Chapter 14 Yoyo-nama - Shifting the goal posts

Chapter 14

Changing the goal posts - justforfun

Yoyo’s speciality was sabotaging any and every arrangement that you made for him if you went out of town. We never dared to keep him in a pet facility, because we were sure he would come up with something so totally unexpected, and find a way to run off. A friend’s beagle had done just that, never to be found again, and the idea terrified us. He was, over the years, simply better off in his own space, with a series of paid people or unsuspecting or brave friends who volunteered to house and dog-sit.

My going away meant that he would completely stop going out for walks, and yet not relieve himself in the little yard, as far as we could see. He just kept it all in, which was part tantrum and part laziness. It was something I feared he would have to pay for dearly, healthwise, as he grew older. Once I was gone, no one could (and Tatsat wouldn’t) take on the hard task of cajole-threatening him over things, whether it was walks, or nail clipping or medicines (though, thank god, he was a sturdy little fellow and rarely fell ill).

Yoyo would be saddish and sober when I was away, going all quiet as soon as any suitcase came out. But he would handle it fairly philosophically – no whining, moaning, barking or destruction once he was an adult. You see, that would be too obvious and unpolished a form of protest for the likes of him. He had a whole highly-imaginative armoury of disruptive acts that he could deploy when you were away.

So going out of town, even for a day or two, for me meant putting in place a series of arrangements in the house, involving a watchman-walker, a cook-feeder, friends and neighbours who would come to look him up and give him some warmth and love as well as put up with the convoluted and alternating love-cum-a-hard-time that he would hand out to them.

Young, unsuspecting Yashoda and Harini probably had the most ‘interesting and instructive’ time at Yoyo’s hands during one of my month-long vacations away. A whole lot of other people were kept on their toes and put through their paces by Yoyo over the years whenever I was away. (But more on that, later.)

He would change the goal-posts every time, and throw a googly ball too (to mix my sporting metaphors). And so, whatever elaborate arrangements I had made, with whatever combination of people for when I was away, there would always be an incident that involved calling in additional troops. This included simply refusing to go on walks with anyone for over 24 hours, so that those taking care of him could almost hear the backed-up pee and poo sloshing around in his system, but had to watch on helplessly. Serious man-hours would be spent in trying to trick him out of the gate. No one dared to simply let him loose out in the colony, to do his business, because perhaps I was the only person who could round him up if he decided to run about and stay just that one foot out of reach, playing catch-me-if-you-can.

Why not bung the wretch in a pet-sitting facility, you ask? I never dared to, frankly. Quite early in the day I had figured out that he would find devious and ingenious ways to somehow buck the system and escape or vanish. While Yoyo had the ability to take up a huge amount of space with his personality and by stretching his small body to tiger-like proportions, a la Hobbes, he also had the uncanny knack of becoming tiny and near invisible or transparent (this is why Mathangi began to call him ‘white-ghost’, and Charmayne called him the ‘shape-shifter’). He would hide most successfully when he wanted to, most times, except sometimes for a give-away tuft showing from somewhere.

The vision of Yoyo Houdini-ing himself out of a pet-sitting place and taking off determinedly in search of home on completely unfamiliar streets, was a terrifying prospect – the friend whose dog had done just that, and was never to be found again, was haunted by that incident, as was the pet sitting facility.

If there was a way to buck the system and do something outlandish, Yoyo would find it, this we knew. So in-house dog-sitting it had to be. That too came with its many complications and many unsuspecting victims.

In Yoyo’s head, there was a very clear-cut hierarchy of who he would and would not obey, I realized. When I travelled, leaving him to just the watchman, Parma and Vijaya to feed and walk, it could mean that he would scuttle all your best laid plans. Besides the refusal to come out for a walk, he would play bait-and-switch with them even over how and when he (and Snoopy, or later he and Jugnu) could be fed.

Or on one occasion, when there was no in-house caretaker, but a system of feeders and walkers in place, he decided to suddenly not allow any of them to approach the fridge at all, where his cooked food, meat, chappatis, etc were kept. Knowing him, it was not like he thought they were ‘outsiders’ against whose incursions he must protect our house. It only meant that he had thought up one more ruse to keep everyone on their toes and ensure that I get SOS calls in the middle of meetings or vacations or whatever thing I had dared to unleash myself and go to.

So on some days, I would get helpless calls when I was away, saying “Because you’re not there, Yoyo is not letting me approach the fridge to take out the cooker and make fresh food or approach the dry dog food tin.” Parma, the by-now resourceful watchman-walker-feeder had to learn to think on his feet. Per force, he would come up with some alternative food arrangement. The first time that Yoyo pulled this trick, Parma went out and bought dry dog food and fed them, carefully keeping the packet with himself, and not leaving it in the house, in case Yoyo decided to bar him from approaching the packet too. Sometimes he or Vijaya would get him chappatis out of their own meagre cash resources, or embarrassedly approach a tolerant neighbour and ask for some money for this, or cook something in their homes and bring it to feed the dogs.

