We recently lost our droopy eared, blazed out eyes, cow colored, moon baying, so so stubborn, clothes tearing, perpetual bed sneaking, blanket stealing, and unconditionally loved by all...Prudence. She was the last of our St. Mark’s road clan of canines, she lived with us in our bougainvillea bubble until she got pregnant on her first heat in the most imprudent manner and was banished to our farm where she began her reign as the queen of Infinite Souls. Prudence had like five different lives. She spent her youth hunting wild boar with Vineeth Vincent, it was during this time that she started to go for evening strolls by herself, hopping over a few hills and making her way to the neighboring school. She would catch rats and rock agamas, climb the hill and stare at Savandurga, and ever so often when she needed a break from the hardcore farm life she enjoyed coming to the city, wearing a pink collar and taking a dump in between the two trees outside the back gate of our apartment building. She loved to cuddle, to play, to go on walks, she loved all people, all dogs, all cats, all cows, all horses, and according to my father she loved to annoyingly rest her nipples on one’s toes.

It’s been a hellish few years because when I left to college it seemed that all our animals started to age exponentially. Inevitably, every time I came home for the summer, I had to spend most of it at a veterinary clinic watching a drip slowly drop away. Death became like this sly guy who waited outside our doorstep to catch us just when we were catching our breath. But never mind any of that… for solely selfish purposes I am going to try and write about life instead, and about how my life and my world have been covered in golden fairy dust by all the animals who have ever been a part of it.

It’s not the loyalty thing, or even the man’s best friend thing, it’s when you look into the eyes of an animal it’s all there, from start to finish; life, death, love, loss, love, love. But let’s say we even forget about the unconditional love thing, because we all know that and maybe we all need to learn that…but there’s something else too, some deeper understanding of why we’re all here and where we’re all headed and what we should hold important in the time in between.

I grew up with a little brown sausage dog who was given to us by our neighbor with the condition that we name her Tara because they were going to keep her brother and name him Tyson (I believe they said it was because Mike Tyson's pet Tiger was named Tara). She had kajal eyes, would pitter patter around the house as if she had bells for feet and was our princess. She didn’t budge from her place on the divan when on my third birthday a man showed up at our front gate with a labrador puppy in a green bow, this was Laddu, my round and golden ball, our saint. It was just the five of us for the longest time, my mother, my father, the dogs and I. Our family pictures are mad ones of us in chaddis and silver tinsel, huddled together on that same divan. These were the days that my parents would throw all of us into the back of our jeep and take us to visit Devadasi’s in Dharwad. It was on one of these trips, while my parents were collecting stories from an old Devadasi with long jaddes and varicose veins that they had to hire a babysitter for the two dogs. However, she turned out to be quite useless because they returned to their Dharwad home one night to find a frenzied lab puppy and a lost Tara! Somehow, I had been deposited at my grandparent’s house prior to this trip or else all hell would have really broken loose-- screaming, angry child plus lost sausage dog. All that day was spent searching for Tara, hoping for Laddu’s instantaneous transformation into a sniffer dog and praying for any leads from anyone, anywhere...until, what I believe happened in the early hours of the evening, when a young man on a cycle indicated that a dog/rat was being kept in a goat shed close by. Thankfully it was there that they found our Tara, tied up in a haystack. My mother was so grateful that we had our princess back and imparted a generous sum of money to the young boy who had found her. He in turn was so grateful for this and felt that Lakshmi had entered his life and tracked down my parents the next day to request a photograph of Tara so that his home would always remain blessed in this way. This was our Tara, who would wake me up with butterfly kisses on my nose, and who was Lakshmi, Saraswati, Parvathi, Durga, Kali, all of them, living in a little sausage dog with kajal eyes.

Then there was Laddu, she was my baby, the love of my life. A magic creature who blessed this earth with her just deciding to be here for a while. There must be another word for the compassion that dogs have because the few words that I know cannot do it any justice, but it has nothing to do with words anyway. When Laddu was about seven years old we started to hear some weird baby mouse like noises coming from the room that was a recording studio at that time and was right below the attic. For two days, Laddu sniffed around in there furiously and we obliged because this was the same dog who once had a mouse sneak into her dinner bowl and sat there staring at it curiously as it started to help itself. Finally, on day two, she emerged from said room with a grey, slimy, glob in her mouth that she placed gently on the floor when we all shrieked in fear. Oh god, we thought, now we’re going to have to bury a whole nest of bandicoot babies. Fortunately, it was only a starving, faeces-covered cat baby. This was Kiara, who was returned to us by the veterinary hospital with the warning that she was not going to make it very long without her mother’s milk. For a few days she lived inside a huge biriyani bowl stuffed with an old mosquito curtain, and as she started to look stronger it was time to introduce her to the dogs. At the time there were three, Laddu and the heirs of our princess who had earlier gone slowly in her sleep, curled into a ball, she went one Sunday morning. Her heirs were Rose, the rebel child, nothing like her mother and Surprise, the sweet, balding boy, who lost whatever remained of his mojo the day we got him neutered. He would try and pull Houdini like escape acts climbing over our front gate, and would become suddenly very social when I put him in a doggy coat. It was only right that we introduced Kiara to Laddu first, the dog that pulled her out from behind a bookshelf, where we could only assume that she had somehow fallen after a cat littered in the attic. They were of course meant to be, Laddu instantly took charge of this rag of a kitten and the two of them started to cuddle up together in the kitchen.

