Chapter 10

Yoyo-nama

Chapter 10

Terriers have powerful jaws, and they need to be exercised. Bhutanese terriers, I had read, would carry heavy bags of provisions for the monks climbing back up the hill to their high-altitude monasteries, after visiting the weekly market at the foothills. These dogs would walk some parts of the way backwards, the bag firmly gripped in their jaws.

I could well imagine Yoyo, with his West Highland mountain blood in him, doing this. I suppose life in the West Highlands, where Yoyo’s ancestry lay, also provided jaw-work and climbing of this kind.

Here, in an urban home in Pune, Yoyo would device his own jaw-exercising games and routines. He would regularly delight in grabbing my laundry bag of ironed clothes, weighing easily as much as him at the time, and haul it upstairs, bumping it up step by step, walking backwards.

Two people who came in with heavyish handbags were his favourites, Raju, the electrician, and Sultana, the beautician/massagist. He would jump up on his hind legs, hug their bag with his forelegs, and insist on taking charge of the bag by clamping his jaw on to the handles. They would laugh and give in, and he would then drag their bags upstairs; if they didn’t let him, he would hang on like a limpet and they would have to climb the stairs with him attached to it.

There was also a figure-of-eight ‘pully toy’ that he loved. Once he clamped his powerful jaws on one end, he could yank you all over the yard if you held the other end. Or you could walk briskly with it in your hand with him hanging on with his jaws, on two legs, coming along like a wheely-bag. He was at first used to making allowances for my not so strong shoulders and arms; but when anyone heftier visited, he would bring the toy to them, confident that now he would get a real work-out, instead of the lame one that I would give him. This would include trying to drag the person around the yard, but also pulling hard enough for a seated person’s chair to move along the floor. You could see the look of impressed satisfaction in his eyes when he managed to hook someone really strong into playing this tug game with him, and when that person would hold his or her ground and not be budged by Yoyo’s might.

When he first came, my speaking on the phone meant that he felt ignored and neglected. His idea of terrific fun and a means to pull my attention firmly back to himself, was to attach himself to my jeans-leg with his jaws and fore paws, keep up a steady growl, and get dragged along like a honey badger as I walked in my yard and chatted on the phone. The person at the other end of the line often heard small yelps, curses and laughs from me. If it was a formal call, I would have to lock myself into my office space. Yoyo would then sit outside the door and sigh loudly; if the conversation went on for too long, he would sniff deeply and let out a powerful exhalation, like the wolf who huffed and puffed to blow the three little pigs’ house down.

If I was sitting on my bed watching TV or at my desk working on my computer, he would crouch and then ambush my feet with nips and cuffs and smacks with his front paw. I had begun to wear thick jeans and socks, in defence. Several friends and relatives on the other end of the line thought I was letting this new dog get away with being a crazy brat. If I sat down to read the newspaper on my bed, he would jump on to it and spread himself all over. At times, I would read the newspaper by holding it upright in my hand and pacing the house, with Yoyo attached to my leg, gnawing and growling.

Baiting him to bite was at times great fun, because this brought out the stalk-pounce, stalk-pounce instinct in him. Which made him look ridiculously sweet, with all that faux ferocity. I would wrap and protect my hand in the thickness of a duvet and wiggle it at him. He found this absolutely irresistible, and could not help but pounce on it and bite down hard. His vocabulary was expanding by the day during this time. He learnt to quickly let go, if I let out a yelp and asked him “What?? Serious biting?” We had, this way, established the limits of how severe the fun-biting could get. Sometimes he would realize himself that he was opening his jaws too wide to clamp down on my hand or leg too hard. He would at such times, turn this wide open mouth into a yawn, to save his face, and mine.

I found this description that I wrote to a friend at that time:

It’s pouring and i am trying to keep up the exercise by spot jogging in the house, wearing good running shoes - only to be stopped in my tracks, quite literally, by Yoyo - who finds it such fantastic sport, arranged exclusively for his entertainment, he thinks. He makes a torpedo of himself and comes at you from different angles, ending the impact with a small nip or a large grab of either your calf or your shoes. I shout, I whack, I let my feet and knees bump his skull when he comes at me, but it just thrills him even more. All this makes me jump about most energetically, and that has its advantages. But when I move to floor exercises, he is on top of my head, or trying to flip me over with his snout, like a pancake. So finally I had to trick him out of the room by jogging into the corridor and then sprinting back in and shutting the door on the most hurt and mystified face…

Another game he played with me and with my house help was to romp all around the bed in the morning if anyone tried to make the bed. We would then heap pillows and duvets on him and cover him up completely – he would try to bite our hands through these layers, and we would take our chance to land a few good thumps on his rump.

