Doggystyle - A Three Act Story of Lifelong Canine Affiliations in Modern Indian Suburbia.docx

Welcome to the new year. I hope you've suffered your first major disappointment this annum already, and fervently wish it goes up all the way from here, before the world ends. 

There's a new blog title, and then there's the short story that the title told you about. Being a dog lover doesn't won't make a substantial difference in how much you enjoy reading it, so if you aren't, go right ahead. 

Doggystyle - A Three Act Story of Lifelong Canine Affiliations in Modern Indian Suburbia.docx

I

For as long as I remember, dogs have been an integral part of my life, and for as far as I am concerned, I have been a part of theirs. My memory begins at discovering about the death of my pre-cellphone era, part time pariah dog, full time family member Jolly, on returning from one of the several trips to Calcutta/Asansol that my youth seems to have been well-endowed with. It felt like losing one of my grandparents when Bobar, Jolly’s elder cousin and family dog for my maternal grandparents’ family-friends the Bhattacharyas, who lived in a house called Parijat in plot C-19, six houses and lane down the road, died. Bobar had been around since time immemorial really, and in a universe populated by the equivalent of either Orcs or young Hobbits of dogs all around Wastushilp Nagar, Bobar was Gandalf and Elrond and Celeborn, though by calling it a Balrog-incident, I might be mythologizing his truck accident death a little too much. But the deaths of these two didn’t cause an American soap-like discord in my family's home. There was nothing like that Kipling (or Chekhov, or O. Henry, I'm not sure.) short story where the family goes twisted with the death of a pet hamster. I remember very little crying, almost no wailing and certainly no parental diktat of ‘no more pets’; it just strengthened a resolve to take better care of pets, atleast between my sister and my mother. So there were more, there always have been pets at home, from parakeets to turtles, rabbits, pigeons, cats, and parrots, and while they won’t let me have any pigs or snakes, one time, I was certain my mother was seriously contemplating getting one of those giant South American birds to complement her fish.

We took in a brace of little puppies that I always suspected were doomed to die an early death, naming them Stanley and Charlie, after characters from The Mask – two little brown dirtbags, Staley the more handsome, with the kind of white lightning bolt spread across his forehead that would have made both J.K. Rowling and Mountain Dew proud. The pair died in quick succession, more, I have now concluded, out of the love we showed them than despite of it. They were probably never meant to be fed with processed milk and Parle-G, their bowels were probably resigned to consuming refuse, before our act of godliness ‘saved’ them, and my sister, now hardened a little by previous deaths of pets, only cried while burying them in the front garden.

So, my folks decided, we should get a pet that’s bred to be a pet, no more emotional charity on mother nature’s ‘rejects’. After all, if dog is man’s best friend, he should have some understanding of man’s ways. A pre-natal canine experience of how to behave in the company of man was now thought to be the perfect antidote to unnatural canine deaths in my childhood home.

Owing to this newfound scientific method to pet acquisition, we got a furry little white Pomeranian who had been named Whiskey in the house of her birth, but since her real foster parents’ home was teetotaller in nature, on my mother’s suggestion, we changed it to an in-retrospect, tongue-in-cheek Pepsi. I was later to discover that a friend of mine from school had a similar Pomeranian called Pepsi, identical in all ways, except his didn’t have the elaborate back-story to what would seem like alarmingly pro-consumerist nomenclature.

It was around this time that my parents’ family-friends, different from the family-friends mentioned earlier, and yes they know each other, had had a delivery of young Doberman puppies from their farm. Having tasted the joy of watching two little puppies assault one another with gay abandon with Stanley and Charlie, my sister and I were convinced that Pepsi needed a mate: into the picture came ‘Coke’, a cross between a farm Doberman and a pariah bitch, he was about 45% Doberman by proper lineage, the rest lying distributed across various species of stray dogs and a couple of Alsatians. There was also a slight deformity in design that he had to contend with – the kind gentleman who cut his tail off to give him the final Doberman touch got his measurements as well as timing way the fuck beyond wrong, and now, Coke was to forever look like something between a dog whose tail was too short to be anything but a Doberman, and a Doberman-wannabe who was brutally assaulted by the neighbourhood kids. To add to that, Coke had an amazingly bad colour scheme that totally did not work for him or any of the rest of us, with his various shades of sparse muddy brown populated by patches of  black and white rendering an image completely unviable for a TV friendly urban middle class home to have him.

