vanished into the void

Vanished into the void -KAVEER

They have moved in my mom said, the most awaited neighbours. For a sane reason the neighbours were talk of the colony as they moved in to the newly built house which was just the very next house i saw the house when it was just sand n mud growing to a huge monster size castle and then been painted too and now iam seeing it get filled with humans too four of them to be precise a mom, a dad and 2 kinds, the couple were doctors and that named the place doctors house.

A week later my sister comes to me and tells me about the dog they owned and like always she showered praises and twinkles and red shining cherry on top in short every dog she sees gets to be the most beautiful dog ever, when people say every dog has its day they do mean something but this time it was a little more than a praise that how they found the dog or rather how the dog found them. One day a man visits his daughter whose a doctor and that evening he sees a dog limping and bleeding feels his share of pity on it and also does a little more than that he treats the dog and help it heal its wound, and the dog decides to stay back guarding their house, it was loved by everyone in the house and when the doctors moved to their new home it moved along. Hence i was hearing to this story. Just had to listen, sometimes sisters can get bossy if you didn’t know.

And then there came a day when i was walking back home from college and while i was passing by the doctors house there i saw this twinkling eyes giving me a lazy stare but the creature to which the eyes were attached wasn’t that pretty truly a filthy looking female dog muddy brown colour black nose and totally out of shape, the ears looked like folded pages of the book and tail which looked like it was badly glued to its back by someone who did not know much about how dogs look, in short it was like a experiment gone wrong.

Being a dog person i wouldn’t hate many ya dogs in the first sight but this one i did just because it looked bad. And like all other dogs this one was close to my sister and walked her back from the main road of our colony to the house every single time she walked down from college and then she would feed her with something nice sometimes she wouldn’t mind snatching my meal away to feed the dog they were good with each other already but i still hated it just for the way it looked only thing that would keep me interested was its twinkling eyes they had soo much to say. It’s always been like i heard a lot about their encounters with the dog and how good it was to them or rather how smartly it behaved. also there were enough people who thought why was this ugly looking dog which my sister called cute was in the doctors house aren’t doctors supposed to be hygienic less know to the people that they were but just that dog needed a makeover to go with the doctors image.

Somehow it knew whom it should bark on and whom it shouldn’t and strangely it picked me in the list of not to bark on thanks to my sister who bribed it enough to recognise me and may be it hoped he would feed something to me someday , it now started to spend enough time at my place too my mom got attached to it too, my mom was never a cat or dog person or at least she portrays herself so .but now she had someone who would stand outside the kitchen door for regular lunch and dinner and if my mom was late the dog would start its hungry howl alarm to which mom usually responded and also told others proudly about it. Mean while even i some had fallen to the magic being a dog person it was easy to ignore the looks and go for the character and the gratitude it showed the twinkling eyes and the expressive face of the dog just could not let me hate it anymore everyday when i was done with my dinner the bones and thorns in my plate would reach the dog for having a reputation to keep up as a person who eats anything given has a corner in me which said the dog is waiting outside it was more of a house dog and must confess the laziest ever seen unless it saw something bad coming .

The street kids had named it the doctor dog (a MBBS for free) and it also scared them away each time they came close to pull its tail or throw stones and mostly it would be my mom who would rescue the kids buy commanding the dog to stay quiet and it would faithfully obeyed and the commanding proved costly to my mom as once a lady in the passing buy shouted at my mom “can’t you tie up your dog why let your dog wander “, she was speechless just did not want to say it isn’t mine i guess.

Years passed by and people who regularly come to our house knew it well and now it just wasn’t my sister who it walked along it came along me too each time i walked back from college but i still hadn’t changed did not give anything all i did was eat myself and if it did make any pity full faces felt sad for it n would give a share of anything i was eating , there were even times that i spoke to the dog like it was a human while it spent all that time staring at me, once me and my sister even tried to get the dog out of its lazy grove so tired doing some dog tricks holding a biscuit about our waist height so that it could jump and grab it, instead it waited looking to the floor trusting gravity it mostly believed in why waste energy when gradually the food has to fall on the floor and we never won that battle we always ended up feeding it with the food we were holding , at the same time cursing it for being such an ass. But it choose to ignore it all and look back at us with a twinkle and my sister simply could not resist saying “how cuteeeeeee” while choose to be manly and said nothing even when i was under the spell.

You could find it around you wagging its strange looking tail during any function or get together it was always there made it feel that it was a important person in the gathering less dog like and more human like behaviour i always knew it behaved well just because it was lazy to do anything else usually the other dogs choose to jump off the compound wall but this gave a good stare at the wall n then decides to sneak under the front gate and many ya times got stuck in between but somehow managed to pull itself out with a big noise. As days passed it understood what we said it got up went outside the gate when it was told to do so and at times even before we tell it to start it would finish off eating .it was always there when we needed it or did not need it.

Time passed days rolled and the dog had been doing all the necessary deeds that made us love it even more sometimes even i said it was cute . Then there came a time when i had to go to Bangalore for few months for my academic reasons and i used to come home once in a month or so , once when i came down i reached home early in the morning and was happy about coming back home but missed something , there existed a void and i did not realise what was the reason and then after a day passed i had my lunch and had was about to throw the fish thorns to the dustbin it reminded me about the dog so i went out gave a glace but could not find it, thought must have had a heavy lunch already and snoring at the doctors house. I ask my sisters how come the dog isn’t here at this time.

Her eyes go a little moist when she says it’s no more alive it was killed for some sane reasons. It struck me real hard when she said that i was filled with tears too and it isn’t easy for me while iam writing this either iam not ashamed to say today that i miss that ugly dog. my sister continues, the dog had cancer and it wouldn’t move much like it used to and would also be seen less and recently it had started to rot and here on was told that each of its organ would rot one after the other and hence would lead to death and it was not avoidable, so the doctors decided to let the dog go and not prolong its sufferings. The people assigned for the job came to the door step the dog was sitting outside the door trying to bark at the strangers for the one last time while it did not know who they were.

The dog was given a strong dose of anaesthesia but the twinkle in its eye did not fade away, it did not close its eyes which was not a normal behaviour after a heavy dose it kept staring at the doctors and their kids while they were in tears looking at their loved one for the last time. it never blinked away a look seemed like it did not want to miss a thing, as it closed its eyes they carried the dog away where it would then be injected to release its soul, it was hard for me to hear all this i walked around my house where i could usually see the dog and missed its presence and wished it could have been alive i would have still called it a ugly looking dog while it would look back at me and make sure i change my words. The dog that lived its life and made a difference in ours, it was just more than” just any dog to us “, Subbi you will be remembered.