Then, one morning when we all walked in, ready for our fried eggs, we saw our ‘on the verge of death’ kitten suckling from our seven year old and at the time puppy-less labrador. We thought for sure that it was all just high hopes and old habits but Laddu was in fact lactating! That’s how we ended up with Kiara, our part cat, part dog, part softness, part sweetness kitten. It’s only now that I’m in these Animal Behavior classes and have everything scientifically explained to me with an emphasis on the role that estrogen plays in lactation and fostering, etc, etc. It’s also now that I fully understand the extent to which we anthropomorphize animals and how ridiculous this is. Ridiculous because we value our human ideals so highly and inherently want to attribute all beautiful things to a similar human thing, when actually they are far beyond our limited idea of beauty just by themselves. But anyway. Then there was Kiara…what can I even say about her, you’d have to share your life with a cat to truly understand what life is. They say that all those times cats go wandering and we don’t know where they are, they are actually off in another dimension, doing fifth dimensional stuff... and I mean, of course, how else can you explain cats. When she mewed it sounded like ‘mama’, when she gave birth she caught hold of my hand in her mouth and dragged me to my father’s studio where I helped her tear the sacks open for her four beautiful kittens, when she got older and got sick, we started to give her subcutaneous drips at home, she couldn’t walk but would get hysterical if we tried to leave the room, when she was dying I had her on my lap and my father played his guitar for her.

When Surprise went, I had him on my lap for two days in this same way, hoping that somehow, by my loving him, it would make up for my living longer, having to let him go, that sort of thing, the stupid human sort of thing. Bamboo, is drawn out on my skin, Laddu’s son, who would wake up every morning and run outside before his mother, only so that he could turn around and kiss her a thousand times the minute she stepped into the garden, he was also head over heels in love with Kiara, and was the father of Prudence’s imprudent litter. There was Mushroom, who was Laddu incarnate, she brought the sweetness in on a rainy afternoon. She was our Livy puppy, Mimi puppy, who was totally not a farm dog and who we should have had held close every second of every day because what else could be the point of loving something. Then, my darling Maggie, Maggie Gowramma, who on Ganesh Chaturthi was given an oil bath by Sankaramma who named her Gowri and who also doused her in kumkum and haldi on a regular basis. Maggie was an angry little blob when we first brought her home from Lingarajpuram, but in two days she was my lap puppy and continued to squeeze her way into that small space even when she grew to almost double my size and even when she got sick with a terrible disease that she protected us from with all that she had. And then of course, there was Prudence..

These, in my 22 years, were our St. Mark’s Road clan... plus of course the many squirrels, kites, pigeons, crows and mice that somehow sniffed us out when they were dying, sick or injured. And here I am writing about death despite my attempts not to, but it’s really just to say how much these animals have shaped everything that I know, in both their lives as well as in their deaths and how I owe all that I am to all of them…and it was exactly this way with Prudence.

In the few days before her death, Prudence pulled some weird cosmic shit and brought together all these people who had known and loved her at different times in her life. We ended up at the farm at sunset, a whole bunch of us who had stepped out of each other’s lives for a little while, all huddled around this sick dog who had started to do rounds, going one by one to everyone to say goodbye and to also say.. like, listen let’s just take shit lightly and love each other and have a good time of it all. She went to everyone; to Vineeth who raised her into the wild boar hunting wild child that she was, to Sandhya who loved her so much and who she adored right back, to Lekha who so well documented Prudence’s summer romance with a sarong stealing monkey, to my parents, to Sankaramma and Thirpal, and finally to the man who was going to give her the injection.. the big one. She moved from there to a jasmine bush and then she collapsed on the steps leading up to the house, looking out onto the hill, looking out onto the sunset. The four other dogs, the brats left behind by Maggie, who normally smother everyone and everything, they came around to her slowly, gently kissing her face, all three horses walked by, our Buffalo- Lakshmi, who we never hear make that weird buffalo noise except for when she’s getting in the pond, she stood above her grave and grunted loudly for hours…Yama’s vehicle, you know. And so she went like that...Queen of the farm.

Love isn’t just a human attribute, it’s a universal power and we’re all born knowing what it’s about. The only difference, I think, with us and animals, is that we get a little lost and confused along the way. And yes, of course, altruism and survival of the fittest, and all that other ‘animal behaviour’ stuff fits together perfectly in a little science-y explanation of it all, but outside of even that, in terms of the capacity to love and the capacity to remain true to some higher force of compassion, of being.. in terms of that..then, screw the science.