sure my grandma was secretly rejoicing, till she opened a cupboard and Jhumri popped out—she had stayed there for three days!
My paternal grandma’s penchant was for the feathered flock. There were these pigeons who seemed to have a life-long lease of every ancient air-vent in every part of the ancestral house that we could not imagine life without them. It wasn’t uncommon that you would open the morning newspaper and find out in a most ‘dropping’ way that the pigeon is reading the paper along with you. My grandmother adored them—according to her, if they were happy and flourishing, her children too would be happy in each part of the world they were spread out in. Once in an attempt to tackle the dropping issue, the vents were blocked out and the pigeons were forced to leave. Ma cried inconsolably till all the air-vents were re-opened and the pigeons allowed to continue their life-long lease. Strange though, that after she left us, my grandma’s feathered flock left too. I miss them. I miss her.
Grandfather M, meanwhile condescended to allow pets in but treated them as pets—his kids however went gaga-goo to the extent that their she-Dachshund inappropriately named Louie, was hand fed, mouth wiped with a personal towel and patted to sleep in their laps. Grandfather M sarcastically suggested that they also add a leg massage for the brown sausage, while they were spoiling the dog out of her canine boundaries. He also had a way of mixing pets and politics, which my mom found out when she brought in a cute black spaniel and he named it Bhutto—I believe, the news that day was about the failure of the Simla Summit of 1972.
Apart from many other things, their love for their pets bonded my parents. They began their life with a parrot called Rupa who could speak. There was rabbit called Tungi who jumped too high for her own convenience and rather than have her dash her head on the ceiling, they gave her to the zoo and used to visit her. Then there were these very young orphaned fawns that my father found on one of his inspections as a young district collector. He brought them home to my mother and both tried to keep them alive by feeding them from milk soaked cotton-balls—sadly it didn’t work. They also had a dalmation called Dotty who walked with my father inviting the comments, “Look, the district collector with his white leopard”. Dotty, far from being a brave, honourable leopard, was a slightly delinquent sort who poached people’s straying chicken. He was however a good babysitter, I believe, and would catch us by the collar as crawling infants in our efforts to scale stairs etc and so saved us from many a fall.
Then we had Scamper—a pint sized white Tibetan Spaniel with honey-golden ears. He was the runt of the litter and as usual was given to my mother to nurture. But my grandmother warned that we would have to officially say that Scamp was my brother’s, because it was his horoscope that gave pets long life. Despite the ownership, he became the apple of my parents’ eyes to the extent that I had to compete with him for their affection. So grew our rivalry—if I got to my father first when he came back from office, Scamp would sulk away under the sofa, till Daddy tenderly coaxed him out. His favourite moments: whenever I got into trouble and got shouted at by my mom. He chewed up my brand new pencil box, he ran off with my hankies labeled with the days of the week, he sunk his teeth into a plastic roast chicken from my food play set as well as a cow from my farmyard set. When I complained, my father was on Scamp’s side explaining that the poor little thing just wanted to know what beef was like! But Scamp was also once of us—he tortured and ragged the cook by stealing vegetables and then have the cook run around in circles after him trying to recover the stolen loot. My brother, semi-ventriloquist that he was, threw out the Scampy voice and presto what a trio we were against the rest of the world. We couldn’t take exams without the “magic pencils” (read: warm licks) which Scamp was forced to dole out. We wouldn’t go out on any journey or any family function/wedding/reception/housewarming that he wasn’t invited to. In fact there was no one left among family and friends who would not invite him! 13 years with Scamper and then he passed away when we were living in New Delhi, his head in my parents lap, my brother away in the USA—and it was like an era over, the innocent era of our childhood. We couldn’t leave him in Delhi, so we flew him home to the garden he had loved so much…and he’s still there.
