Chapter 6 Yoyo-nama

Yoyo-nama

The Chronicle of a Foundling turned Dictator

Chapter 6

A little before Yoyo had come to stay with us for good, and was still at his previous house nearby, I had heard amidst much giggling and hushed whispers from the neighbourhood watchman and domestic help from that house, that this new dog Yoyo had caught and eaten a piece of bhaakri that was used for ‘ovaaluntaaknay’. It is a ritual in rural Maharashtra, where a piece of dry food is circled around the head of a new groom and bride and then thrown away, so that the evil spirits can’t harm them. Usually a crow or a cat or just the ants will eat up this piece once it landed safely somewhere. There had been a wedding in the ‘servant’s quarters’ at his first home, and Yoyo, standing at the periphery watching on, had apparently darted out and deftly caught the piece of bhakri once it was flung away, and simply gobbled it up. And this meant surely that there was a wicked and/or wayward spirit now firmly lodged inside of him, was the general consensus. And the way to get an evil spirit to leave someone’s body would be to smack the person with the soft end of a broom, was another belief. I don’t know if someone there had tried it, but Yoyo did have a life-long vengeful-visceral hate of brooms, and would often growl at broom-wielders.

One of the things that to Yoyo were totally optional was going for a walk. I had a hired dog walker who would take both dogs out for 3 walks a day, whether I was in or not. Yoyo would love to go out with me and later with my partner Tatsat, who entered our lives. All we had to do is, even when he got pretty old, pick up his leash, and say and signal ‘Chall walk la, tu ani mi tu ani me’ – meaning just us, no walkers. He would be out in a flash. We began to wonder if the walker Parma was abusing him in some way or just annoying him by sitting in one place and smoking his bidis. But this was simply not true; he as well as Vijaya who walked him in the afternoon, were sincere walkers, and it was just Yoyo’s cussedness at play. Vijaya would even allege: “I do so much for him and with such love, but see, he thinks of me just as an employee and prefers you people any day.” At times she would try and use the pet-names that Tatsat and I used  - and you could almost hear the “quote marks”: “Chall Manchu,” she would try to say, using Tatsat’s term of endearment, when calling him for a walk. Or “Yoyuski, Yoyoppa,” she would call him, like me, leash in hand. Yoyo would look blankly stonily (the Marathi word is ‘makkha’) back at her.

Vijaya had seen me whisper to Yoyo, ‘come let’s go’, and then in Marathi, ‘to-ani-mi-tu-ani-mi’ – meaning just you and me you and me no one else. This would bring him out instantly. When Vijaya tried it, he would actually turn around and show her his butt and fall asleep. “Aik mazya dhugna,” she would label this action of his. Something like, as if he was saying to her: ‘talk to the butt’. Again she ruefully repeated … “How much I do for this dog, cook, feed, even clean up after him, rub his belly, put up with his nonsense, but he still thinks of me as paid help, not like you.”

I tried to tell her that he couldn’t make that distinction in his mind, but then I wasn’t even that sure. One of her other grouses was, that even if he did go for a walk with her, he would employ a series of vocalizations that sounded so un-dog like, that people walking ahead of her or behind her would look curiously at her, as if she was making them. One of the sounds was a sort of yawn-turned-burp with a question-mark ending. People would turn around to look at her, never at the dog. She would lamely try to say, the dog made that sound. And she claimed that people would think she was a bit mad. Or worse, that she was burping and/or farting musically.

Another sound that Yoyo produced was a meow – not just any meow, a sound like a human imitating a cat meow sound. Again, Vijaya claimed, people thought she was walking around meowing. There was also a duck-like quack he would emanate at times. Right to his last days he would surprise us with the kind of new utterances and vocalizations that he could come up with. Haan (downward inflection) eeee (upward) was one of them, which was the yawn turned into a joyful outburst, when he waited impatiently for something good in the offing, like a car ride or a game. He would produce this sound if Vijaya stopped to talk to someone on their walks too, and she would come home crossly declaring that yet again, this dog was hell-bent on making her look silly. She claimed that people laughed at her, asking her if she was walking a kutra or a gaadhav - a dog or a donkey.

The long-suffering Vijaya, however, was truly his fan. At one time, she actually asked me to take a picture of Yoyo pooping out in the open, because she felt he did it so elegantly and had such a cute look of concentration on his face!

On days that I could not walk him, Yoyo would simply make himself very tiny and vanish in the house somewhere, so that none of the other walkers could access him. (Equally, he could make himself huge and take up more than half a bed, if he chose to. He was highly elastic, that way.) Sometimes, to avoid detection, he would sit at the bottom of a long window, behind the curtain that came right down to the floor. Here his nose was in plain view actually, but he would have covered his eyes and head and most of his body with the edge of the curtain. His rump would be sticking out from under the curtain, in plain view actually, but he thought that he was clad in a magic cloak of invisibility. Ostrich-asana, we used to call it. The walker Parma or Vijaya would stand right there patiently calling out to him, Parma laughing and saying “Saaf dikhayi deta hai, usko lagtaay chupa hai,” – Can be clearly seen, but he thinks he has hidden himself. Vijaya would say wearily in Marathi, “Chall, ata natak banda karr, mala ajoon kaama padleli ahet,” – Quit these games and come out, I have other chores to finish. Or on occasion she would say “Dolyawarr patti ani magcha sagla ughda-nagda.” – ‘A band over your eyes but your backside all exposed.’ Yoyo would not budge, even when they stood right next to him saying We can see you, comeon! And then I would hear an appeal from them, shouted out to me: ‘Yoyo is not coming for his walk… Gouritai do something.’ 

Why any of the devoted long-suffering paid walkers were a no-no for Yoyo, is simply not clear. I once, absurdly, even followed Parma the watchman-walkman at a distance to see if he was simply tying Yoyo up to a tree and going off to chit-chat with his cronies, or pulling his leash too tight, or even maybe whacking him with the leash (as if anyone would dare and then live to tell the tale) – because there had to be some explanation about Yoyo’s extreme and open reluctance to walk with them.

The morning walk, at least, after 8 hours of being in the house and not relieving himself, I thought I must insist on, even if I was working and the walker arrived. Yoyo would have sensed who was headed towards the house to walk him, or heard the gate and would quietly melt away. He would not appear when called, and wait it out. Till I raised my voice. Only when I shouted loud and threateningly, he would scamper out of his hiding place in utter glee, run past the waiting walker to the gate, and turn around and look at the man standing with his leash, giving him a ‘come on, what’s keeping you’ expression.

“Yoyo, Why Why WHY do you make me shout at you first thing in the morning?” I would ask him angrily. And he would look back with an unfathomable expression in his eyes. “Because I’m me” he must have been saying. “And it’s fun to watch you being you,” he might have added.

(Next instalment of Yoyo-nama on 13 July 2018)