Brindle and Polo

This is my four month-old Labrador Retriever whom I adopted recently. He is by far, the naughtiest and the craziest dog I've ever had.

Polo, after having dug into the sack of flour in the kitchen. The white powder on the nose says it all.

He has a shoe fetish that I hope is just a temporary teething phase, for I've already lost four pairs of shoes to that. But the queerer part is that he never chews the same shoe he's attacked once and he always assaults in solitude. How many more to go, Polo? I've been trying really hard to train you, but you've been very stubborn about this.

I finally gave up the fight yesterday evening, when the fifth attack was made on my clothes. I discovered my kurta lying torn on the floor when I returned from college and I didn't know what to do with him, this time! 

Later that night, my friend Dodo, sent me a blog post written by my favorite columnist to cheer me up. It was about Jug Suraiya's dog, Brindle, who recently passed away, after having lived 13 good years of his life with Jug's family. Despite it being a painful subject, Jug manages to sound light-hearted, even as emotions flow through the post. And as wittily as it is written, it taught me a couple of things. 

It is not Polo who needs to be trained, but I, who carelessly leaves things lying around in my room for him to chew. The poor soul only chews it because he misses me when I am not there, for the odor lingers.

The same way I'll miss him when he won't be there anymore, and I won't even have the canines to chew his collar. But Brindle has taught me another way to cope with it. I wouldn't think of him as having gone somewhere far far away from me, I would consider him free, free to be in everything around me.

Or as the late (or free) Brindle puts it,

"I am the laughter of children. I am the noise of traffic, the dust of the streets, the sound of water. I am the greenness of leaves and the blue of the sky. I am every where and every thing. People have a big word for it; they call it the Universe. We dogs, we Indian street dogs, have a simpler word for it. We call it Freedom."

My condolences to Jug and my love to Polo.