Chasing kittens

As I was going to work yesterday I saw a cat perched on a wall, very studiously washing itself. And as always, I though of Lyka.

When Lyka was about 2 years old and at her bouncy and energetic best, she decided that her favorite pastime was to make all the colony cats' lives miserable by lunging at them. There was this one morning where a kitten, who I'm certain was making its first foray out into the world having told its mother that it can take care of itself and it just wants to explore, wandered onto our front yard. Lyka, who was outside dutifully sniffing every corner of the house making sure nothing had changed in 12 hours, detected the slight movement and stopped still in her tracks. In such moments she often resembled one of large cats you watch on the Discovery channel who are getting ready to pounce on their prey. She crouched down and watched the kitten make its way daintily across our lawn. Now this little cat being completely unaware that there's a concept called dogs, was happily pawing at things and looking around. This was the moment Lyka decided to strike. Galloping full speed at the kitten, barking her sonorous barks, tail wagging madly in the air, I'm sure from the kitten's perspective Lyka looked like some kind of nightmarish monster. It ran to the nearest tree and somehow managed to climb up to the top branch and sat there, quivering and thanking its stars.

Lyka not having anticipated this, stopped short at the tree. She thought she would give the kitten a good chase around our yard till she got bored but this animal climbing a tree was unheard of. She looked up at the tree, very puzzled, as if to say "huh?? how come you can climb?" So she sat down, waiting patiently for the kitten to come down. The kitten of course had no intention of moving until this dog had been safely removed from its vicinity. Now I of course had been watching this entire proceeding and found the whole spectacle very amusing (I was 11 so don't judge me). But I decided to cut the kitten a break and took Lyka's leash, clamped it on her and somehow managed to drag her back into the house. She didn't like this one bit. I had ruined her fun.

The kitten noticed this turn of events and decided to slowly makes it way down. There was one problem though. It had no clue how to come down from the tree. When you're running for your life, I suppose some instincts kick in and climbing up a tree happens unconsciously. But coming back down is a whole different ball game. After much hemming and hawing and a few hours, the kitten managed to land on terra firma. Lyka by this time had lost interest and was fast asleep. But by some quirk of fate, she chose that exact moment to wake up and caught sight of the kitten again. Unfortunately I was too slow to stop her and off she went bounding in the kitten's direction and the kitten went straight back up that tree. It took about 15 min for me to stop laughing.

When that kitten finally made its way home that evening, it would have had an incredible story to tell.

Odds & ends

A life less ordinary

My tryst with dogs started at the age of seven. My grandmother was walking me home from the bus stop and as we were making our way through the alleys, a stray ran up and cuffed my leg. In my panic, not realizing that the dog hadn't actually broken skin, I shrieked and the dog ran for cover. But that was enough to put me off all canines for a very long time. Large, full grown ones at least. If I spotted a dog even 5 km away, I would promptly head in the opposite direction.

Then we had Lyka and I couldn't imagine ever being scared of dogs now. Having a dog brings you into this club of people - when we spot other dog owners on the road, we automatically smile at each other and look on fondly as the canines trot along happily smelling every nook and cranny of the road. Before Lyka, we may have liked animals, but not empathized with them. You never really realize how difficult it is for animals to communicate but how much they manage to tell you by just being themselves. Lyka, for instance, would lunge at stray dogs on the road, not out of aggression but mere playfulness. But being as large as she was, she would scare the daylights of the dog on the receiving end of one of her playful gestures. On the other hand, she was an absolute lamb around small children, knowing, even as a puppy, not to jump all over them and scare them. She would wait patiently as they would pull and poke and prod at her tail and coat.

My parents and I have often had this discussion and we have often wondered if we would be the people we are today had it not been for Lyka. I like to believe that having Lyka in our lives has made us better human beings.

A window to the world

One of Lyka's favorite pastimes in our house was to stare out the little cut outs in our balcony, at the general state of affairs on the road below and the sea beyond. On a particularly windy day, Lyka's ears would be buffeted by the wind and she would calmly watch the goings on of the world outside.

