9.08.09

We rarely speak about our relationships with our pets in my household (and I assume, most South Asian households). They teach us more about ourselves and the world around us — especially when it comes to our paradoxes and hypocrisy - than we care to admit. So this is in their memory.

The sun burned down on the courtyard, heating its red brick floor and if you squint hard enough, you could see steam rising off of the places where Puka had peed or knocked down the water buckets. He was sleeping at my feet now, he had tired himself out by giving the guard a run when we took him out for his bath. He would do this most of the time, either to play or to escape the water. I was exhausted too but satisfied. Puka’s love could calm my heart even on the worst days. His love was confident in its wholesomeness and its unconditionality was healing.

It felt like the hottest day of the year and the humidity was choking. But I loved summer evenings despite their brazen unbearability and because of their beautiful sunsets. For a few minutes every day, our world would turn pink, purple, or yellow; at times a threatening grey, when storms were on their way. These evenings were when I felt at home, with Puka by my side and the sudden silence of the city that followed the sunset. It was ritualistic and it was the only ritual in my everydays where I found comfort.

I didn’t know back then that rituals — the moments preserved in the bubble of mine and Puka’s making — were not permanent. That change would come and it would be slow and that I would only realize its touch suddenly — it would shift my perspective, my imagination and I would suddenly realize that my bubble had become a part of the past a long time ago. I didn’t know back then that the permanence, the unconditionality of that moment, of that love had been my negotiation crutch with the unpredictability of reality.

Puka was something I called him accidentally — deriving it from poka, as in — bug/insect/pest. He had developed the odd tendency to fish out bugs and kill them and chew them and throw them at the doorstep. My mother had exasperatedly said one day “O toh nijei ekta poka” He’s a pest himself — they were not used to dogs being a part of their homes and it took a long time for them to even look at him as a part of the house. I took her exasperation and turned it into a nickname. I had put a very dignified name on him and his collar but he eventually responded to Puka more than anything else and eventually I changed the name on his collar too.

My parents referred to Puka’s home as being under the stairs, where he would retire to rest/sleep and eat and would religiously clean out pests and dirt from its corners. But I knew the entire grounds and the periphery of the house was his domain. You only had to watch him run around the grounds to know he had made it his home. He would sleep from early dawn till afternoon, the time I went and got back from school. He would wake the guard up on most nights by barking at the cats lurking on the border walls. When he was bored by his routine games, he would resort to snatching the clothes from the drying lines on the terrace and run around with them until someone noticed his mischief and chased him down.

I don’t think Puka knew he was any different than me or any of the people in the house. He wasn’t submissive in the way we are told dogs are supposed to be. He was proud and short-tempered and expressed it clearly when he didn’t like something. But he was also understanding and accommodative — in his own way he would let you know that while he disagreed with you, it was okay, he still loved you and if you left him to clear his head on his own, he would go back to playing with you and allowing you to play with his paws. He was a happy soul and he made me happier than my twelve-year-old imagination could fathom.

***

I was at school one day when Puka had run outside the building. The guards say he was chasing a cat, the neighbors whispered the guard aggravated him to get him outside. People who were told to fear animals but did not understand why they often did terrible, cruel things to them. My heart stopped and I frantically ran outside shouting and at the same time realizing it’s of no use to shout. I didn’t know back then that, unlike humans, you can expect dogs to never let you down. Puka came back home after a day, he was covered in dust and had his fur bitten off in several places but his eyes were smiling. The guard was not smiling, he let him in reluctantly and Puka’s barks brought me downstairs. I was introduced to the feeling of relief washing over you so fast and so unexpectedly that you can’t control how you feel, I cried and I laughed and I didn’t let him go until my mother came down and let out a scream looking at his state. And to this day, my memory of his smiling, mischief-filled eyes is vivid. After that day, Puka and I would often wander around the neighborhood, where he would occasionally disappear down alleys and abandoned buildings to chase ferrets or cats.

***

I don’t remember the day Puka died, at least I don’t remember the details. His death and what followed are only a collection of moments and feelings/emotions. When the grief of his death comes, it comes in small lapping waves now, it stings in the middle of my chest reminding me of a suffocating heaviness I had felt there when someone said “He’s suffering too much today, I don’t think he will survive.” It stings and I remember in flashes — my own panic and the rush of adrenaline when I raced to him, Puka struggling to breathe, my screams now inaudible in my memory urging my mother to phone the vet, to ask for instructions, to tell them to come as quickly as they could, the blue kameez I was wearing, the ends of which I used to dip in his water bowl and rub it on his head — it is a black blur after that — I remember crying and my mother screaming at me to calm down and repeating that it was not her fault — there is more silence and murkiness after that.

My last memory of the storyline of Puka’s death is the silence and calm the day after. I went down and collected flowers, I don’t know from where, I gathered them and laid them at his small grave behind the apartment complex. There was no marking and I don’t remember if I put one there. Everything else had fallen through the crack in my consciousness where grief and panic and pain had struck that day. I don’t remember the day and date, I don’t remember how we buried him, I don’t remember what he died of, I don’t remember if the vet ever came or not, I don’t remember how we broke the news to others at home or the guard who helped look after him. And oddly, as I scrutinise my memories in writing this, I realise — I don’t remember registering anyone’s grief but my own and a little bit of my mother’s; because the burn from her anger directed at my hysteria and crying was something I analysed and overanalysed throughout my life.

All I remember of his death is the pain. It still arrives as a physical sting in my chest each time the memory surfaces and on some days I stop to recall the murky storyline, on other days I only recall the flowers I placed at his grave and the way the sun and blue skies had made the world look beautiful. He left a hole in my heart. Several years later, I realised why I had never had another pet — his absence was replaced by an unrecognizable fear. I had catalogued the fear of having to carry another pain under my mother’s practicality. It was too much to do, too much to care for, too many people would come and complain and negotiate about how much freedom an animal can have in this apartment complex — that is what my mother said. It was not worth the pain — that is what my mother meant. And twenty years later I realise I had agreed to both those reasons.

I was more fearful of things after he was gone and I was quick to file things that confused, bothered, or hurt me in any way as things that required practical solutions. I can always count the ways in which Puka changed my heart for the better and I am very good at narrating to people, when prompted (or self-prompted when drunk), how he made me love and made me cry and was the reason why I learned to love sunsets. But I could never, even to myself, describe the way his loss changed my heart. The words for those had irrecoverably fallen through the cracks his death had opened up. In life and in ways I can never truly trace back, Puka had shown me how to read fears in between the words of men and their ambitions, but in death, he had crippled my ability to read my own fears. I am harbouring fears so enmeshed in my flesh and bones that the mere act of resisting the urge to jump to practicality and tell myself the truth instead will make me spiral into a feeling of helplessness, a feeling of falling into a pit that I predict, I won’t know how to come back from.

***

He is the reason I cherish sunsets. He made me love in a way that I have not found anywhere else and I often think, how different my life would have been in his absence. Would I have grown more fears and laughed less? How would I have loved differently?

These questions come up mostly on days where there is no hope left, like today. I think how I would have reacted with him by my side, with the knowledge that love was present and it was unconditional and even if the world came apart at its seams, I would not be alone and that was important the things that matter are things you will feel the most fear for.