When I returned, they would always report to me, deleting the expletives they no doubt must have had running through their heads, that after this bout of blocking them from the fridge, and them foraging for food for him from outside, Yoyo would then heartily eat what they served him and stalk off to take a large snooze under a bed or table. From this point on, he did not bother with who came in and out of the house. Now someone could trespass and take away the entire fridge for all he cared. The mission, of making people around wring their hands and dance around for solutions, had been accomplished.

I had long since given up locking our house when I went away, which would be open 24/7 so that the dogs could go in and out of the place, and the caretakers too could come and go, without the complication of door locks and keys, where or who to keep them with, the fear of Yoyo not letting people approach the front or back garden door, and any of those imponderables that he could suddenly mastermind and manifest.

Like all tyrants, Yoyo would change his rules and make you feel utterly stupid for doing so much bandobast for him. On some days when I was away, he would be sweet and completely sane and co-operative, and not pull any of these stunts. Quite soon, I found myself throwing in a dog-sitter into the mix, for when I needed to travel – even on short 2-day trips to Mumbai. He would happily, or at least quietly, go out for walks with these sitter-friends. Tatsat’s pleas and half-hearted attempts to be strict with him, he would in the beginning not pay any heed to, but once their bond deepened, he would agree to go out with him.

When Tatsat could not be here full-time, Yoyo had a slew of visiting temp staff-cum-fans. This was primarily four people, over the years. Jaya, my niece-daughter, who would stay sometimes, and house and Yoyo-sit when I travelled. Jaya took in her stride his many little rules and regulations. For instance, moving furniture meant that he would bite the leg of the chair or stool or table being moved, so she would be cautious about lifting a chair and never dragging it!

Mathangi was another recruit, when she visited from her stints in Mumbai, or Austin, or Chennai. He would be thrilled to have her around, but with her, there was that business of growling and fake-nipping at her pyjama leg if she came downstairs after lights-out and Yoyo had chosen to sleep downstairs. Mathangi would take everything upstairs, cold water, a snack, books, papers, anything that she might need from the pantry or fridge, to avoid Yoyo doing that white-ghost-attack on her. She too later learnt to tell him sharply to just stop-it, and he would then let it go.

Later there was a friend’s daughter, Harini, doing her MA here in Pune, who stayed for a couple of terms. She adored Yoyo, but had got his number and knew how to deal with him. While she indulged him, played with him, even dressed up his head hair in what she called a Yohawk, marked and respected every strange quirk of his, she dealt with him mostly with a firm hand when it came to him insisting on sleeping on her bed or hanging around her desk and asking to be petted, when she needed to concentrate on her reading and writing.

They would have subtle, pitched battles, and she would find ways to keep him firmly out of the room, to which he most surprisingly conceded – surely a sign that Yoyo was ageing, mellowing. Or like all bullies, had learnt to recognize and respect stiff resistance when he encountered it.

For one bout, of a month, Harini was joined by another friend Yashoda in my house, while I was away all of that time. Yashoda, he probably played fast-and-loose with, the most. She had not co-habited with a dog before, and certainly not a personality-packed fellow like Yoyo. In those 30 days he had ample opportunity to show them all his facets in technicolour.

He liked them both, but there was some degree of disorientation in his head, because Yashoda was housed in my room. Both Harini and Yashoda would not let him sleep there in the night. So he would come up with little acts of revenge. He did not de-bar her, as he would have the watchman and domestic help, from entering my room, but he would climb on the bed when she was away and dig it up, and even broke his usual excellent and unswerving potty-training to take a dump or a pee on the bed a couple of times. Both Harini and Yashoda and before them Mathangi, have been blessed with a neat round production of vomited food, specially upchucked for them in case they were slacking in their ministrations towards him. They all gamely mopped it up, knowing full well that he was not ill…and only being perverse.

He would be alternately sweet and then do something like this to them. Yashoda famously declared in complete exhaustion after a month at Yoyo’s hands: “Yoyo makes you feel like those women who are married to abusive men, you know…where they behave horribly with you, you never know if you’re displeasing them, but then suddenly they can be so damned sweet and sooo charming and so apologetic, that you forgive them everything, and hope that things are going to get better and the bad times have been put behind you, and that’s the time they begin to quietly prepare how they’ll give you a tough time again. And so the cycle of abuse begins again.”

(picture shows Harini and Yoyo - she styled his hair to look like a 'Yohawk-Mohawk' as she called it )