And with this began the Coke and Pepsi era of dog-related incidents in my house, a series that included several nights of praying that they stop barking at the neighbourhood strays gathered to eat the garbage, two thieve-chasings, one of whom was just stealing a steel bucket, daily dog chases, and eternal hoping that they return home while you cursed yourself for leaving the house gate open. Both my paternal grandparents had dog-related accidents in their relatively short time in the house, and they’ve scratched or bitten, in the unwittingly ill tempered childish fit way that must be unique to domesticated dogs almost every regular visitor to my house in the four years. Despite their mercurial (read: erratic) behaviour the dogs were loved like they were where they belonged, in a conventional semblance of home. This image was completed to perfection in winters, when bedspreads replete with water, food for the night and three layers of warm rags were laid out every night for the dogs’ comfort, an arrangement that must’ve seemed right out of canine paradise to the unsuspecting hairballs.

Coke and Pepsi were a change in ways for my family, and it showed in more ways that my parents would’ve liked to admit at that point in time. There was now a fixed time to walk the dog, a duty that was later passed on to my good natured daily gardener-driver-carwasher-dogwalker guy, aptly named Raju bhaiyya, adding to the long list of Rajus, Bharats, Akshays and Harishs in my life. The dogs had fixed meal times and bathing schedules too. My family had found a method to the madness, with my sister taking full responsibility for Pepsi, providing metaphorical proof for abundant maternal instinct making for a beautiful six months of puppy rearing, starring bitten off bathroom slippers, gnawed on sofa ends and indeed, half-eaten homework. A thoroughly canine but slightly alternative method of using the toilets seemed to have come about which consisted of my dogs using the floor as their commode, and my father, alarmed at the prospect of slipping on the same, hired a trainer. He came, every morning at 8 as we were getting dressed for school and taught the dogs how to sit and walk and sleep and shake, reminding us frequently that we should practise those with them as often as we could to ensure we verified Pavlov’s for ourselves. It was fun for a while, and Pepsi was quick on the uptake, forever justifying her lineage and parenthood, except she still hadn’t given up her taste for the wild side and still made a break for it when she found the gate was open. Coke on the other hand, got nothing from the training, only barely realising that someone with his index finger stretched out shouting “NO!” at him meant he was not supposed to eat the item in context. They still ran about for an hour in the wild, with early evening to dusk seemingly being their favourite time, but were hopelessly loyal every time they entered ‘Shilanil’ or its modest but unique front garden.

With the arrival of the organised pet industry in my house, also came the dawn of the veterinarian. Dr. Marwah was the man when it came to dogs and you could sense it every time you went to see him. For years, we maintained files on dogs, and on his advice, got the best available products to bathe and feed them, along with a separate batch of milk and roties made every day by a rather intelligent and efficient domestic help/girl. About three times a year, my mother or sister would get the dogs into the car in what used to be a highlight of the evening effort, and make for Dr. Marwah for a check-up on the dogs, returning with sullen animals who didn’t need to be able to talk to tell you that they’d just been given an injection shot. But with time and distance and the overcrowding of Nagpur’s inner city, as well as the sprouting of businesses in outer parts of Vidarbhan suburbia, we found a short term vet in a young doctor guy, eventually ending up trusting him to deliver Pepsi’s puppies, fathered ostensibly, by Coke or conceived during some other cavort that she’d been party to and were consequently, too large to be born normally. This was before the internet and we’d never prepared for the eventuality of puppies, there was no understanding in the household about what we were to do with them, except that there would be an increase in the quantity of milk that my mother purchased every day. Despite our cluelessness, my mother took a pregnant Pepsi to the vet’s on delivery day to have a Caesarian, and though Pepsi delivered a live black puppy successfully, the white one was stillborn. To add to this, the fool sewed into one of Pepsi’s intestines while putting her back together again.

