Confessions of an Epic Indian

And evenings. Nights. Mornings. Entire days, in fact. Eleven, and counting.

Training and caring for a 2 month old puppy takes some doing, I can tell you. Especially with my son Ayush nursing a dislocated shoulder and preparing to go in for surgery, my daughter Yashka currently sitting for her exams, my wife busy teaching at a montessori school. Which left mostly me, most of the day, almost all of last week, to care for Willow. And since she’s such an intelligent and responsive little thing, I try to make that time a combination of play, walking, a few puppy-level training exercises, timely and nutritious feeding, and of course, sleeping–a LOT of sleeping, which she loves to do, because she is, after all, just a 2 month old ‘baby’.

What amazes me and the rest of the family is how well she’s responding to training–she’s actually enjoying it! She now sits when told, stays when told (though not for long, which is okay), comes to heel when summoned, is making excellent progress with the toilet training, and has even started training us now. For instance, when it’s time to go downstairs for a toilet break, she goes to the shoe cupboard by the door, whines or barks once, then sits before the front door, facing it, looks at one of us, barks or whines again, and waits for us to get the message. She goes through a similar routine when she’s really really hungry too–which isn’t often, because we feed her on time without fail, except she does the routine in the kitchen, and her focus there is the gas stove and platform.

She’s so obedient and responsive that I actually dread the time when I’m going to have to put her on a leash. But it’s inevitable because although she only sniffs people, never bites or nips them, most people assume she’s going to do so, and some react really badly. Mostly overweight women who have a tendency to leap high in the air, probably much higher than if they were at an aerobics class, and squeal. Men tend to shuffle their feet frantically or threaten to cuff or kick, or sometimes, mime throwing a stone at poor little Willow.

Like the dog training expert Cesar Millan says, bringing up a dog correctly is really all about ‘training humans, and rehabilitating dogs’. Because ninety nine percent of the time, dogs (as puppies) come to us with good habits, and it’s we humans who treat them badly, or wrongly, or spoil them, and it’s we who really have to learn how to behave around them if we want to bring them up well.

I find the whole experience especially fascinating in light of my ongoing Mba, because, as you surely recall, the Mahabharata story begins and ends with a dog (different ones). And it’s a dog that is responsible for Yudhishtira’s entrance into swarga at the end.

So it’s well worth the effort and sleep-deprivation and cleaning up after, and now we’ve fallen into a comfortable routine wherein I manage Willow all morning while I manage to write as well (she’s taken to sleeping at my feet while I write, is doing so as I write these words now, in fact), then Yashka takes over after she comes home in the early afternoon, and evenings belong first to Ayush, then to the whole family, at which point Willow is so ecstatic at being with the whole family that she’s quite literally in dog swarga!