Yoyo-nama Chapter 11

Yoyo-nama Chapter 11

Yoyo was never ever unsure of his welcome anywhere, once he came to stay. His patchy sense of self from his early months at his first home, had now filled out fully, with no chinks for self-doubt or tentativeness. He felt totally free to scamper out some mornings and into the neighbouring house, wander around, go up the stairs to the bedrooms, and stand staring at or breathing on the retired army man next door. He would be greeted with a surprised smile and a treat, and be gently escorted home again. Or he would try to enter a super-clean neighbour’s home, where he was allowed only up to the threshold. There, he enjoyed leaving his large flower-shaped paw print on the super-clean doormat or on the three spotless marble steps and would be indulged with a ‘Ay what ya yoyo?’ He would look up yearningly towards the top storey, wanting very much to be admitted in, but he was firmly and lovingly kept at bay. But nowhere was he shunned or shooed away. Even those visitors to my home who weren’t much into dogs, would gamely submit to being leaned on, sat on, or at the very least be melted into submission with him butting their knees with his strong little coconut-head and looking up at them with the full power of his liquid black eyes.
On some days he would take a whirlwind tour of the large compound of a newly occupied building nearby. He would dash into the half open gate, sprint across its lawns, past its clubhouse, through its spic-and-span foyer, and come darting out before anyone could say anything. If he was a small human boy, he would have darted into the lift, pressed all the buttons for all the floors before he ran off – it was in that spirit that he entered here. The guard, who meticulously stopped and took down the name of anyone who entered, would look surprised when Yoyo whizzed past at first, and get up as if he should do something, but the entire foray was over in a few fuzzy-furry seconds, as he exited kicking up his heels and grinning in an eat-my-dust way. Soon the guard took to just smiling and saying to me, “bhawaal hai, bhawaal” – a whirlwind.
So sure was Yoyo of himself, that one day, off the leash and walking in the winter sun on our colony road, he strode most purposefully towards the large closed iron gates of a gated community that he had never explored. I called out to him to stop, desist, no! His entire body language was all about the head-toss, rump-shake, jaunty-stride, ignoring me completely. As he stopped short of the big gates and expected to be let in, he was greeted with a sound that he was quite unfamiliar with, and is usually reserved for Indian street dogs: “Ay huddd,” shouted the security man and waved a baton at him. Ever the face-saver, Yoyo quickly recovered from this blow to his poise, and veered away, pretending he didn’t mean to visit there anyway. I laughed very hard and had to sit on a culvert to regain my breath at this tableau.
The whole sequence - his shruggy-smarmy ignoring of my warning, then the rude shooing that he got, his utter shock, and his quick pretend recovery – sets me laughing out loud even today. That was perhaps the only time he was actively shooed away from anywhere in such street language as a Ay huddd, and his cool-dudeness had taken a small but of course temporary dent.
Yoyo’s first experience of the monsoon and Diwali had him rattled to the core. He didn’t even try to pretend that he was not terrified. But in that psychedelic circuitry of his mind, he decided that I had personally arranged to make life miserable for him. So no amount of asking him to come huddle and cuddle in my room, with the doors and windows shut tight and the music going loud would be of any use. He would give you a long withering look once the noise began, and go slowly and determinedly deep under a bed. He could never decide whether the noise was worse upstairs or downstairs. So at every bout of crackers, he would solemnly, tail at half-mast, go up and hide. When it started up again after some silence, he would wearily take himself downstairs again, thinking he would be better off there. No tranquilizers worked on him, not mainstream, not alternative, nothing. Running away to a quieter place in Diwali became the only option. 

Quite soon into his young adulthood, Yoyo learnt the teenage art of appearing super cool at all times. Not for Yoyo the open begging or praying to the kitchen for his meals. He would appear from somewhere, and sit not directly in front of you, but at a 10 or 2 o’clock position, so that you could see him, but he didn’t appear to be asking for food. Or he would sit on the staircase, taking up three steps, so that if you were to go upstairs or come downstairs, you would have to vault over him, and thereby remember it was time to feed him – spread out that way, he was sure that you would figure out, oh ya, mealtime.

On outings where he roamed free in a meadow or on a lake front or in a forest or hillside, he would ignore our calling him; he would broadly stick to moving with us, but never appeared to be following. He was quite afraid of being left alone, but would never ever show it.
At first, Tatsat simply refused to believe that a dog could manipulate anyone. He simply did not believe him capable of deviousness or premeditated games of this kind. He held on firmly to the belief that I was reading too much into Yoyo’s behaviour, and I was anthropomorphizing rather too imaginatively. Till one day, when we had taken him out for a run to a nearby hillock and wooded area. When it was time to go home, Yoyo was out of sight. Snoopy came at once, but there was no sign of Yoyo when Tatsat began calling out to him. I signalled to Tatsat to just remain silent and wait, not even take a step on the crunchy dry leaves. I knew that as long as Yoyo knew we were near by, he would simply not come; but if he thought that we had left, he would get worried and appear at once. Tatsat just smiled and wagged his head at me, as if to say, ‘There you go again, imputing convoluted motives to that sweet and simple little dog’. But he did go quiet, and as we waited, within less than half a minute, an anxious looking Yoyo came round the hillock at a brisk canter, looking for us with a worried expression. The very second that he spotted us, from quite a distance, he immediately covered up his anxious demeanour. He abruptly changed his body language to languid, unconcerned, and stopped here and there to smell things even sitting down as if to enjoy the atmosphere, clearly hoping that we had not seen his frantic run in search of us. Coolness, at all costs.
For the first time, there came out of Tatsat’s mouth, a cussword, part angry and part impressed at the devious game-playing of this dog. ‘Haan rey, haraami hai yeh,’ he said in wonderment at how this had played out. Tatsat would be witness (and victim) of many more such tableaus, in the years to come.
When we left him in the yard for a few hours, well past his destructive phase, he would not like it, and by all accounts, he would be hanging around near the gate waiting quite anxiously for us to return. However, many of us observed this, and it is not just my overreading his cool-stance: the second he spotted us coming down the lane, he would run to the back of the house, to appear as if he was, in no way, waiting for you or anything. In fact I have been busy chasing cats and napping at the back, was the message. He would then come running round the corner of the house in a jaunty canter, as if in happy surprise, that we had returned. 'No appearing needy', was clearly Yoyo's memo to himself, which is the motto of so many people who start off life feeling vulnerable and starved for love.