Old Dog, New Dog

Minerva Moment

It’s made up of just one or two beats, a Minerva Moment. When the whole world and its noise recedes into nothingness, and there’s just you, and a fleeting but absolute understanding, leached and bleached of all doubts and questions. I like to capture such beats, frame them in words. Like this one:

I sit down with my sitar. After many days.

Older dog settles down, reading the situation correctly. He knows his place in the scheme of things for the next hour; he has a good idea about the various sounds that will come forth. He shuts his eyes and flattens out with a contented sigh. Secure, happy.

Younger dog, only 6 months old and 2 months in my life, perceives it a little differently. He’s seen and heard me and my sitar a few times before. At first he simply would not stand for the fact that I could sit on the floor and not be interested at all in playing with him and his assorted toys. Or that I would not put up with my hand being gnawed, or him putting two paws on my shoulders from the back and chewing at my hair. I had batted him off, and he learnt for the first time that, sometimes, he was not the centre of the universe.

Today, he approaches, watching and cocking his head in exaggerated curiosity at the deep rumble of the kharaj pancham while I tune-up. He keeps his distance, but watches my face, a little anxious about his place in the scheme of things now.

He passes very close, brushing past my right hand, toying with the idea of a little nip – but changes his mind. He climbs on to my bed, sitting with his face at my eye level, resting his chin on the footboard. The picture of newly-learnt patience.

I play pieces, I play scales, I try out 2 Beatles songs that seem to dovetail with the raga that I’m playing.

Older dog relaxes further, now flat out. Younger dog, forehead in furrows, bats at me gently from the bed, stretching out one paw. I nod at him to tell him, I see you, younger dog. He sits down again, sighing, wondering.

Ten minutes later I stop and place my sitar on the floor. He jumps down softly, and ever so subtly inserts himself between me and the sitar, facing away from me, but looking back at my face as I sing out the notes of Bhimpalas; his eyes hold my eyes. He catches fleetingly what older dog knows – I am happy and humming, and this does not exclude him at all. He continues to be a fixed point in my Universe, and I in his. The music doesn’t take me away, it only expands my capacity to love him more. Younger dog can understand this Truth only a little at a time, in a small brief moment, like right now. We are both having a Minerva Moment.

Then his youngness and his need come crowding back in. He gets me his most favourite toy; and waiting gravely only for as long as it takes me to put away the sitar, rushes to me with all the haq of someone who is restored to being at the centre of the universe again.

ps: old dog (in the pic) has since passed on, new dog is now the cool one, and the 2 new infiltrators are the young dogs.