The final goodbye

I finished work at 4 a.m. that Friday night and stepped out of the bedroom to stretch a bit. Our Dachshund, Tommy, had been unwell for the past few days and was under medical care.
He was somewhat sluggish and his movement restricted.
I was therefore surprised to see him half-way up the stairs, looking at me with his soulful, though deeply slumberous eyes.I smiled at him and said, “What are you doing here, Tom? Go to sleep; it’s late you know.”
He just kept looking up at me as if even a wag of the tail was too much of an effort. I switched off the lights and went to bed. At 6 a.m., Tommy was no more. His body was found just outside the kitchen, as if asleep on the floor. Tommy had been diagnosed with cancer a couple of weeks earlier but couldn’t be operated upon as he developed high fever the day he was to go under the scalpel. He had finished his dose of injections at the hospital that morning and the next day we were to take him for another check-up to set another date for his operation. He had obviously decided otherwise...
Tommy was eight years old and the children absolutely doted on him. Often I would joke they probably licked him more than he licked them! They were of course devastated at the news, but what all of us were totally unprepared for was my intense reaction. I have never considered myself a dog lover. Well, at least not the kind who shares her bed, sofa or lap with the dog. And certainly not the kind who won’t call a dog “a dog”! I looked after Tom and cared for him but only to the extent that he lived with us like family and so was my responsibility.
Over the years, Tommy had realised my need to maintain a healthy distance and kept his side of the bargain. He would wait patiently at a distance while I served his food. If I held my hand out to him, he would walk up and bend his head to be patted; if I held out a biscuit, he would sniff it delicately without touching unless I gave permission. When I returned home after a while, he would bark, wag his tail, come up to me and literally just kiss my foot before prancing away.
With the children it was a different story. They just had to snap their fingers and he would jump onto their knees and lick their faces silly. When meeting them after a gap in time, he would go crazy, barking his and our heads off, and dancing around in circles! Tommy knew his boundaries well – and he knew mine too! In my room, a single word “Out” would have him slink away without question. If I tried the same when he was in the children’s room, to the backdrop of their collective protests, he would just stare back defiantly at me and then proceed to completely ignore me!
To be fair, Tommy and my relationship started on a bad note. Perhaps childishly, I was somewhat resentful of his presence even before I met him. He had already been christened by the children in my absence, and had free reign of the house.
I was posted in Hyderabad at the time and felt lonely being away from my family in Delhi. Every evening I would have long conversations with my husband and children, Nikhil and Saurabh, then 11 and 8 respectively. One day they called with much excitement to announce they had acquired a puppy with the help of their naani.
“Now, why did you get a doggy?” I asked my elder son, who knew I was against keeping a pet for lack of open space and fear of the extra work it would entail.
Pat came the reply, “Because you went away and we needed someone soft and warm to cuddle!” This was followed by loud laughter at the other end of the telephone. When you are far away from loved ones, deep-seated fears and insecurities surface. To my mind, at that time, the dog was all set to satisfy the one need that I fulfilled for the kids. I knew this was ridiculous and yet, being far away and alone, the fear wouldn’t go away. And so when I first met him, for me, he was the strange new addition to our family. In his view, perhaps, I was the intruder.
At our first meeting, Tommy and I sized each other up, with a very eager twosome jumping around in excitement trying to show off their new pet’s various antics to me. The focus had shifted – from their mother’s visit home after twenty days, to their little live toy. Obviously, I did not like that. Nor did I take to Tommy instantly. At best, I tolerated him.
Perhaps the dog sensed my mixed emotions and resentment, for he responded with equal indifference and snootiness. And so it went on. The children grew steadily more attached to the Dachshund, while he and I gave each other a wide berth. Despite the children’s craze for the dog and their insistence that he was my third son, I just couldn’t whip up enough enthusiasm. Tommy probably knew I came home for short intervals and so avoided getting too much in my way.
All that changed when I was posted back to Delhi. Tommy and I instantly realised that we could not share the same space together. I would get irritated with him tripping me up each time I moved and he would get irritated when I restricted his movement around the house. I could not tolerate the fact that he had absolutely refused to be toilet trained. His resentment towards me came in the form of his poop which he religiously delivered on the top of my bed each time I was out of the house. Even as I stuttered with rage, getting rid of sheet after sheet, it constantly amazed me that this little creature, barely half a foot above the ground, actually made the effort to jump atop my bed to do his dirty business!