Pepsi died sometime during the night. They said there was a pool of blood.

After this setback, my family decided that it would be prudent of us to let Coke go, in the sense to lose the hope we pinned on him turning the leaf someday into a majestic brown dog who was all the things Coke wasn’t. We let the doors open, and he came and left as he pleased, always fed when he was around, and for a while, always cursed, in an evocation of the emptiness of a household bereft of its youngest, when he wasn’t. There was an unsaid acceptance of a period of mourning where no one spoke of Pepsi at all, and although there are now a couple of pictures of the cutest thing that I have ever held in my arms, in my house, it took us a while to get there. A few months passed, and Coke stopped visiting us altogether.

II

When we weren’t actively rearing pet animals full-time in my parent’s house, we were constantly feeding our subconscious on virtual ones. Believe it or not, every cartoon series that I watched with any interest had a canine component, and here, in no particular order are a few examples (corresponding series name) to support my claim –Astro (The Jetsons), Dino (The Flintstones), Scooby & Scrappy (On various, eponymous or otherwise, issues of The Scooby Doo Show), Pluto (you really asking?), Spike & Tyke (from the Tom & Jerry canon), Droopy, Dribble, Mumbly/Muttley and other extras that were on the Laff-A-Lympics, and Odie (Garfield) and while Hobbes’ perpetual companionship with Calvin does put him in conspicuously canine territory, I’ll leave him out of the list. We graduated to Santa’s Little Helper (The Simpsons) & Brian (Family Guy) and while my sister always tried to get me to watch it, Ren (Ren & Stimpy) was simply gross.

And there were always Caesar and Cuddles, and Sultan, later, Crespo, Pasha and Buddy the Great, dogs of friends who lived in the colony, the last one owned by a Sikh family who moved in to a house that seems further down the road now than I remember. And then as if this recounting needs a cherry on top, there were the ever changing dogs of my visits to my cousins around the country. The idea that I want to present here clearly is that there are a lot of dogs in the world, and I’ve casually interacted with my fair share of them, so you wouldn’t judge me when I say it came naturally to me to buy a packet and distribute crushed pieces of the iconic Parle-G biscuits when I see stray pups in what can only be classified at SEC-B marketplaces: quadruplets – black, white, grey and brown, so identically malnourished at first glance that it takes you a while to figure out which ones have the best chance of surviving what is turning out to be a rather cold start to the year the world is supposed to end, the fourth in my lifetime only. But hey, this time they’re serious.

The first day that I saw the puppies prancing around the chai kitli that I’m a regular patron of, I thought they were only three, till the fourth came running over, only to find that his siblings ate all the Parle-G, and their benefactor had passed the remaining half of the packet to one of those boot-polish boys who remain in hiding, emerging from their private shadowland only when you have food to distribute. The pups were clearly hungry and from the rate at which they consumed the biscuits, it was easy to tell that they were going to need more food. I wondered if I had time to buy another packet before I’m in the ‘you’re dead, son.’ region of the probability density curve of my boss beckoning for me, only to find me missing and then blowing his top in a manner typical, I’m extrapolating, of people too used to too much power for far too long. I stopped short of buying said additional SKU of Parle-G when I saw another guy doing the same, with intentions of distributing them to the same quadruplets, now complete in their four-ness. With a heavy dose of not feeling special, I mounted my motorcycle, and started to look over my shoulder as I dragged it in reverse, responding unwillingly to a very different kind of duty.

