The Puppy That Followed My Father to School Like Mary's Lamb!

This story dates back to the early sixties. My father was a serious person. He always went around with knitted brows and stern eyes, without any sense of humor. There seemed to be nothing on earth to soften his stony heart and steely mind. I never saw him contemplating a flower, a full moon, a rising sun, a fluttering butterfly, a frolicking calf, a kitten with kaleidoscopic eyes, or a liquid-eyed puppy. While we were wondering how to find a way to melt his heart, an incident—a God-sent incident, I should say—happened.

One fine morning, when we opened the door, we found a puppy (white with brown patches) curled up on the doormat. It was healthy and plump. Somebody had left it at our doorstep deliberately.

Those days, such things happened. People used to get rid of unwanted puppies and kittens that way. Every house back then had multiple children waiting to fall in love with the young ones of dogs and cats. Parents of yesteryear were liberal; they listened to their children's hearts. Children had a lot of elbow room to move around, and they were seldom scolded for bringing home orphaned kittens and puppies.

Coming back to the main story, I saw a softness in my father's eyes for the first time when he looked at this puppy, as it stood wagging its tail vigorously with its round, black grape-like eyes. It was a pleasant shock to us when he bent down and picked it up. We had expected him to kick it, but instead, he allowed it to lick his hand.

For the first time, I saw eye to eye with my father, and I thanked the puppy's eyes. The next day, my father sprang another surprise on us by giving a name—Munusami—to the puppy.

Why he chose such a conservative name, I am not able to comprehend to this day. He instructed us to feed it on time and keep it on a leash so that it wouldn't stray into the street and get hurt.

Munusami grew up fast. Somehow, he understood my father's role in his adoption into our family and started showing special affection towards him. The way he wagged his tail on seeing my father was different from the manner in which he greeted the rest of us.

"The bond between your father and Munusami has its roots in their previous birth," my mother observed when we discussed my father’s love for the puppy.

One day, my father bought Munusami a leather neck collar, without which he would run the risk of being caught by the corporation's dog catchers. Eventually, we stopped chaining him when he became big enough to walk the streets and face other street dogs boldly. He followed my father (who was a teacher) like the lamb that followed Mary in the famous nursery rhyme, Mary Had a Little Lamb, walking with him every day up to the street-corner shop where my father would buy him a piece of twice-baked bun called porai in Tamil, which the dog was very fond of.

We often thanked Munusami for changing, through his sheer gratitude, my father's attitude towards us. The problem with the heart is that when it starts to melt, it melts fast. We also got to bask in the care and affection my father showered on Munusami, the white-and-brown dog.

When Munusami died a natural death after years of association with our family, my father—who had not cried even when his own father and brother died—sobbed. Whenever I think of my father, I think of Munusami, too. It is not only the demise of human beings closely related to us that moves us to tears; the death of animals, birds, and even trees associated with us can make us cry.