Dogs and other pets

I have never been fond of dogs, stray or otherwise.

I am not really scared of them but a little wary and so, prefer to keep a safe distance . It is actually a family tradition. I grew up in a large family which neither had the space nor the money to afford the luxury of having a dog as a pet. This was true also of the middle class neighbourhood we grew up in. Love of dogs was reserved mostly for a bit wealthier people who lived in posher areas.

I know times have changed and dogs have entered middle class homes , as pets I mean. But in the fifties and early sixties (ah, of the last century !) middle class life was hard enough to sustain itself without the added distraction of looking after a pet dog. If at all, a bird or two, a parrot or a myna, was good enough to satisfy extra-familial love instincts. We had at our home a parrot on one occasion, kept in a cage in the verandah. Since we always forgot, Mother would feed it regularly. She belived that the parrot talked and responded to her queries. She would try to convince her children of this amazing feat of the parrot, but they were quite sceptical . We knew that some parrots could imitate human voices, but ours was surely not one of them. The sounds it made were only discernible to our mother, possibly because of her abundant motherly instincts, but not to us.

Much later, I stayed in a Bungalow in the northeast in one of my travels and came across a talking Myna - a Pahari (of the mountains) Myna -which greeted me in the morning with a distinct Hello. It could utter a few more words and even a sentence or two quite distinctly. I remembered our poor parrot which had flown away at the first opportunity when the cage door was left inadvertantly open and missed the opprtunity of a proper and and more rigorous training to improve its phonetic abilities.

Coming back to dogs, some people in the neighbourhood did display canine affections by offering surplus food to one or more of the many street dogs that roamed in our streets.These were days before the refrigerators were to make their appearances in city homes. The need to dispose of surplus food especially of fish bones could easily be combined with an urge to reach beyond the mere human species. It definitely helped some cats and dogs, but made the streets dirtier, but then who ever bothered about Calcutta streets ?

One of my younger brothers though was a bit of a genetic variation which is as it should be as Charles Darwin thought and pronounced . Otherwise, how would there be any progress in the process of evolution ? He was the one who would plant flower plants in pots and make them grow on our roof, would bring birds, love birds or otherwise, and look after them. He even started at one time to feed a street dog - a puppy at that time- which would hover near our house from then on. The puppy grew up soon enough to be a handsome young male with a shiny black coat. Even though most of us kept our usual distance, we could not but like it. But it contacted some disease which all street dogs are prone to and its coats disappeared revealing blisters on its skin. It died soon thereafter.

I don't know if this brother of mine experimented with puppy love again, but he has retained some of his habits despite many limitations.He continues to nurture flower plants and has an aquarium for goldfishes. In fact I maintained a small aquarium of my own with his help for some time. I had to abandon the project when I moved to smaller house after retirement. But I found having an aquarium and looking at the fishes gliding back and forth in the water in utmost serenity, effortlessly and without any sound, quite relaxing and to use a modern term, destressing. I might aquire a small one again.

When I was living in the tea areas of Assam and North Bengal, I did toy with the idea of having a dog as a pet to give my son some company. I had a spacious Bunglow and enough people to look after a dog but I never got around to having one despite persuasion from some of my Manager freinds.

Almost all tea garden Managers had a dog or two, mostly the big ones. Labrador,Alsatian,Dobberman, Golden Retriever and in one instance, a Pyrenees which was as big as a calf. Knowing my lack of any special fascination for dogs however brilliant their pedigree was, most Managers or their wives were polite enough to keep their dog or dogs in some other room when I visited them but some would not care. Invariably these dogs would snuggle close to me, a perfect stranger, with the idea perhaps of winning me over. A feat they never succeded in achieving. I was not going to be drawn so easily into their love nets ! I remember having almost skipped a heartbit when the Pyrenees came to me once, very unexpectedly and from behind. He sat by my side silently, possibly expecting a caress which he never got.

Well, it is not that I do not appreciate dogs . After all, your dog is the only one who recognises you instantly even when the whole world fails to do so and showers you with all the affection in the world on a hard and tiring day. After you got a firing from your boss,that is. Or your wife.