The second day I had more time and a friend along. We decided to sip on chai and share a Marlboro Gold before proceeding to repeating yesterday’s act of buying and breaking biscuits. The Marlboro Gold is, in my opinion, one of the best new cigarette blends to have infiltrated the Indian market, and while it is clearly aimed at weaning away those with a discerning eye for luxury from ITC’s Classic Milds and Gold Flake brands, it might find greater acceptance among the younger smokers in the country. As the cigarette lived out its short lifespan, we fed the puppies, talking about how they’re probably going to die anyway, given how cold it was that morning. The brown one among the bag of fleas brought what looked like a rather sturdy piece of string, but on closer examination I was sure it was the severed tail of a dead rat. No sooner had did said rat’s ass arrive on to the scene, our biscuits were forgotten. The now alerted trio leapt towards their brown brother, at once engrossed in the novelty of the rat’s tail. We felt rejected, my friend and I, but at the time I didn’t hardly realize that for the second day straight, the little puppies in a shady marketplace were seemingly giving me a sign.

The third day, I was alone, and short on time. I was hurting from the snub the previous day and essentially, occupied by the decision of whether or not I should buy the packet of Parle-G, forgot that I was short on time. The puppies were there, all four, mucking about in the decaying debris from an upturned dustbin. There was something gray, grasped tightly in the small, almost wraith-like delicate jaws of the black puppy. I walked over, already submitting to the desire to feed, to see very clearly that it was the remains of a pigeon wing that the darkest of them all had in his possession. I crumbled the biscuits, to no response from the puppies. I made that sound your mouth makes, at least mine does, especially when beckoning to beings in a tone most loving, like with my lips puckered shut, pulling in short drags of air and letting the wind do the rest, which drew the white puppy to me. He walked over, slowly, almost unwillingly, sniffing at the biscuits, but not eating them. As I realized the possibilities that the puppies might be over my offering, that in their short lifetime, Parle-G is now ‘so 90s’, a simultaneous dawning of the source of my joy also appeared clearly to me – that sound of the biscuits crunching in the little puppies short, still developing teeth as they began assimilating you in their lives, acknowledging your offering with consumption in a manner clearly opposite to most deities I’ve heard of or dealt with. That sound, like shrapnel wounds that are testimonials to wars that your favourite war hero won for whichever side of history you’re on, was the proof that it was difficult for the puppies, even though it was easy really, like how you got all your toys from your parents in childhood? That sound encapsulated a thousand errands that I ran for people in my life, and it was my firm belief that my source of the simple joy of feeding another being stemmed from hearing it chew; from an act that would build character. That sound, which wasn’t in the sniffing of biscuits. A minute passed and the last look on the white puppy’s face seemed in my head like it was one of pity. It pranced away, rejoining the quest for the parts of the pigeon wing, already the late entrant in the puppies’ new game – one that involved tearing the pigeon wing into pieces and littering the rest of the place while the black puppy gnawed on the cartilage. I watched what looked like National Geographic for the underprivileged, amused, holding a Marlboro Gold in between the fingers of one hand and a cup of rapidly cooling tea in another, till a group of three very similar looking from Delhi/Gurgaon, straight hair/black fringe, a-little-too-short-to-be-statuesque-a-little-too-tall-to-be-short women in ominously attractive dark-coloured clothing walked by. I was sure the one on the left looked at me a little longer than she should have.

I see those puppies now and then, never all four at once any more though. I feed them on days that I have the time, without really expecting them to eat. I leave the biscuits on the ground next to the dustbin, always appreciating the juxtaposition in hindsight as I turn to go. I’m guessing, among other things, that even dogs have the right to be fed up of love.