A well bred canine on her queen sized bed

Call it an academic debate if you will, but my parents and I have often wondered if Lyka was a pure lab. After she grew to her full size, Lyka was still shorter than several labs around the block and had much sharper features that we had expected her to. Most labs are pug nosed but Lyka had a full snout, not shortened by her genes. And a subject that was a particular favorite of ours - her sharp ears. We liked to believe that Lyka often bore resemblance to a rabbit, especially when she would be fast asleep on her custom made bed. Her ears would be be pointed outwards, in sharp relief to the rest of her.

Lyka could often be found lying on her back, lost in dreamworld, with her paws sticking up into the air. Given a choice to sleep in my parents' room with the a/c on and her bed, Lyka would inevitably chose her bed. And we recently discovered why the choice was obvious, given that we live in Madras, which only has one kind of weather and Lyka had the small problem of being saddled with a fur coat all year round. My parents got Lyka's bed refurbished about a month back, and we've kept her old mattress, as extra seating in our house. You can sink into that bed and never want to get up. That's why till the very end, Lyka always preferred to sleep on her bed.

Our doggy deserved nothing but the best.

Playtime

As Lyka got older, her exuberance for life mellowed down and day to day things stopped evoking extreme reactions. But every once in a while she would decide it's play time and go completely crazy - tugging on her leash, running around in mad circles and digging large holes for no particular purpose. She would be covered in sand at the end of the exercise and look extremely pleased with herself on a good day's work.

The dog who hated water

Atypical for a lab, Lyka hated being bathed or being anywhere near water. We would have to bribe her with biscuits to get her to the terrance to be bathed. After enduring the indignity of being scrubbed, she would ignore the biscuits we would give her afterwards as a peace offering and sulk the whole day.

But it was all worth it to see her fluffy and clean and have her fur curl up into ringlets, very much like the family she came from.

Pondering

It's been a mini lifetime since the last post, but not for want of stories, just time. However, as diwali time approaches and I hear the fireworks outside, I can't help but think of Lyka.

Lyka, like a lot of dogs around this time of year, was miserable during diwali. One can hardly blame her. If you had the capacity to hear frequencies unknown to man and then have everything you hear multiplied times three, a sharp blast every so often would probably jar every nerve in your body as well, not to mention, give you a splitting headache. I know the rows of firecrackers that seem never ending send me looking for the nearest paracetamol strip. The entire time that firecrackers were being set off, Lyka wouldn't leave our side, lest the booming noise consume her. She was certain that as long as one of us was around to reassure her and keep a hand permanently placed on her, she couldn't be harmed. Or if she wasn't to be found, Lyka would be hiding in the bathroom - though I'm not quite sure the acoustics of any bathroom are suitable for reducing echoes.

Lyka hated any form of loud noise actually. Thunder, loud bangs at any point in time, anything that jarred her delicate sense of peace really. And woe betide the person/thing that shook her awake, she would bark till her objection was well and noted. We would, of course, have to wait it out until her indignation subsided.

They say though that animals are afraid of fire. Strangely enough, everytime my grandmother would take an 'aarti' of the family, Lyka would be front and center, watching the flame go round and round. And also be the recipient of the 'teeka' that's supposed to keep the evil spirits away.

With no Lyka insisting on continuous physical contact, covering our clothes in her golden fur or us stumbling on her in the middle of the night when you go to brush your teeth, this diwali will certainly seem empty.

A death defying feat

When we moved to Madras, we moved into govt. housing, which was a fairly decent sized apartment. While it was no big deal for us, Lyka found the whole concept of an apartment puzzling - there was no access to anything resembling a garden, no place to stretch out and soak in the sun, nothing. And to top it all off, we would disappear for long periods in the day for school and work, leaving her locked inside. Let's just say, she was not happy about this arrangement and took a while to come to terms with it.

Moving into a cramped space also meant that we now had to take a decision on whether or not we wanted Lyka to breed. While I loved the idea of lab puppies running amok in the house and then putting them for sale, my parents decided it wasn't practical. One, we didn't have the space and two, being the softies we are, there would have been no way in which we would have had the heart to put little furry golden colored animals on sale. That being said, we decided it was best to get Lyka spayed. So off we went to Blue Cross and picked up Lyka a couple of days later, post the procedure.

