Remembering Peru
Knowing as I arrived that this would be the last time I would see her, I had reminded myself that a dying Carmen Callil was still more Carmen Callil than she was dying.
—Julian Barnes, Departure(s)
It is tempting to interpret this deceptively simple sentence as a description of a good death. If dying does not erode your identity, it is perhaps a good death. Barnes’ last (i.e. his latest, and also literally his last) novel constantly circles the themes of identity, memory and death. He keeps saying that memory is identity. And, as with Carmen Callil, he also seems to claim a small victory over death on her behalf—as long as people remember her for who she really was.
Peru died this morning. Irrevocably. When I saw him for the last time, he looked like any other dog lying on his side, fast asleep. But he is as dead as Marley from A Christmas Carol (imagine what would happen in the story if Dickens had not emphasized this fact upfront). Peru was 12 years old—which, for a stray Indie, is pushing it. Even before he fell sick, he was practically blind because of cataract. A month ago he developed a serious bacterial infection. Nobody noticed it until he was too weak to walk and eat. I got him hospitalized right away, but after a week of treatment, his kidneys started failing… and this morning he did not wake up. There was not much anybody could have done to help him. Now there are no more than five people who will remember him.
Which is why I took to the keyboard so quickly after he died. And, in part because of Julian Barnes’ memory-and-identity thesis. Sadly, I have exactly three distinct memories of him. And even his identity is scarce. I don’t know who he was. I don’t know who he was to me, at any rate. Not long ago, he was to me just an asshole.
Cookie was only months old when she broke free for the first time.
I was walking her in the lane behind my house when she saw something, probably a cat—she lunged, her collar snapped and she disappeared. I ran after her, but even as a puppy with legs barely six inches long, she was disproportionately faster.
I asked bystanders if they saw her. They pointed in the direction of my house. She’s smart, I thought, she can find her way home. Then I heard distant barks - from at least two other dogs. I haven’t run faster in my life.
I’ll never forget what I saw on my doorstep.
There was a large bale of black and brown fur. My brain took a moment to resolve it into three huge dogs.
These three monstrously large dogs had their backs to me, hackles raised and backs arched, all growling menacingly. One of them was Peru, the resident stray of the next lane. Not one of them moved, nor made the slightest change in their stances as I stomped towards them, making every effort to stomp as loudly as possible.
And then I saw her over their shoulders.
She was on her hind legs, almost standing erect on them, her back glued to my front door. She was snarling with teeth bared, completely cornered and desperate. Her pursuers had had her to themselves for at least a minute before I showed up - and in that minute, they could have torn her apart.
Even when she was standing erect, she was just about a foot tall. But there was an indignation, an anger in all six kilos of her. I can’t imagine something barely larger than a football having so much ferocity and menace. I could not be more proud. After some frantic shouting and stomping, I managed to shoo the dogs off. Cookie had held her ground honourably.
About a year later, Peru attacked her once more, completely unprovoked. Cookie wasn’t hurt, but she soiled herself. Since then, Cookie has hated him with a vengeance. And so I hated him too. The ignorant, unexperienced dog parent expects strays to behave better than even humans. Peru’s attack scared me as much as it scared Cookie—I thought I’d never be able to walk her in the neighbourhood again. All thanks to this asshole of a dog.
Over the last five years, I grew to understand dogs better—both strays and mine. I learnt that the name of the asshole was Peru—because his older brother is called Sheru. When he saw me without Cookie, he would even wag his tail and try to sniff me. It was a sort of truce. The relationship was one of mutually polite indifference.
But then, last month, in his weakest, most painful moments, this asshole would return to my doorstep—the same doorstep where he had once terrorized Cookie.
And I have no fucking clue why.
It was on the 21st March, Saturday, around 4 pm. At this time Cookie is usually snoozing somewhere in the house. She casually got up and walked across the front door, stopped, and started furiously clawing at the front door. This was strange because clawing at a door is something she only does when she wants to get to the backyard to do her business. The peephole didn’t show me anything. So I ignored her—it was probably just a passing cat. But only a minute later, she was barking with bared teeth. The peephole still showed only the hallway. There was no way I could have opened the door with Cookie on this side of it, now trying to dig through the threshold. I had to lift her bodily and lock her in a room before opening the front door. Outside the front door there’s a grill door which opens outwards. And it wouldn’t budge. That is when I saw him.
He had thrown the doormat into disarray, pulled socks out of shoes and tosses all kinds of footwear around, like makeshift bedding. He lay fast asleep on top of the mess. I moved the grill just enough to nudge him. He woke up and saw that I was softly patting his hind quarters as I moved the door to and fro. He decided to ignore it and went straight back to sleep. I could have nudged harder until he’d have been forced to get up and hopefully walk away, but I was still a little scared of him. Moreover, he was by no means a small dog. If he had made up his mind about laying siege to my house, it meant a war of attrition—one which I would definitely have lost.
I decided to wait and watch. Nothing had changed for a couple of hours. In those two hours I had let Cookie out thrice—foolishly hoping that she’d ignore Peru’s smell. And I locked her up thrice. Finally, I decided to exit the house from the verandah which would have allowed me to walk straight up to where he was resting. Walking up to him made me especially apprehensive. Peru was the last dog I wanted to face when he was backed up into a corner (much like Cookie was, at the same spot, five years ago).
But he just blinked once and went back to sleep. I tried a variety of things to get him to move: prodding him gently with a blunt stick, trying to pull the doormat from under him, bribing him with handfuls of Cookie’s treats. He didn’t budge. I went back in through the verandah, wondering how long my door would be besieged. At nearly 7:30 pm, he got up and walked up the stairs to the landing. On the landing we keep a couple of broomsticks. Again, he manipulated them again into makeshift bedding. It seemed that he was specifically trying to avoid lying on the floor… but at least the siege was over.
It would be two more hours before he finally got up and walked off. He had a painful looking limp. Meanwhile, a neighbour who sometimes looks after the strays had come over to see what the fuss was all about. Slowly and painfully, Peru limped along and we followed. After an eternity of limping, he stopped at a house that had a dog bed in the porch. He curled up and seemed again to go to sleep. We met the nice family who lived there. They’d known Peru since he was a pup. They fed him occasionally, but being a stray, he had spent most of his life foraging through trash. Also, being a stray meant that it was hard to keep a close eye on him. So ultimately, nobody knew why he was limping. We tried to feed him, but he refused.
We managed to get him to the vet, and it turned out that the limp was not because of a fracture, as I had feared. It was a skin infection that had spread to his paws. Severe, but very treatable. We decided to admit him for a course of antibiotics, and I finally drove back home around midnight…
… wondering throughout the ride why on earth the asshole came to my doorstep, of all places.
I went to see him the following Tuesday night, hesitating at first—I wasn’t even sure if he’d recognize me. The vet’s attendant brought him up to see me. He just looked at me for a few seconds, and then tentatively approached me. He sniffed my hand, rubbed his head against my thigh, and then, for what seemed like the longest twenty seconds of my life, rested his chin on my knee.
In that fleeting moment, he had forever claimed me.
Last year my mother shared a picture of my first dog, Timmy. He looked nothing like the dog I remembered. And here we return to Barnes’ themes of fallible memory. I don’t know if I forgot what Timmy looked like because of memories I have suppressed, or because I really forgot, or because I simply never remembered him often enough. They say that you only truly die when nobody remembers you. I can’t stand that happening to the dogs in my life.
And, not for nothing, this post has pictures too.