Note: This is a long, dark, graphic post. User discretion is recommended.
Julie was my pet dog through my late adolescence and early adulthood. One of the plausible reasons why I haven’t written about her is that I haven’t gotten over the trauma of the evening that I had to part with her.
I’d, in fact, realized that I had not written much about Julie, after my search for the same returned just two superficial references (Monday Blues [2004] and Animal Instinct [2011]). I did the search for a special reason, which I’ll write about in my next post. In fact, it was at the end of writing that post that I decided that I needed to write about her before writing about anything else.
I had adopted Julie from an animal shelter ran by a lady, who was featured in the Young World supplement that came along with The Hindu on Saturdays. Along with Julie, I had adopted her name, which was originally assigned by the lady. I chose Julie over the other available options for adoption because she was unlike any other puppy/dog I had had a chance to interact with.
While I wrote the previous paragraph, I cringed at my choice of words that imply my omnipotency in the matter, almost ignoring Julie’s role in it. These choices do paint me in a cruel, insensitive, materialistic light, which is fairly close to how I’d expect myself to come across by the time you reached the end of this post. I reckon I must have been like that when I was younger, at least more than I’d like to admit that I’m now.
I remember being told that Julie was about ten weeks old after I had properly looked at her for the first time. I was seventeen at that time, having just finished my first year at Medical College. I was also let known that she did not have a known direct lineage that she was aware of, which plainly meant that Julie had been rescued from the streets.
She was a short-haired, mixed breed dog (a “mongrel” or a “mutt” for the ease of comprehension). She had a predominantly brown coat whose shade I can only describe as somewhere in between syrup and cinnamon brown. Fair warning:the overexposed, poorly framed photograph I share below—the only one of hers that I was able to find—would suggest otherwise.
Her paws and the tail tips were white, complemented by an almost perfectly symmetrical white jacket with collars seemingly sown into her pelt, with the white hairs trailing off while making their way to her underbelly. Even as a puppy, she had an unusual skeletal structure, which over the years would fill up to make her appear shorter than stouter, and heavier than unhealthy. I guess my lack of awareness of what constituted a healthy diet for dogs could have also played a role in these morphological transformations.
Her eyes were a blend of caramel and chocolate brown, conveying a wonderful blend of naughtiness and maturity. She had a dirty pink nose that was so soft that I often had the urge to bite it off. Thankfully, I did not need to resort to such extremes, and had instead ended up kissing the nose and booping her at every chance I got.
Her breath was fresh enough for making a strong case to burn dictionaries for the fallacious definition of dog breath, and the scent of her paws and toe beans could be mistaken for the fragrances of fermented rice cakes. She is the reason I bury my nose in the paws of all my pets!
But the real reason why I went for—or after—her was because she got along well with cats, which was an important criterion because my household had around half a dozen cats of varying ages at any point in time. In fact, I’d gone to that particular shelter because of it being a safe house for both cats and dogs.
Before adopting Julie, I had little experience in being with dogs, especially at the collegial level that I find myself with them these days. She taught me things that no man or woman could ever teach, and I think she groomed and mentored me as much I did her.
This is not to imply that ours was a perfect relationship, with me having a longer, shallower learning curve after having being with felines as companions for much longer. I must have felt frustrated and alienated with her like how most people that you would come upon would feel about cats.
I remember the sense of liberation when she would take the lead, without quite dragging me along, in our walks around the neighborhood, which would extend beyond our little housing colony as she grew into an adult. I guess a more appropriate term for describing my neighborhood would be a tiny township and not a housing colony.
I would eventually take her to grocery shopping and on walks to my cousins’ place a kilometer and half away, which is a significant distance between two locations in Thiruvananthapuram. As a couple, we would attract strange looks and conversations on the way as well as at our destinations.
At that time in Kerala, dogs were mostly relegated to an ancillary security role, spending most of their daytimes chained or locked in dog cages, hardly getting any human playtime. They would be let free at night, during when they would run around the houses within the confines of the compound walls and gates barking at street dogs, cats, and passersby.
I was surprised at how fast my feline pack warming up to Julie—the lack of significant size differential must have helped. At the time of her arrival, Julie was definitely smaller than the adult mom cat and was only slightly bigger than the youngest kittens/cats at the time of her arrival.
Yet, it seemed too soon for my cats to assume that a strange puppy/dog would be safe enough to let their guards down, considering how the dogs in my neighborhood never stopped chased them around. I guess Julie was more intuitive than I gave her credit for at first, which also manifested in her knowing what (literal) lines to cross and not, at home.
I must remind everyone that I lived in a Tamil Brahmin household in Kerala. In houses like mine, different mammals and genders were assigned different lines that weren’t to be crossed. They were also allowed different privileges, whose mere allowances needed to be viewed upon as offerings of kindness and modernity that had somehow infiltrated the dungeons of regressive thinking. This was one of the many reasons why I would eventually alienate myself from my family—the immediate one and the extended one alike.