Initially Lyka seemed none the worse for the wear. She had stitches that took time to heal but that was all. Then we started noticing that Lyka's beautifully triangular face no longer seemed normal - her facial muscles were seizing up and her eyes looked unfocused. Soon she started to bump into things and started having seizures. Our vet said that when dogs are usually operated on, they're not given a tetanus shot because they have a very high threshold for infection. However, Lyka seemed to have gotten tetanus nonetheless, usually a death toll for any animal. But we wouldn't give up.

We took Lyka to the vet hospital everyday where she would be injected with various things and put on IVs. Then we'd bring her back every evening and sit with her, coaxing her to eat through a dropper and hold her tight when she'd have seizures so she wouldn't hurt herself. Things seemed bleak for a while and the infection took the better part of a month to pass, but I don't think there was any point at which we didn't believe that she would make a full recovery. There was no question of Lyka not being around.

Finally, after extensive visits to the vet, she started to improve. Her doc was very surprised and apparently wrote a medical article chronicling her whole sickness. We were told Lyka was one of maybe 10 dogs in the country who had survived tetanus. Eventually, her facial muscles relaxed and she looked like the happy dog she was and she stopped bumping into things. We like to think that apart from the extensive medication she was on, our positive vibes had a lot to do with her recovery.

Human Nature

Have you ever wondered how difficult it would be to express yourself without being able to use words? What if all you had was your face and a desire to be around people all the time?

In our last house in Agartala, we had a front patio bounded by a short wall. By the time Lyka grew to her full height, she was able to rest her head on the wall and watch the world go by. If we'd go out, Lyka would await our return on the patio, with only her triangle face and raisin like eyes visible above the wall. Her face would be absolutely immobile and would stare at us beadily till we got to the front door. Till such time she would assess us and determine whether we were planning to abandon her once again and leave for distant parts.

When we moved into our current house, Lyka investigated the whole place thoroughly and demarcated all 'her' places. When we sat upstairs watching TV, she would heave herself up and pad her way up the stairs. We always knew she was coming by the clicking of her claws on the marble. After dinner she would automatically go up to the TV room and await our arrival. If we didn't show in sometime, she would come out on to the landing and look at us questioningly, wondering why on earth we were taking so long, when family time was supposed to have started long ago.

In some ways Lyka was more eloquent than any person we've met. She would express her pleasure with a wide doggy smile and a thumping tail that had the power to sweep things off a table and whack your shins till they were 'black n blue.' If she was depressed she would refuse to eat. If she was concerned about anyone of us being upset or ill, she would spend the whole day by our side, not asking for anything, making sure we knew that she was around if we needed her. Just her presence sometimes would make all the difference in the world. All she asked for in return was our company. Her brand of unconditional love is hard to come by.

Lyka made the most unlikely people believers...

Sibling rivalry

Being an only child has several advantages, one of them being you get your parents' undivided attention. And after 11 years of getting used to that, you don't quite know how to handle a puppy, a Lab puppy at that, who wants to wriggle her way into your parents' good graces too.

For as long as Lyka was a baby, she was convinced I was some kind of two legged puppy as well and therefore, we were equals. But that also meant competing for attention, at least in her head it did. So we had a game. Whenever we would watch TV, I would lie down on the couch and lay my head on my mom's lap. The minute Lyka saw that she would come running over and push her cold nose into my face and try and budge my head out of the way. And trust me there's only so long you can take a dog licking you. Once I was successfully moved out of the way, Lyka would have full access to my mother and thereafter, proceed to sit docilely while my mother petted her. She didn't take very kindly to intrusions on "mommy & me" time by me.

As the years passed, Lyka's first priority would always be my mother. For obvious reasons of course, my mother got to spend more time with her at home, was the giver of meals and generally has that "mom" stamp. So every time my mother would leave town on work or family visits, Lyka would initially go into depression and refuse to eat. Then sense would dawn on her and she would gobble down every little bite we'd give her for fear that with mommy gone, lord only knows when we strange non-mommy people would feed her. So she had better make the most of the situation. The hand that feeds is always the true master.