For a sizeable amount of years my parents promised they would not pledge their hearts to any furry or feathered thing again. But they did. When they visited me in New Delhi and got out of the taxi, out jumped Theodore SpitzWilliam aka Teddy. “Where did you get this Road-ation?”, was my first reaction. My parents were visibly hurt. They were positively put off and went on to tell me how he could walk on two legs, how affectionate he was, his fondness for mutton liver, and how content he was with a used up plastic coconut oil bottle and a rag. I looked at Teddy’s saliva-soaked worldly possessions, his huge love-loaded grin and sighed about what my parents have got into. My sister-in-law ( by this time marriage had happened to us all and though we were non-resident at our parents home, the ownership of pets still went to my brother in accordance with his life-giving horoscope) clarified that Teddy was in his growing stages and that I should give him some time. I did and within a few months, on his next visit, he had grown out of his mangy adolescence into a spectacular sight—I thought he was Aslan—complete with a mane of golden brown! As the official dog-in-law, he did invite envy as his meal consisted of dishes of specially prepared liver (which as a vegetarian, I still haven’t understood). He very proudly baby-sat my daughter and gave the 20-day old baby his tennis ball when she cried. So much so, that she would search for him and stop crying and smile when he barked. Teddy endeared himself to everyone and to my daughter he was Teddy Baba, who she could count on to bark back at her mother when she shouted, who would be her pillow while she read through a book, who would let her sit on him and share his ball. Then on Christmas of 2000, after being sick for some time, Teddy breathed his last, melting brown eyes fixed on my parents, his head in my dad’s lap—it was heartbreak all over again. Such a dear dear soul…gone too soon. I think of Teddy and Scamp and think—what’s wrong with being a dog or being called a dog?
This time my parents have kept their promise. But there have been the early morning crows who insisted on sharing Daddy’s tea biscuits which he stretched out to them. There were the numerous family of bulbuls who find the most inappropriate places to nest and hence have to be guarded. Apart from being standing sentinels to their feathered friends, there were many stray stories that entered their life. There was Panchali, who would dutifully wait for my father’s car to drive in at the end of the day and greet him with a happy wag. There was Toni who was quite beloved and came to us as a guest during my brother’s wedding, keeping a watchful eye over all the proceedings. She was sick and tired and she needed a place to rest and my parents gave it to her. There was Puppy, who was called puppy even after he was full-grown and his lady friend Camilla (perhaps because of the Rotweiller looks). Then there was Lily christened by my daughter, till she turned out to be a Lalu.
That’s the pet-roll of those who stood by us, watched us grow, shared their wisdom, made us laugh and broke our hearts too. In the end, everything is worthwhile.
Meanwhile, here are snatches of friends and family members’ “pet” conversation:
I had a pair of love birds.
How sweet!
Yes, but you can’t believe how they fought! They just would not stop pecking at each other. The non-stop khat-khat-khat drove us nuts—it was like some new kind of torture!
What happened to them?
Oh, the pecking went on and on till the birds pecked each other bald!
Then there was the fish. It used to swim round and round sitting in a bowl on the study desk. One day, I was trying very hard to teach my daughter a math sum and spoke really loudly and accompanied the decibel level with a thump on the desk. Suddenly the fish just flopped out, landed on its back and died. I can’t fathom what happened to it?
I had Fern the caterpillar…she fell off somewhere in the Himalayas.
Aww…(phew!)
Our dog Agassi was the cutest. Except that when we used to look for him in the yard calling out, “Hey Gas….Gassy where are you”—our neighbors would give us weird looks.
Duh…obviously!
We have a turtle…Noddy’s his name and he’s as big as a soda bottle cap and has such a penchant for food that he climbs up the aquarium wall and sticks painfully on one side and cranes himself sick to see the food we were eating. I was shocked when he even ended up needing an endoscopy. An endoscopy? For being on a See-Food diet?
An endoscopy on a soda-bottle-cap-sized turtle?
My mother had a pet Myna and her brother fed it to the cat!
Correction—my brother wanted to see the Myna stretch its wings and fly high into the bright blue sky. The reality was that when he opened the cage, it jumped out, flapped its wings and then before it took off, sadly a stray cat pounced on it—feathers and all.
So much for breaking free and soaring—baby, baby, it’s a wild world!
