Tito was about four years old when the brown female dog, younger to Tito arrived at our place. Her left ear had been cut at the corner, indicating that she had been vaccinated and neutered. Tito’s first instinct was to be all over her as he greeted her enthusiastically. Our attempts to chase her away proved futile. She would go away for a while and then return to the garden. We became tired of her perseverance and decided to let her stay. She inhabited the front veranda corner, directly outside the living room’s ground level window. We thought she could offer Tito companionship of his own kind. We started feeding her twice a day, in a bowl set aside for her. We also provided her with a mat to sleep on. She was not permitted to enter the house. Alka named her ‘Kutty,’ which means ‘small’ in Tamil as she was much smaller than Tito. She soon started responding to her name. Kutty had an enigmatic daily routine. She would disappear during the second half of every morning, and sometimes in the late afternoon hours, and reappear without fail at the feeding time for lunch and dinner. We never found out where she went. Perhaps she had a more devoted lover than Tito!
If Kutty was around when we sat on the lawn, she would greet Tito and then sit or lie down a few feet away from him. Tito’s early fascination with Kutty waned as he grew older. It was clear, though, that he enjoyed having her around whenever he spent time with us in the garden. When we sat outside, we got used to having two dogs by our side. Tito preferred to sit or lie down in the shaded area of the lawn regardless of the season perhaps due to his thick black fur that absorbed sunlight and warmed up his body. Kutty wasn’t picky. She would sit a little further away from him and keep an eye on him.
Often, during the time we spent in the garden, Tito would engage in his favorite pastime of crushing plastic water bottles or stripping layers of husk from green coconut shells. Tito learned to grasp the coconut shell with his front paws and peel the husk out layer by layer. By the end of our stay outside, the plastic bottles would be two-ply plastic sheets perforated in multiple places, and the coconut shells would be a pile of fuzzy brown strands. These hobbies of Tito were not picked up by Kutty. She merely looked at him, appearing to be perplexed by Tito’s ‘stupid’ fascination for plastic bottles and coconut shells.
Sitting in the garden with Tito and Kutty post-lunch in the quiet stillness of winter afternoons on holidays, often put us is a deep trance that yogis may find difficult to achieve through meditation!