The family dog

Lyka was happiest when she was surrounded by family.

Lyka's introduction to our colony happened on my 11th birthday. She couldn't quite understand why she was being tied up like a dog.

She's staring intently at the biscuit I was holding right on top of the camera.

Anything for a biscuit!

Training Days

In her absolute craze for chicken, Lyka actually went after a tiny little bone I'd thrown into the trash. She arose triumphant with the chicken bone and with the trash can lid around her neck, completely nonchalant, like it was an everyday occurrence. My mother and I took a good 5 minutes to stop laughing hysterically.

Teething trouble

Lyka, the puppy, went through an intense phase of teething where absolutely nothing on the floor was spared. At the time I was enrolled in a convent and we had to wear those awful black "Mary Jane" like shoes with our regular uniform. I, like a diligent child, had polished my shoes the night before but made the cardinal mistake of leaving them in puppy reach. Come morning, the straps that were supposed to buckle the shoes on were missing. And there were telltale bite marks around the scuffed edges. Lyka in the meantime looked very sheepish and was wagging her tail as if to say, "Was I not supposed to eat that?" I, of course, had to go to school with a note that actually said the dog ate my shoes. I don't think the nuns at school were very amused.

We had read somewhere that ice helped soothe teething trouble for dogs. So we tried giving Lyka ice cubes to gnaw on, hoping she'd leave our valuables alone. Her expression, like so many others, was priceless. She sniffed at it, gave it a perfunctory lick and watched the ice melt into a puddle. She looked very happy about the whole process.

The funny part is that Lyka seemed to think anything in her reach was fair game for chewing. So a year down, I again made the mistake of leaving a prized possession (I was 11 at this time. Don't judge me!), my long haired Barbie, on my bed while I had gone out to play with friends. I got back to find doggie drool all over the doll and an arm chewed off. Unfortunately, I gave in to my temper and Lyka got a solid yelling. She realized immediately that something had gone very wrong and spent the rest of day trying to make up for it by being extra nice (read following me around like a baa lamb and keeping me constant company).

Lyka in her old age lost a lot of her teeth. I always wondered how she chewed through her food. I think on most days, in her hunger, she just swallowed things whole. Doggie dentures, now there's an idea!

Chicken Run

Our houses in Agartala were surrounded by huge yards, conducive to raising animals and other farm like things. To this end we decided to adopt and raise chickens. We brought them home as chicks and as they grew, built a coop for them so that they could live in peace. Every evening our ‘man Friday’ would let them out for a walk around the yard and shut them back in. Once Lyka grew more familiar with the landscape she took upon herself to give the chickens exercise, lest they get fat and lazy. Lyka would charge at the birds at full speed, her tail waving madly, and a mischievous glint in her eye. You knew the chase was on when you heard terrified squawks emanating from outside the house. After several months of this chasing routine, one day Lyka finally managed to corner one of the birds near our compound wall. Now you must understand the bird imagined that this was the end, time to meet its maker. It had its head bowed, waiting for the inevitable. Lyka, whose DNA didn’t possess the genetic code for killing, was completely surprised at this turn of events. I don’t think she ever expected to catch one of the chickens, much less want to harm it. It was all about the chase for her. After standing there a while, looking a little puzzled, she sniffed at the chicken, gave it a lick and sauntered away, as if to say “what’s the fun if you’re going to stop running? Boring bird.” The chicken in the meantime must have died a thousand deaths and I’m sure was wobbly legged for days after this incident.

few of the 1000 odd pictures we have of her

Her tummy, a bottomless pit.

Lyka could tuck in an enormous amount of food and have nothing to show for it. She was never obese, as is the tendency with most Labs. She had perfected the art of making people feel guilty. She would eat an enormous meal and have a starved and piteous look an hour later.