III

After that necessary detour through time, allow me to welcome us back to present day. My life has alternated between spells of dog-less-ness and not, and while most people would superstitiously touch-wood at the proclamation, the last eight years have provided us plenty of canine company in the house of my birth and rather enjoyable growing up. A few years after Pepsi, we got ourselves a shiny black little Labrador retriever puppy, one that look wise beyond years and has proven to be precisely that by looking 20x scarier than he actually is. In a tribute to the Centurions’ ultra-cool space dog, we christened him Shadow. Having learnt the tricks of the trade from some childhood social conditioning of our own, my sister and I trained Shadow to learn the most basic of commands – come, go, sit, no, and the misnomer, get, which was the best we could come up with while trying to make him run after something. It was almost sunshine in paradise again, well almost, because there was the recurring problem of the alternate toilet usage method and it took us a while to devise a selection of doors that would force the growing puppy out to the garden every time it wanted to use our facilities. And although Shadow’s bark was a few hertz lower on the frequency scale compared to Pepsi and Coke’s squeak and whelp respectively, it made up for the shortage in decibel. Shadow could give an early 90s Monica Seles a run for her money when it came to loud. Thankfully, his nights of heat were well regulated and the passage of time had led to fewer dogs in the neighbourhood clamouring over the garbage.

It was around the time that someone suggested we should get Shadow to mate, I decided to talk our parents into getting another dog. Except that we got a gloriously golden Labrador Retriever puppy who was decidedly male, instead of the glorious Golden Retriever that should be female. For the uninitiated, those are two different breeds, the potential mating of which would surely result in a litter of puppies that could eat their way through anything. Still, too enamoured by the puppy’s puppiness, we decided to keep him, shelving all plans forever of mating any of our pets, in a final surrender to whatever went against us in that regard, getting the freshman canine checked up by Dr. Marwah before we gave it a rather frolicking first bath.  

Staying with tradition and the themes that ran with the keeping of dogs in ‘Shilanil’, I offered my mother the options of Shipwreck or Shamrock, after the GI Joe or the wrestler, Ken Shamrock, respectively, while my sister, with her not-entirely-undue emotional attachment to Bryan Adams, wanted to call him, Spirit. My mother chose Spirit, and there he was. Another puppy in my living room, gnawing at the carpet, eating the strands of those typically Indian sofa covers that hang below, tearing across the house with someone’s towel in his mouth – he had spirit alright. Spirit was either easier to train or we’d gotten better at training, but he was done with learning his house etiquette sooner than Shadow, acquiring a Casanova appeal as he grew up, always finding the right bitches to sniff around when taken out for a walk. He was also the first of my dogs to obey the command to enter the house at once, no matter how far away his interests lied, and the first that I could safely have walking next to me without a leash on without worrying about where he was about to dash off to, allowing me, and now a vital cog of the functioning of my family household, the good natured daily gardener-driver-carwasher-dogwalker guy, Raju bhaiyya to walk both dogs at the same time. As much as this was a deviation from the time it was standard practice to keep the gate shut forever so as to prevent the family dogs from running out, the newfound confidence in our pets’ sense of belonging was a moral victory for the modern family, establishing the completeness of the home in a fiction-worthy manner.

And in what would be perhaps fitting, I have little doubt about Shadow and Spirit being the last dogs that my family will raise, considering that both my sister and I have moved on to towns and jobs that we don’t intend to return home from, anytime soon. The departure of dogs will leave no space for Dr. Marwah in our annual routine, and it will markedly alter Raju bhaiyya's daily duties - he'll walk a couple of kilometers less, probably get fatter by the week . And soon it will be time when my parents and priorities will be too old to enable the kind of effort that taking the decision to get a dog requires.  And given how things have been, I might end up living with someone who really doesn’t care too much for dogs, like my last girlfriend. That said, I absolve myself of any end of the era delusions about the life of dogs in my parent's house, there will always be a dog around the corner looking for the odd weekday lunch of Parle-G biscuits. Like I said, for as long as I remember, dogs have been an integral part of my life, and for as far as I am concerned, I have been a part of theirs.