He welcomed guests and thieves he stole snacks from children he humped pillows, my short friends from school, tall men’s knees, and my mum he dove into snake pits he shamelessly watched people make love he cold-shouldered other dogs but flirted with their humans he pulled off a heist to steal dozens of jaangiri with Anu Boo and quietly ratted her out during our investigation by not licking his muzzle. It was not easy to love him with all the biting and zoomies and barking, and that was the point: he brought a new, effortless sort of love into my life.įor the next 12 years, Calvin was a ruffian. The book had a bunch of information about how big he would become, his innate love for water and retrieving, and how friendly he would be with children, but it failed to warn us about the piranha he would morph into in a few weeks. We started the journey of raising him by reading a pocket-sized encyclopedia of dog care. He was fifteen days old, he was the size of a tiny floor-tile, he had two tiny greed beads for eyes, and his hunger was bottomless. With no vision, no sense of direction, but with only his acute longing for his mother’s milk and another body’s warmth, he tumbled out of the shoebox and into our lives. It took a few hours to convince my father, but the gravity of the black hole couldn’t be resisted. This black hole snoozed like that was all he was born to do. The boy waited to hand the shoebox to us.
We had dreamt for days and months, but dreaming didn’t mean we were ready. In 2003, we had returned from a one-day trip to Pondicherry, and this boy who wanted to woo my sister stood at our door, holding a shoebox, with a black hole throbbing inside. That’s not an easy question to answer either.Ĭalvin’s story had no frills. Is it a good thing or a bad thing? No one can answer and confirm but the observer.
The image, the memory was there, like a Kodak-photograph, waiting to be held by a rational, balanced observer who would recall facts about the day when the picture was taken, who were there, what everybody ate, and what happened the day before and after that, and the observer didn’t have to struggle to swallow the lump in their throat or take a moment to hold their tears from streaking down their cheeks. The arrow of time had crossed so much distance from that day that thoughts about this great black dog didn’t sting anymore. The knots were unyielding, but all of a sudden, there was a day when I thought about him and the image of him lying on a cold, steel table didn’t cross my mind. Between that day and to an unrecognised day in the recent past, I replayed that scene in my head many times to intentionally or accidentally untangle my mental knots about euthanasia. He was on a cold, steel table, surrounded by people, whom he fully hated and partially loved, and the ones whom he loved with his entire being waited in the reception, while he crossed the ‘rainbow bridge’. Seven years ago, on this day, we let Calvin go. I’m an old physicist - I’m afraid of time.
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