She knew who the pushover was in the house and target them at tea time for biscuits or anything crunchy. The only time she EVER sat like a dog was during tea time, and dinner when there was chicken. She took up her position at a distance from the table where she had everyone in her line of vision, and looked at us unblinkingly, willing us to take pity on her and give her her all time favorite “Jim Jam.”

If we avoided looking at her, she would go below the table and look up at us from under the glass. She never let us forget that she was one of us and had equal, if not more, share in the cookie packet. I, of course, always succumbed.

Every evening after her meal she had this wonderful habit of thanking me for giving her her food. She did this by wiping her mouth on my clothes!

Lyka loved physical contact. Her theory was, "why have your hands free when they can be petting me?" There were times when she was very aggressive about it, pulling at our hands while we were seated. She used to subdue when given a warning. But then she'd start the whole process again, a few minutes later. Totally incorrigible!

Junk food and other edibles...

On Lyka’s second day home, in her initial forays into our backyard, she found an interesting creature that seemed to transport itself by hops and leaps. To the rest of us it’s known as a frog, to her it was some strange new critter that begged further investigation. She poked her nose at it and tried identifying its smell. When that didn’t work, she tried to lick the frog, determining whether it was food that she had not been exposed to yet. The frog in its panic at this giant fur ball invading its personal space gave off some kind of resin to protect itself. Apparently it’s fairly common. The minute that stuff touched Lyka’s tongue, she recoiled in shock and started making faces like the kind you do when you taste a pill in your mouth. And tried desperately to remove the taste of the frog from her tongue.

Unfortunately she seemed to have some kind of side effect to the chemicals in that resin, and began to froth at the mouth. We called our vet and demanded he come over immediately, even though it was well past office hours. When he arrived, I think Lyka had subsided a little. Our vet said there was no permanent damage and that the frothing would pass. Then he explained the mechanics of the frog and why Lyka was behaving the way she was. I don’t think she was ever enamored with jumping, hopping creatures ever again. Little did we know that this was but the beginning of her fascination for ‘junk’ food – and I mean real junk.

We started taking Lyka on walks around our colony and she would smell and explore every nook and cranny of the roadside with that eager, excited look that you can always identify a puppy by. When she thought we weren’t looking, she would also pick up cigarette butts and other assorted disgusting things from the road and happily munch away. As though she was being fed enough at home! A sharp reprimand would garner a guilty look from her but never broke her of her habit, until the last few years. There have been times where we had to forcibly make her spit out whatever garbage she had in her mouth.

The one time that she explored the world of cow dung (I’m not making this stuff up), she fell very ill with a gastro problem. For the next couple of weeks we would take turns feeding her barley water through a syringe dropper and crushing medicines into her food. Expecting her to swallow a pill on its on would only result in her giving it a cursory smell and have her walk away from the offending object. She eventually recovered.

It was only the beginning of her nine lives.

Catharsis

I guess in some ways this blog is inspired by Marley & Me. The book is, of course, brilliant and ironically something we all read about a month before Lyka passed. There were several moments in the books where we'd go "that's just like Lyka!" and others when we'd thank our stars Lyka was never as destructive as Marley.

We had often thought about documenting Lyka's antics. And there have been many. But I guess we would have never gotten around to putting this stuff down in writing unless we needed to. And this blog is really what we need right now. It may seem strange to many that we're so attached to our dog. To some she was just a pet. But we never saw a dog, we always saw Lyka. Exuberant, loving, dog smelling, fishy breath, hated baths, lunged at cats, ate all sorts of junk when she was a puppy and promptly get sick, shed enough fur to fill a pillow.

But we always saw Lyka.

Her big black eyes could melt any heart. Her ears, face, eyes, they were all a series of triangles, A caricaturist's delight.

This is years later but if Lyka couldn't be found pottering around the yard or sleeping somewhere in the house, you knew she was in the kitchen hoping something would come her way.

Of winter mornings and crashing doors

Her first night at home was traumatic - for her, she missed her mother dreadfully and cried through the night, for me because it was my first all nighter ever and I never imagined she wouldn't be overjoyed to be home with us. Even though we had decided it was important to teach her early on that she couldn't sleep on our beds at night, I dragged her basket into my room and kept her company that night.

