Yoyo-nama Chapter 18

18

“Rage, rage, against the dying of the light”

That yelp when you rough-housed with his fore-legs - it was a sure sign that Yoyo was now heading towards that place called ageing. He also now refused to be carried, even for fun. Something hurt – either his ribcage, or shoulder. There was nothing wrong as such...he was just displaying some early signs. Another sign was that he began to take medications calmly. Some vitamins and sometimes some tummy meds, or calcium, or his deworming. Elaborate ruses like pedhas, and hollow kababs filled with the meds, or crushed tablets mixed in honey and quickly smeared on to his gums...all those constantly reinvented stratagems that we had come up with over the years, were not needed anymore. It was a mellowing that had the ring of slowing-down. While this made life a whole lot easier,  it was one more of those early intimations of his getting old and of course of his mortality, that you had allowed to enter your mind only for a few seconds and then dismissed as preposterous – Yoyo, old? Ha!

He would now enjoy much less boisterous massages, objecting if you pressed too hard, and would be happiest when Tatsat would softly massage his paws. If I tried it, he would grab his hand away with a ‘You don’t know how’ expression. Or it was also out of my old habit of checking his paws for ticks, which he didn’t like me doing. (Our joke was that the ticks were pets that he kept, and probably had pet-names for them too. He would be that reluctant to let you take them out. However, once in a while, he would mysteriously leave a bloated tick in the middle of a room, with his spit and teeth marks on it. You could have felt him all over for ticks and never felt this large one; and yet there it was, clearly pulled out by him when he felt he wanted to rid himself of it.) Overall, I was always the bad cop, so he had less faith in my intentions than he had in Tatsat’s intentions.  When Tatsat picked up a paw to massage, he would flatten out with a sigh, and let him press the pads of his feet. Somehow, Tatsat knew that this is what he needed, and how best to do it.

Another sign that he was ageing, and we were getting tuned to this, was that we kept a tiny envelope in a small drawer of a little cabinet, on which my motley collection of icons gifted to me by various friends, was kept - Ganesh, Datta (him with the four dogs and a cow), Laxmi, Haji Malang, and Our Lady of Lourdes and St Francis of Assisi (the patron saint of animals). The envelope said ‘Yoyo SOS med’. An identical envelope sat in my wallet, and one in the glove compartment of the car. This was because the vet one day (after managing to muzzle him and do an x-ray and examine him) declared that he had a slightly enlarged heart, now. Part of the ageing process, he said.

That word again...that tended to bounce away from us, as it didn’t seem to apply to Yoyo at all. What made us take him in to the vet to be looked at, is that we had been on one of our picnics - where too, he had waded around in the water of a lake, scrambled atop and sat on a large rock like a mermaid (albeit a hairy one), and as usual, marched off on to the main road well above us, one fine moment when he decided it was time to go home.

However, he had suddenly laid down, on the edge of the road, and his tongue looked bluish. A few other picnickers who had come to say hello to him, asked us if he was a very old dog, and us, in full denial mode, had laughed and said nooo, he must be just about....eight...To which they said, hmm, ageing dog. We realised we were taking Yoyo’s robust health too much for granted, and had gone to the vet the next day.

Now the SOS meds (sorbitrate) were shown to all the stakeholders in the Yoyo Enterprise: maids, walkers, sitters, relatives, neighbours, drop-in friends, for when we may be away and he may display the same symptoms. However, we never had to use them, his tongue never appeared blue again, and he lived on for a good 5 years after this. And did not die of an enlarged heart. 

Yoyo began to fade so imperceptibly. First we noticed how his coat, always a thick double or triple layered thing, which needed trimming and thinning in the summers, began to thin out. His pink skin began to show from the thick, short, soft first coat, nearest the skin. The second layer of longer hair became more scattered. The outer longer coat of waves and curls was now thinning out too. His super-long eyelashes, which were intriguingly like the end of a silk sari – with the first part thick, then thin connecting strands and a whole other long set of lashes, was now down to only the usual short ones. The thick silky fringe from his forehead (meant to keep out the snow, in his native West Highland) hardly grew out anymore. His paw and leg fur, which gave his legs the thick rectangular non-tapering look, much like a polar bear cub, was now scantier. 

Always a grooming enthusiast, he now didn’t enjoy it so much; perhaps the combs and brushes felt too harsh on his skin. We used the rubber-glove with the short little bumps on it, which worked to groom and massage him a little. It was easier to comb him with a very broad toothed rounded off wooden comb now. However, he would stalk off soon, when he had had enough. He had stopped climbing on to the bed or even the low divan.

For years I had cussed and cribbed about how I could NEVER have pretty divan, bolster and cushion covers because my dogs would simply colonize them. Once in a while, I would get hassled enough with this to keep a separate brand new beautiful set that I would put on when expecting guests. For a few turns I would remember to take them off as soon as people left, but all this efficiency and house-proudness would fall by the wayside soon, and that set too would get Yoyofied. Woven sheets from Sikkim, Indigo from Kutch, Jaipur prints…all of them went that way. During the last few months of his life, I had got myself a vibrant thick cotton sheet with giant Dahlias on it, from a place called Sundari Silks, in Chennai. I loved that sheet and would not let the dogs anywhere near it. And yet, somehow, sometime, it became Yoyo’s. Here it is, faded and much-washed, and covering him during his last weeks.

Box, to be laid out as a separate inset in this chapter layout.

When Yoyo became Skin Horse

– From The Velveteen Rabbit

“What is REAL?” asked the Rabbit one day, when they were lying side by side near the nursery fender, before Nana came to tidy the room. “Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?”

“Real isn’t how you are made,” said the Skin Horse. “It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.”

“Does it hurt?” asked the Rabbit.

“Sometimes,” said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. “When you are Real you don’t mind being hurt.”

“Does it happen all at once, like being wound up,” he asked, “or bit by bit?”

“It doesn’t happen all at once,” said the Skin Horse. “You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”