He too had a code for when he thought we were getting too rough and laughing at him rather than with him. He would emerge from this cotton-heap prison, shake himself, jump off the bed and stalk off. ‘Total nighunjanay’ is what we called this, meaning: G’uame over and a decisive exit in high dudgeon’. But if you called out to him to return and pleaded with him with a sorry sorry, he would delightedly sail through the air back on to the bed, pounce on you, and the game was on again. This time it involved a kind of victory dance in which he dug furiously on the mattress for a few seconds and then whirled round and round and round at top speed, like a wind-up toy, and let out some high pitched yaps looking menacingly, not at us, but at some imaginary assailants in the air.

This sequence remained well beyond puppyhood and till his last year. We would be downstairs and we would hear him upstairs, on his own, digging, rolling, whirling, tossing pillows on my or Mathangi’s or Tatsat’s bed. Someone or the other would call it: “Weda” or “Madman” or as Vijaya the house-help would sum it up: “Yedyachya ispitalaat pathwaa - Belongs in a madhouse” or simply, “Saraklela” – which is unhinged or off-centre.

His puppyhood walk, the toy-train one in which four sections of his body seemed to move slightly independent of each other, now became more polar bear like, padding along on his large paws. And when he walked on his leash (he had developed into a wonderful non-pulling, slack-leash walker), his gait turned into a kind of side-winder like movement. He would walk on a straight road on leash, at a 45 degree angle or slant to the road. And yet we moved forward along the road. I spent many walks trying to figure how he didn’t go off at a tangent, and how the straight road could be negotiated in this slanting way. Yet another sign of his ‘saraklela’ personality. Off-centre, for sure.

Later, I would make a small asymmetrical memorial installation to him, in honour of the physical and mental unhinged elements of his personality. But more on that, later.

His beautiful coat, double, perhaps even triple-layered, now in its prime, needed regular grooming and trimming. He quickly took to this routine. He loved to be brushed and groomed. So that I could have him at working-table level, I would call him up on a chair and from there on to a table, in the garden. It started with me jokingly calling it ‘Beauty Parlour’. Very soon, he would come out from wherever he was, to climb in one fluid move on to a chair and then on to the table or tall stool, as soon as I called out ‘Chalo Yoyo, Beauty Parlour!’ Here too there were many rules of engagement, set down by him. Only a light big-toothed comb for his whiskers and forehead. If there was to be trimming of the snout-fur, it would have to be done deftly and quickly, under the continuous barrage of low-grade growling. Back brushing with a strong bristly brush was always welcome and he would keep moving like the needle of a compass, so that even if you started off with brushing his face, you somehow had his rump under your brush. Paw brushing and checking for ticks was just about tolerated, and you had to keep up a threatening dhamki-voice to keep the growling and the furling of lips in check. Teeth and eye cleaning would be gamely tolerated if done quickly and with chicken-flavoured toothpaste and suchlike. Nail clipping was a whole other ball game, that involved a lot of growling and counter-yelling, but he would kind of let you. He had four dew claws, not removed when little, so those grew into curls and whorls if you didn’t keep them in check. Every click of the clipper was accompanied by a pretend snarl, but the mad fool would get distracted and most engrossed if you gave him the little cut piece of nail to investigate and chew on. Some of my non-dog-lover friends found the Beauty Parlour story plain silly, until they saw it in action. At first they thought it was just the usual anthropomorphizing of animals that dog lovers indulge in. But on the day that my friends David and Charmayne, for example, saw it in action – Yoyo coming out from under some snooze spot, and solemnly getting on to a tall stool when I called out Beauty Parlour – they were charmed muchly.

After it was all done, this grooming session, huge handfuls of fur would be taken off the brushes and gloves, and put into a wire box on the wall. From here, all kinds of birds would come and take away little clumps of his fur in mouthfuls, to line their nests. Once a tailor bird’s empty nest fell to the ground after it was vacated, and we saw that Yoyo’s fur had made up the primary bedding material in there.