Lyka was brought home just as winter was setting in for us in Tripura. Once she got over her initial homesickness and learned to trust us, to feed her and be nice to her, she started to explore the vast compound where our house was situated. We used to have a little drain running around the house that was meant to catch rain water. In her initial few days, Lyka's legs would never reach across and she would come to a screeching halt in the midst of an after meal run out of the house. She then learned the fine art of jumping and thereafter, there was no stopping her and her floppy ears that would bounce along happily.

My dad once brought home a chewable chocolate bone from one of his trips that Lyka promptly buried in our sandpit with glee, having accomplished something instinctive. It was different matter when her instincts never led her back to the buried bone, though she searched for it high and low, and looked completely puzzled at how it seemed to have just disappeared.

Winter mornings and exuberant puppies bursting with energy make for a deadly combination. Lyka had her own special way of waking me up. Once my parents were up and had let her out for her morning chores, she'd run back into the house and make a beeline to my room. We soon realized that it was prudent for my parents to give me a warning yell so that I could hang on to my blanket tight and prepare myself for the onslaught of affection ahead. I'd wait for the door to crash open and the bundle of golden fur to leap directly onto my bed. Within minutes my face would be covered with puppy drool and Lyka's ever shedding fur. I'd be reduced to incoherent giggles and she would be satisfied at having woken up her sister in a way that a true canine sibling should be. With a good morning's work behind, Lyka would then lope off my bed and saunter off in the direction of the kitchen, with her face saying "She's up! Now, where's my food?"

We did this for the two winters we were in Agartala.

Chapter 1

September 1994. That's where this story begins. An 11 year old curly haired only child (me, in case you hadn't already figured that out) had been standing on one foot about getting a puppy and had finally succeeded in convincing her parents that it may be an idea worth considering (I was told later it wasn't my brilliant persuasive skills that tipped the balance in my favor but my paralyzing fear of dogs, courtesy a dog bite at the age of 8). And off we went in a rickety old office ambassador to look at 'Bartala' Labrador pups. I remember being told that this was a pure window shopping exercise and that if we did pick out a puppy, it would have to wait till after my term exams were over for it to be brought home. Fate of course decided dogs were not to be brought into a family this way.

Upon arriving at the 'kennel' (being a large house with dogs and pups of all ages and sizes all over the place), we were asked to sit down and wait till the eligible pups were brought out for inspection. Ideally a puppy has to be 45 days old before it can really even be put up for adoption, because it hasn't yet been weaned from its mother. Anyone who's ever met a lab knows that asking it to curb its enthusiasm for strangers is like hoping for snow in Madras. The mother dog in question shot out into the sitting area and greeted with affection that only dogs are capable of. I have to admit I was a little take aback. Mothers are supposed to be dignified things, not wriggly dogs who slobber all over you. Then eligible pup number one shot into the room - Sunny, he was named. A yellow lab with a mad glint in his eye and cowlicks over his floppy ears, reminiscent of Dennis (of the Menace fame). I didn't immediately warm up to him - he had scratched me with his sharp puppy claws and I didn't imagine any dog of mine would be so boisterous (I was fairly painfully shy thing when I was young).

Then out came puppy two - Tina (creativity with names was obviously not the kennel's strong point). This little girl sauntered in quietly, taking her time to sniff everyone and categorizing them as friend or foe, wagging her tail a little uncertainly. After all who wants loads of strangers staring at you, determining whether you're fit to be in their family? And then she looked up at my mother and me. With her big melty brown eyes, it was love at first sight for us. My father still wasn't sure about bringing her home right away because I was 11 after all and getting me to study for exams after this momentous occasion would require some serious will power. But my mother and I prevailed!

We loaded 'Tina' into the car and I kept a tight grip on her. She was trembling from the strange noises and the strange sensation of being moved without actually walking on all fours. Once we got home, we had decided that first order of business was changing her name to something more respectable. I had gotten off an 'Aladdin' phase and wanted to name her Jasmine (ugh!). Thankfully we tossed around some more.

Enter Lyka.