I tried scolding him using a rolled newspaper. All good books on dog training suggest that method. But with my two boys hovering protectively around him, Tommy would actually snarl back at me, letting bare his true feelings! Some self-proclaimed dog analysts informed me that pooing on my bed was the dog’s way of showing his resentment towards me. But considering that I was the one who fed him, and often had to clean up after him, I considered his behaviour rather rude and ungrateful on his doggy self. I decided to start shutting my bedroom door to keeping him strictly out.
However, that was the beginning and both of us were trying to figure each other out. Over the years we learnt to adjust to each other and even be affectionate, in our own manner, while maintaining a dignified distance. The one thing that bothered me and the neighbours was his very loud bark – and he could go on and on, never seeming to tire. At times when he was in the backyard, it would be extremely amusing to watch passers-by almost jump out of their skin when he barked all of a sudden, and then look extremely sheepish when they saw his very diminutive size!
Tommy was a fighter and as is peculiar to the breed, extremely resistant to discipline. He did what he did and you couldn’t do a thing about it! If he didn’t like being on a leash, he would bite it into two. If he didn’t like a particular rug or quilt, you would find it in tatters the next day. There was the time he kept getting rid of his collars; I still have no idea how he took them off. Until the time he became extremely possessive about his collar and then you just couldn’t get it off him! My children never gave me as many problems disciplining them as Tommy did.
As time passed, Tommy matured. There was deference, a grudging respect and even affection towards me. It was around this time that he started his foot-kissing habit. A quick sprint towards me and I would feel his tongue touch my foot in a quick dart before he ran away again. I recognised this as a sign of affection and that we had now adjusted to each other, much like an old marriage!
By this time he had toilet trained himself (I cannot say we ever succeeded!) and had acquired the habits of what according to me is the perfect dog. He just sat quietly and observed. Very alert to alien sounds, he would bark a lot and yet the moment I said, “Quiet, Tommy!” he would immediately sober down, no matter how grave the provocation. He would however refuse to be left out of the house into the yard. Whenever I wished to do that, he would dash past me and wriggle his way inside before the door closed. He had become quite clever at this and soon I kind of gave up.
Tommy was clearly the boys’ dog. I was also very fond of him by now. All references to family, birthdays, cards, and celebrations included him. And yet I didn’t have a clue about how much a part of us he was till that morning when he passed away. I knew my focus needed to be on consoling the kids, but I was too overcome with grief. As is typical after a death, my mind was swamped with questions, regrets and what-ifs.
Had Tommy come to bid us goodbye that night up on the stairs, I wondered? Had he been trying to struggle up the stairs to go visit the boys to bid them goodbye, but couldn’t make it beyond halfway? Why hadn’t I understood? The look in his eyes haunted me and I worried about him being alone somewhere, scared.
Out of the blue my friend, astrologer and tarot card reader, Veenu Sandal called me the day Tommy died. She spoke to me for a long time and understood my feelings. She told me to try reach out my love and feelings to Tommy just as if he were still alive.
A week passed, and on Friday night, as I sat working late (Fridays being my production day), I had a deep sense of Tommy’s presence in the room. A wave of grief washed over me as I looked at his photograph that I had put as my desktop wallpaper. I asked for his forgiveness if I had ever done anything to hurt him or if I had loved him any less than I should have.
It was then that I had a supernatural experience, which, surprisingly, left me with a feeling of peace and acceptance. As I looked at his photograph with tears in my eyes, a strange light seemed to glisten from both his eyes in two straight lines towards mine. The light increased in intensity and didn’t go away even when I blinked my eyes. I squeezed my eyes shut thinking the tears were playing a trick. When I opened them, the bright streams of light remained. I was a bit shaken now. Suddenly, my computer started acting up. Several windows started opening and shutting on their own. The computer seemed to have taken on a life of its own and refused to follow any of my commands as I wrestled to gain control. This would have lasted about a minute before, suddenly, everything settled back to normal. The computer was behaving once again and the points of light from Tommy’s eyes had disappeared.
I was left with a feeling of peace and calm. I felt like I had shared a dialogue with Tommy and knew that he was safe and happy. This was around the same time I had encountered him on the stairs a week earlier.
Even today, when I walk in through the main door, I sometimes feel him brush past in an attempt to outsmart me in his effort to enter the house before I shut the door on him! I do feel he is still around us, the only family he knew and loved, and who loved him back.
(Originally featured in Dogs and Us: Collected Dog Stories, Edited by Dhiraj Nayyar, Published by Natraj. Rs. 795)