Those who do not
know what having a pet is are the second most unfortunate group of people on
earth. (The first of course are those who have never enjoyed a fine drink in
the company of good friends.) Our fox-terrier Chorki, aka Chakradhar Sinha went
to meet his maker on a pleasant spring morning five years ago, but he still
seems to be around.
If the
introduction has given you the impression that Chorki was a loving pet, a dog
that was eager to please people around him, I am sorry. Nothing could be farther
from truth. In fact, I have never seen a more self-centred and opinionated dog
than Chorki. Like all authentic fox-terriers, he honestly believed that the
main purpose behind the existence of the universe was to please him. He loved
to be at the centre of everything and instinctively knew where he ought to be
in order to make his presence felt. For example, if any one of us was packing a
suitcase, he would calmly move into it and pretend to be sleeping. He
loved good food and saw to it that he was given the biggest slice of cake and
the largest scoop of ice cream. He was a strong believer of the Hedonistic
philosophy: Eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow we die. On a summer day he
would always sleep directly under the fan or the ac vent. In a frosty winter
night, it would be impossible to nudge him out of his blanket. What was worse,
he had a huge chip on his shoulder and was always ready to take offence. Unlike
most people with dogs, we couldn’t tell people: ‘Don’t worry, our dog doesn’t
bite.’
Sorry, but our dog
does bite. On a conservative estimate, Chorki bit seventeen people in his
career, and many of his victims had to experience the pain multiple times. Some
of them were nice people who would themselves pay for the prophylactic
anti-rabies shots, making us feel even guiltier, but to many others, besides
apologies, we would offer medical facilities. It came to such a stage that if
we hadn’t bought the shots for a couple of months, our friendly street-corner
pharmacist Sona would ask me, ‘Ki dada, Rabipur
laagbena?’
And if there was
one dog whose bark was worse than his formidable bite, it was Chorki. He would
be easily disturbed by any legitimate noise that passers-by made and would
respond by increasing the noise pollution manifold. So if you had a car
screeching to a stop or a cyclist ringing his bell in front of our house,
Chorki would start barking, continuing for at least ten minutes after the
reason for his displeasure abated. Mornings were the worst time. We Bengalis
being broadminded people, whenever we say ‘Good morning’, we don’t just wish
just one person, but the rest of the humanity too. So every time a morning
walker said ‘Good morning’ a little loudly, Chorki would take off. And sound
was not the only stimulus for him to bark.
He firmly
believed that whatever area he could see from our windows was out-of bounds for
other dogs. So even if he saw the tail of a stray dog curled up at a distance,
he would try to enforce his no-fly zone. Things were so bad that we would give
directions to our house as follows. ‘Come to Parnashree bus stand and if you do
not hear a dog barking already, wait for a few minutes. You will hear a shrill
bark coming from a fourth-floor flat. Just follow the sound, and hey, Bob is
your uncle.’
You might think:
what kind of people could fall in love with such a cantankerous dog and why
should anyone write about him five years after what should surely have been
good riddance? And there lies the nub, Gentle Reader. Despite all his failings,
Chorki had such a magnetic pull … and he loved us madly. He could understand
practically every word of Bengali (except modern poetry) and if ever anyone
could express feelings, information, and ideas with just their eyes, it was
Chakradhar.
Once we took him
to Bangalore to my daughter’s place. The plan was to leave him there for six
months as we would leave for the US, where my son and daughter-in-law had just
set up their home. The day we were to leave for Kolkata, Chorki understood the
situation clearly and behaved like a dog possessed. He stopped eating and
drinking and would run alternately to my wife and me. He would bark as softly
as he could – in fact it was the only time he whimpered in his life – and look
into our eyes with as much pathos as he could muster. No language could have
expressed more clearly what he wanted to say: “Don’t go away. Please don’t
leave me here.”
We were
heartbroken but we had to leave. After much cajoling, my daughter managed to
take him for a walk in the afternoon and we slipped away during the time. When
Chorki returned, he realised what had happened and shot off immediately. There
was a taxi with a driver waiting in front of the house and to the utter horror
of the driver, a dog suddenly jumped into the vehicle. Chorki had correctly
reckoned that the only way to catch us would be to take a cab.
But as Paulo
Coelho has said, if you really want something, the whole universe conspires to
help you get it. The present chief minister of West Bengal was a firebrand
opposition leader then. A few days before our departure, she had called the nth
bandh in West Bengal, as a result of which the train services had been
disrupted. When we reached Krishna Raja Puram Station, our train had been
cancelled.
Kolkata
Saturday, 04 April
2015
