Inimitable Sweety Pie

Telling people that dogs are the most sublime, noblest and faithful creatures is like selling ice to an Eskimo, since almost everyone is already aware of the rich epithets that dogs are blessed with.

 The favourable qualities of dogs prompted me to get extremely attached to a beautiful grown up dog. Though everyone called him ‘Tigger’ (pronounced like ‘Tiger’ due to his brown-with-black-striped appearance), I called him ‘Sweety Pie’. When those who were not fond of dogs called him a “pariah dog”, I would get livid. They should be judged by the resolute character and never the breed.

My neighbour, Yasmine Claire, and I loved Sweety Pie endlessly, for both of us are extreme animal lovers. Sweety Pie was affectionate and lovable. He attracted several admirers, especially the other apartment watchmen, who shared their bread crumbs and cups of unbearably sweet tea with him.

However, he remained unfazed at all the adulation, and genuinely loved being in the company of young impressionable children. He somehow discerned by his gut feeling that these children were untouched by the vagaries of life and hence were innocent and could be trusted. Indeed, so resolute was this bond that these children flocked around Sweety Pie, like butterflies around a flower.

Sweety Pie was really, by any yardstick, old for a dog when he breathed his last. He was about 15 years old, whereas most dogs don’t make it past their 13th year. After I saw him for the last time at Yasmine’s apartment, I knew that he was living on borrowed time, for the signs of geriatric old age and its incumbent effects had caught up with him. He was no longer mobile or agile. His eyesight and hearing had taken a beating, and he shuffled around bumping into furniture because he just couldn’t see the furniture.

The dog loves you when you are young, so you got to love it when it is old. It’s like the amount of attention and sacrifices one’s parents give their children, the parents giving their todays for their offspring’s tomorrows. Yet, what happens in the parents’ twilight years? The same children calculate and connive to dump their old, enfeebled, and “useless” parents in decrepit old age homes. Not very symbiotic and mutual!

Sweety Pie, in the course of these 10 years, has given me only love - undiluted, pure, raw and unconditional. It is a love which knew no barriers or boundaries, and which did not look for criteria, but was given plentifully and implicitly. Since Sweety Pie is now gone, I pray that the message of his life and his legacy of being the sweetest dog ever will live on forever. The best tribute I can pay to him is that because of him I have become a (hopefully) more humane human being, because they say that when one is really sweet, that sweetness rubs off on all around. Sweety Pie, may your soul rest in peace.