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Shahji

NEEL KAMAL PURI

 

 

 

 

 

Shahji was treated with reverence wherever he went. It was inbuilt into his name with the appellation ‘ji’.

Shahji aa gaye, Shahji aa gaye!” was the chant that went up as soon as I drove up to the gate of my mother's house. A gaggle of children playing in the street would abandon their game of 'pithu' and come bounding to open the gate for Shahji.

And the little golden cocker spaniel who had sat decorously all through the drive in the front passenger seat, would already be dancing, his docked tail circling furiously like helicopter blades, as he anticipated the revelry that awaited him.

The children would then close the gate after the car, throw their ball into the garden and wait for the live theatre to begin. Excitedly, Shahji would run after the ball, retrieving being part of his DNA.

He would knowingly tease the ball, much to his audience's delight, before grabbing it and bringing it back to the gate. Finding the exact spot where the gate was a little elevated he would nose the ball from under, onto the steep incline of the drive. The gleeful children watching this charade, thrilled each time over years of repeating the same drill, would throw the ball back inside.

Then they would hurl hysterical instructions at the equally excited dog, telling him where the ball had landed.

“Under the car! Under the car!” they would collectively shout, all the while hopping up and down. “In the hedge! In the hedge!” And of course, Shahji understood because his vocabulary, we believed (in the tradition of all proud parents) was equal to anything anyone said, unless of course they were in the esoteric business of discussing Plato.

 But if you said to him, "Shahji, go and call Ruth," He did. He would stand stolidly in front of her, wagging his diminished tail and fixing her with his deep brown eyes, till she understood and complied.

I suspect he understood and commiserated when I expostulated, in politically incorrect terminology, about life being a b****. Of course, he knew well that the allusion was not to the pretty mongrel down the street he had been lasciviously eyeing for months.

English, however, was not his first language. It was Punjabi.

Much like the burra sahibs of the Raj, his English genes, visage and instincts remained; but his linguistic skills simply became more eclectic, but without the attendant confusion that such mutations normally engender.

He was equally at ease with polyglot commands like ‘leash lyaa’ and ‘cakie khaye ga?’ and all Punjabi ones like ‘picche ho’, ‘thhorra hor picche’. To the last, he would make a show of moving his posterior just a shade, without actually moving too far away from his ball.

But any show of violence in Shahji’s presence was met with outright hostility and a great deal of angry barking at the perpetrator. He was overly protective of puppies, revealing what his vet said was an over-developed mother’s instinct.

I use the past tense because Shahji passed away earlier this month, ushering in a pall of gloom not only at home but even as far away as Delhi, where Shahji, the human after whom he was named, lives.

And when we buried him, my mother recited the prayer of the ‘pehli paurri’. Ruth lit candles on his grave.

In any case, he was an English hunting dog who ‘spoke’ Punjabi, Hindi and English, ‘mothered’ puppies and his toys. And in this rigmarole of identities and gender, if anyone might suggest an element of conversion, one would have to agree with that too, since Shahji, in his lifetime of 13 years, had managed to convert many a terrified child from a fear of dogs to a great love for them.


[Courtesy: Tribune]
March 26, 2015

Conversation about this article

1: Harman Singh (California, USA), March 27, 2015, 5:08 PM.

Man's best friend, indeed. I only wish I went through life with as much 'sehaj' as my dog does.

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