Julie would end up donning the de facto maternal role among the band comprising my cats, myself, and her. Julie was a better ratter (I should really say “mice-r”) than my cats would ever be. I remember many a time when I could sense the disappointment in her eyes on the days when we would all be on a loft or on the terrace, playing the role of exterminators. She would watch her feline peers be sloppy in executing the members of a mischief fleeing for their lives, and would have to cover for them, almost too casually.
She would extend this to protecting the kittens from all sort of threats while I was away or when the mom cats (I would end up having two of them eventually) would be away fighting or fornicating. Most days, she would end up being the lone warrior fending off all the tomcats would arrive for the genetic cleansing of their rivals’ progeny. I could only be a facilitator for the true guardianship that Julie offered, by opening doors and gates when the need arose.
Julie, along with the cats, would give me company at early mornings and late nights, while I was studying, reading, or rehearsing, regardless of whether I was happy, sad, anxious, or hurting. She was not much of a sleeper in bed, probably because she felt like she should instead protect her dependents—which included me of course—who chose to (or needed to) sleep in the bed in various physical combinations and arrangements.
She eventually became the lone liaison between an estranged son and apathetic parents. Yet, her strength proved to be too little to prevent the widening of the chasm, resulting in my moving to Mumbai. This, in turn, resulted in the decision of her needing to be returned to the shelter. After a year of me being away, my parents had finally admitted to a combination of being frustrated with the need to, and their inability to, take care of Julie, demanding that I take care of the situation.
On the day of my separation with Julie, I vaguely remember what I had felt before I arranged for a rickshaw for the trip. I must have felt like a murderer with a motivation that could be presented as relatable in the hands of a masterful storyteller. Someone about to commit a heinous act that could be painted over with the kindness and morality they would show in their future toward others, allowing for at least a partial redemption.
In retrospect, I realize that this experience is one of several in my life that have consolidated the fact that losing someone alive is far more damaging than losing someone at their death.
Yet, on the day, I remember the rickshaw ride being unremarkable except of a mild feeling of betrayal toward Julie. The anger, frustration, and resentment toward my parents must have been overpowering the dread and pain of impending loss and separation.
I wonder if the expectation of the impending phrenic amputation had lent itself as an anesthetic. Maybe the evening traffic on the road to the airport helped a little. But I guess most of the credit ought to go to the scars from the past of the wounds in similar scenes of stowaway violence and trauma.
As an even younger child—and by that I mean the pre-Julie phase—I had many experiences of needing to either discard litters of kittens or be complicit/responsible for their death. The former because no one would want to assume the responsibility of taking care of them. The latter because I was solely responsible for taking care of the kittens and cats that I would dare to take care of, which meant that if they fell ill or were hurt, I would have to figure out ways to transport them to the veterinary hospital regardless of the urgency warranted.
As a child, I did not have the means or the knowledge to transport kittens safely. This meant that I’d have to endure multiple instance of kittens dying—in my arms or in ill-ventilated boxes/bags/baskets, in rickshaws or on my bicycle, in transit or after reaching the hospital.
I’d eventually find myself cocooned in a state of surreal shock in a pool of cold-blooded reality overlaid by the sights and sounds of loved ones grappling with death. These experiences left me with no one but myself to blame, for having allowed them to happen and having allowed myself to be in such situations.
Julie must have had at least a vague feeling of being discarded, but she did not act it out until I started walking away from her after handing her, in leash, over to someone at the shelter. I don’t even remember if I’d met the same lady who had handed over Julie over to me seven years ago. She must have thought highly of me then—a young medical student wanting to adopt a stray puppy who will get along with his cats. What a magnanimous, charitable gesture.
I must not have even looked up at whosever’s face that I was talking to, while casually and indifferently delivering my rehearsed reason to justify what I selfishly needed to do. To take care of myself, at the pretense of taking care of my parents, who I needed to get far away from, both physically and emotionally. As I walked I away, I did not have the courage to acknowledge Julie’s yelps and cries, which reeked of betrayal and hurt and sadness.
These audibles haunt me to this very day. I wish I had carried a pair of headphones that evening, so I could shield myself from the world. Or that I would have had the thrum of a waiting rickshaw engine to do the same. Or that I had asked the caretakers to take Julie inside the house and keep her distracted while I snuck out. Or that I would have had the courage to not commit this cowardly act.
But the fact is that I didn’t do any of these things, and did not even think of the possibility of other options I could have chosen. Instead, I stubbornly, selfishly, and meekly chose to discard Julie and walk away—the same Julie who trusted her existence with me and with whom I trusted mine with.
In the following months and years, in my visits to Thiruvananthapuram, I would mull over giving the shelter a visit. I never did do it for fear of the re-aggravation of trauma. Each time, I’d hope that Julie would somehow have forgotten the cats, me, and my parents. I’d hope that she would have gotten over the trauma of separation and would have found joy and happiness in the shelter or with someone else who would give her what she deserved. It was not me; it was never me.
Today, if Julie was alive, she would have been an unlikely twenty-five. It is eighteen years since I did what I thought I needed to, and I still bear with me the hope that, someday, I’ll be able to find forgiveness from her and from myself.
