Puppy Love

Isn’t it wonderful to have a pretty young girl doting on you in middle age? What if it is a female pup with white mane and brownish long hairy ears, with a huge bellowy bark? I’ve found love again. The object of my affections is Saba, my landlady’s puppy. She came in May from Queensland by air, a small cute cross-breed of Golden retriever and poodle. She was tiny when she came but she has grown bigger and her white mane has started covering her eyes now. She spends her time out in the grass gnarling at passersby, twisting her head vigorously chewing something or running amok in the garden. In the mornings she would wait at the kitchen door for the Missus to give her breadcrumbs to eat. She would sun herself in the grass, sniff the air and drive away the parrots and Cockatoos that seek grains in the garden. She is an endless source of pranks and amusement. Let her in the house and she will make way with a pair of slippers or socks. But there is some bad news. She has a congenital kidney problem and the prognosis is that she may not last long. I am hoping that by some miracle she recovers. We would miss her more than anything else when we leave Australia.

Chathu was always keen to have a pup at home. For the last so many years we’ve been living in flats in big cities. The inconvenience of taking the dog out for its’ daily poop always deterred us. I had a dog called Benny long back, with a dark band around his neck. He looked like a cross between a mongrel and an Alsatian, but his ancestry is largely unexplained. During Vishu, a festival of fireworks, I tied some crackers to his tail and set them off. He ran away from home and didn’t reappear for several days. I started crying and my Mom sent delegations to search for him in the village, amid much admonitions of having got just what I deserved for treating the dog cruelly. After three days he reappeared out of the blue. I was overjoyed and swore never to scare away my dear puppy. He died years later at ripe old age. I didn’t think of having a dog ever after that. But Saba just might make me rethink my resolve when we get back to India. It is nice to have someone welcoming you when you get home.
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We finally did that trip to Alice Springs and the long road journey to Uluru. Alice Springs is typical heartland Australia. It is a small outback town. The long drive from Alice Springs takes 5 hours each way. We did that in a hired Toyota Kluger which drives like a breeze. There were acres and acres of desolation, with vast stretches of bare countryside with patches of bushes. There are four small outback stops with shops displaying the quaint inscription “No shirt, No service”. That sounds so much from another era, while aboriginals walked shirtless and white Australians wore top hats.

One is more likely to find regular Aussie binge drinkers without a shirt these days. The Ayers Rock, a large monolithic rock looks as if it dropped down from another planet. We gazed at it at sunset and sunrise and drove to the Kata Tjuta National park nearby. While there were sandstorms while driving to Uluru, it was raining when we were driving back. The weather varies from day to day in this country. There are places where it hasn’t rained for twenty years. While it was hot when we landed in Alice, it was chilly when we left. The long trip fulfilled an old dream of mine. I remembered it was this vision of Australia in “A Town like Alice” that finally drew me to this country to spend a year.