Yoyo-nama; Chapter 3

Yoyo-nama

The Chronicle of a Foundling turned Dictator

Chapter 3

There is a Hindi expression about beautiful people: ‘Khuda ney phursat sey banaya hai’ – meaning God really took his time to create and perfect this person. With Yoyo, it seemed quite the opposite had happened. As if he had been hastily put together by his Maker and sent off quickly, because he simply would not hold steady or sit still during the creation process.

He had, under his snout fur, a skin that was some parts pale pink and some parts dark. The nose was pitch black except for a little pink in one nostril. One of his lower eyelids was pink while the other one was fully black. This gave the impression that one eye was smaller than the other, and in later years, when he would show us his temper, this earned him the name Lalita Pawar, the actor with the one-smaller-eye, who played the proverbial nasty old lady in many films. My friends David and Charmayne and I have spent many (wo)man hours talking about the utterly perfect aspect of imperfection.

At about 3 months old, he was at that stage of growing when for some reason he was growing long but not very tall. So his jaunty walk was something like a goods train, with the wagons moving slightly independent of each other. Head and snout was the engine, shoulders and front legs one wagon, middle body another wagon, hind legs, butt and tail a third one. On top of it, his head was rather large for his body at the time, and during this stage he looked like an actor wearing the head of a donkey in a production of A Midsummer’s Night Dream.

He was all white, except for faintly golden-auburn ears, which looked like satin-silky corn hair. There was one coin-sized orange patch on his lower spine area, as if to designate where his curled tail would rest. Unlike full-fledged Westies, with their signature carrot-tail as the websites described it, Yoyo had a turned tail.

We have debated many times, throughout his life, whether Yoyo was aware of how extremely adorable his entire body and face looked, the effect those eyes had on people…And the consensus was that he did not. He just was. Also, he took himself too seriously to consider himself in terms of being words like adorable, cuddly, or cute, is what someone once pointed out.

Yoyo had begun to show us the many facets of his eccentric, jaunty, jagged personality, minutes after his full move to my place. He had become fiercely territorial about my little yard, as soon as he came to stay permanently with me. It was as if, overnight, he had realized that his shaky position as a not-wanted, barely-tolerated pest in his first home, had been restored to firm, most-cherished status. The gate was now his beat, and Snoopy, never much of a watchdog, and always ready to welcome guests, workers, salesmen, thieves and dacoits with equal joy, now seemed happy to let Yoyo fulfil any expectations of patrolling the borders.

This meant that when the bell rang, Yoyo would rush out and stand what he thought was menacingly and bark a pretty impressive and surprisingly deep bark from such a little dog. If the person on the other side found his small stature unimpressive, and proceeded to try and open the gate, the bark would turn into a growl that came from inside his chest and was projected mightily outwards; that would have people hastily remove their hand from the gate and step back.  Once I got to the gate and let them in myself, he would quieten, sniff them down, and let them pass. My getting there and letting people in was important, in his scheme of things.

Some people couldn’t help giggling at what they thought was a comical little fellow doing a watchdog act, and would ignore my ‘Wait, wait, don’t come in till I let you in’ that I would shout from inside the house. A couple of them made the mistake of laughing and teasing him with a counter-bark, or worse, a mocking high-pitched yap. Yoyo straightened that matter out by going for their calves as soon as they were let into the yard. He never actually drew blood, but that could be only because they were wearing thick legwear. He did leave a lasting impression, on the calf as well as on the psyche of such visitors.

One such person he had marked out as persona non grata; and this was in perpetuity, permanently. Any future attempts to get him to let the matter go were never successful. He would growl throughout her visits. You could bully him into retreating, but then he would sit on the staircase landing, kind of hanging over the edge, like an eagle waiting to swoop down. From here, he would watch her every move, growling menacingly when she reached for her drink or got up from her seat. None of our nerves could take this, and after a few attempts to broker peace, we accepted that something had got hard-wired in Yoyo’s mind. From then we would have to simply round him up and lock him in a room upstairs well before she came over. From there too, he would bark whenever he heard her voice. Which meant that she had to speak sotto voce throughout her visit with us. On a few occasions, if we passed her on the street, us in the car with the windows rolled up, he would even then hurl himself at the windows with a “let me get at her, I say”.

But mostly, he would warm up to people once they had strictly followed the protocol that he had established. It went something like this: a) do not address any remarks to him, particularly no exuberant Hiiis and flailing of arms and attempts at head patting b) but do not sweep past him ignoring him c) do not laugh at him or imitate him, however comic or cute you find his fierce stance d) let him sniff you out and only offer a muted ‘hello yoyo’ f) do not hug me, the host e) glide, don’t stride, towards the front door, once he stops sniffing you out f) let him then come to you once you are seated.

Being received by the Queen, meeting and greeting her at B-Palace, possibly involved a less intricate network of conventions to follow.

But it was worth following through, because anyone who followed this routine was then rewarded with a swift and wonderful reversal of fortunes. It was like they do it once you pass the hard-eyed examination by the US Immigration Services as a visitor. Suddenly, after treating you as a potential terrorist, a possible alien who will vanish inside their land, once you pass all the requirements at entry point, the same suspicious and paranoid officer is suddenly all smiles and trills: ‘Welcome to the US of A, have a good stay, here’s your free map,’ and whatnot.

Once the new visitor was seated, Yoyo would proceed to get friendly, whether the person wanted it or not. This could be in the form of suddenly turning into a puddle near the person’s feet, with all four legs in the air, for a belly-rub. Or he would sometimes decide to jump up on the divan and sit with one proprietorial elbow and arm firmly placed on the person’s lap. The whole demeanour was of those hunters of yore who stood with one foot on a tiger that they had slain. And in this way, many of my friends and associates and relatives, including my ageing father, who had never particularly liked dogs, got drawn willy-nilly into accounting for him, if not outright falling for him. “And how’s that Yoyo?” they would find themselves asking on the phone, and would end up buying him little gifts from their travels, and put up with him gnawing gently at their socked feet under the dining table or sneaking into their razais if they spent the night. I began to hang a sticky-roller by the exit gate, so people could brush off the wiry white fur that he liberally left on their clothes.

His pride and joy at now belonging unambiguously to us, he would display elaborately, when we walked past his previous house. He would stiffen a little, slow down, and kind of goose step starchily past their gate, his butt doing the talking. It was like he was mooning that household. If anyone from that house happened to be around and called out to him, he would ignore them completely, and sometimes pointedly take a grown-dog one-leg-up leak on a plant nearby, looking studiously away from their gate. He would relax his formal butt-stride only when we went out of sight of that house.

The only person he dropped this act for, and turned himself into a little smudge of affection for, was the resident house help there, from whom even a ‘Kay rey Yoyo?’ would have him curling and uncurling like a caterpillar, in great affection of an uncharacteristically shy-child kind. This is the same person who fed him and allowed him to gnaw at her hair justforfun, when she rested in her quarters in the afternoon, during his early few months there.

At first he had just the one soft short wavy coat. As he settled into my house, he grew a second coat, a luxurious, longer wiry top layer. He grew a ‘snow-fringe’ – to keep out the snow from his eyes, were he to ever visit his native Highlands. The borders of his ears grew silken pale orange-gold long fur, like corn cobs.

(Next instalment, 22 June)