Yoyo-nama

(The Chronicle of a Foundling turned Dictator)

Chapter 2

A few weeks into his house-arrest and regimented routine at his first home, after we had sadly and firmly decided that he had just been a comet in our firmament, now gone, one late morning he turned up at my gate. I let him in, and he was allowed past the gate only after Snoopy gave him the US Immigration Services treatment…a thorough once-over, just short of a cavity search. Once cleared gruffly by Snoopy, he came in shyly, but simply decided not to leave till evening. He seemed to tide over his mealtime and hunger, and when I broke my rule of not feeding him full meals (since he usually went off on his own when it was his mealtime; this way we could all keep up the pretence, the self-deception, that he wasn’t our dog or meant to be in our lives in any kind of permanent committed way, but was just a wayfarer), I offered him some of Snoopy’s khichdi without any meat in it, as he was now just about 4 months old. He came up to the plate, but stepped back from it at once, and waited. As if the only explanation for no meat in his food was that I had forgotten, or that it was still being cooked. The second I added a tablespoon of mince, he ate hungrily.

And thus, he had trained me in one shot, never to forget meat in his meal forevermore. For the rest of his life, if you gave him only vegetarian food, he would sit watching you archly. ‘Where is that ‘saamthing’ extra’ (which for some reason we pronounced in a Bengali accent), we thought he was asking pointedly. But I’m getting ahead of the story. We weren’t yet into forevermore. He was just a dog who would slip away from his house-arrest, and drop in on us.

That evening, the doorbell rang.  It was his politely irate owner standing outside my gate, leash in hand. He had come to take his dog back, he said. Yoyo, who had come up behind me, now quietly hid, behind my legs. He was now grown enough to be certainly most visible, with a nice round rump, and big corn-silk ears, but he seemed to be convinced that if he stood very still behind my legs, he would not be seen, and the man would go away muttering to himself, ‘where the heck did that dog go’, and then forget all about Yoyo.

Not wanting neighbourhood awkwardness, I did not ask the gentleman why he had left his dog to wander the streets, over the last some months. I did not point out that Yoyo was often in all kinds of perilous places, like the time I saw him standing looking down from the second storey of a half constructed building without any sides to it, or the time that a workman had rescued him deep from the rubble of a swimming pool being dug out, where he must have gone exploring and been unable to clamber back up the steep 12-foot deep pile of excavated mud and rolling stones.

I stepped away, clearly signalling that I was not hiding the dog, and asked Yoyo to please go home. I took the leash (just a rope actually) from the man, put it around him, and handed him over. He left, looking askance at me over his shoulder. Again, I pulled my mind-shutter down.

Only, of course, to have it rolled open firmly again, a few weeks later. Yoyo’s family had gone on vacation, and only one aged great-grandmother was holding fort. From her seat in a patch of sunlight in their garden, she called out to me as I walked Snoopy past their home, and said, “Look, please take this dog. No one has time for him, no one was prepared for a dog, just an impulse purchase…please take him. He’s just lying there tied at the back of the house.” If I take him, I will get involved, I won’t be able to let him go again, I said to her. That was my polite, tangential indication that I did not want to risk having him yanked away from me (on a rope) after the family returned from vacation and was in the mood to have a dog again. She assured me it wouldn’t happen.

I went to the back of the house, and there he was, tied near a genset, sleeping against its warm and loud vibrations. He looked sad and tense but stood up. I led him away, and as soon as we were out of his sitting-sleeping area, he sort of let go and produced a mighty, spreading puddle of pee. He watched solemnly, helplessly, as the puddle grew all around him and under all four paws. He had been holding on for long, not wanting to dirty the area in which he had been sitting for hours and hours. When he was done, he neatly jumped clear of the puddle and began to walk with sprightly determination on the leash, towards my gate.

And just like that, Yoyo came to stay. And life became a new flavour of madness for us - me and my then flatmate Mathangi, who had been encouraging me to just keep him. He adored her till the very end; over the next 15 years, when she would visit, he would have a special ‘my person’ expression on his face – as she was part of his early years. She was also a willing victim of his arbitrarily made rules like no coming downstairs at night or I will snipe at your pyjama leg, but I can crawl into your bed and up your blanket and emerge to sit on your face.

Yoyo’s coming and my taking him in was clearly a redefining of who I was and where I really would and should put my energies. The person I was seeing then asked me challengingly, “I see, so taking in one more dog…this means that you’re signalling to me ‘Love me, love my dogs’, right?” Some of Yoyo’s sparkiness had already rubbed off on me, and I had rediscovered my temporarily silenced snarkiness to reply: “No, the signal is that you should go back under the flat stone I lifted that you came out from under” (or words to that effect).  And with that, I pulled the plug on a limbo-relationship in which I had been floundering for longer than I care to disclose.

Yoyo seemed to have recognized fully that this was now his home. He ate, drank, slept, and took his first pee and dump neatly and discreetly under a clump of bamboo. And would never after that, ever, do it in the house. Very soon, he began to relieve himself only when he was taken for a walk along with Snoopy – who had now resigned himself to having a feisty housemate under foot. He continued to be frosty, and Yoyo continued to either not notice, or deftly wheedle some leeway out of Snoopy, so that his aggression simply died down, and sometimes he even allowed Yoyo to almost snuggle up.

Snoopy must have noticed how very captivated everyone was by this maverick new entrant, but he took it with much grace.

Here he is, Yoyo, a few days after he had become decidedly my dog and I had decidedly become his human: 

There continued to be people for whom Snoopy was their one-and-only, with his gentle, noble manner, right from the time he had jumped off the garbage pile at Seven Bungalows, Mumbai, and decided to become our dog. Much had happened after that, and now just he and I had lived companionably and uneventfully, a monastic existence, for several years. We walked, worked, we met old and made new friends, we ate simple and regular, and occasionally treated ourselves to a shared plate of chicken haka noodles from Kiran Dhaba, the only eatery for miles around at the time, in the far-flung Pune suburb that we had moved to, from our ex-life in Mumbai. The dog that we had had when Snoopy came into our lives, Annie the boxer and his biggest buddy, had been gone for a while. The niece who grew up with us for some years, had left.

Khudsey juda, aur, jaggsey paraye…hum dono they saath, a sort of quiet evensong, is how it was between me and Snoopy, after our exit from Mumbai and the dismantling of what used to be our family unit.

My nieces and nephew and sundry other people were Snoopy loyalists, but even his old die-hard fans could not help being drawn into the unconscious charms of the newbie Yoyo when he burst most unceremoniously into this quiet scene. 

(Next instalment of Yoyo-nama on 15 June 2018)