Don’t feel like reading? Listen to me tell the story.
* Names have been changed to protect the guilty…
Deepa was driving to work dreading seeing the pitiful pug which sat tied to a scooter on a very short lead at the bottom of her building. She was traveling out of Bangalore for a couple of weeks so had not seen the poor soul for a while. As she got closer, the familiar looming sadness for him and helplessness washed over her.
Not only was he unable to move around, but his water was dirty, and the small amount of food he was given was curd (plain yogurt) with rice from the chopped-out bottom of a plastic coke bottle. Deepa’s family had two well-loved pugs and the thought of them being treated in such a way was unbearable.
She arrived and looked with trepidation over at the scooter, but there was no pug. That was unusual. The pug was always there in the same spot.
She saw Mr Roy, a tenant from the same building, and asked him where the dog was.
“Dog gone! Dog gone!”
“Dog gone! Dog gone!” he said. Huh. Someone must have taken him, she thought.
She then saw the landlord and owner of the dog, and asked him what happened.
“He was stolen. We used to tie him up as we were afraid that someone would steal him, as he is the kind of dog that wouldn’t make a sound,” he said. Their cruel ‘security’ measures clearly hadn’t worked because that is exactly what happened!
He went on to try and justify how they looked after the young pug but none of it made sense to Deepa. He then told her the dog was a gift and they weren’t planning to get another one. That made sense. Likely the people didn’t know how to take care of the dog and weren’t that interested in finding out.
So sorry for your loss
She told him how sorry she was for their loss and she hoped he had moved on to a better place. She really hoped he had, because she thought things couldn’t be much worse for him than when he was there.
Deepa was getting regular messages from a driver her mother, Meena had recently fired while she was away. She hired him temporarily for work around her sister’s wedding, but he turned out to be totally mad. Some of Deepa’s friends were fairly sure he was drunk most of the time when he was dropping them home.
One full moon night while she was still away, he went up to the roof of their apartment and started acting erratically. The watchman went up to try and calm him down and the driver beat him up. Meena let him go.
Because Deepa was the original family member who hired him, every day he sent her text messages begging her to re-hire him. “I’m sorry Prasad, I hope you get another job, but we can’t take you back,” she would tell him.
One day, not long after she was back, the messages got more bizarre.
“Madam, Ravi (Deepa’s brother) stole a dog and sold it on the internet for INR 30,000 (c. AU $600),” it read.
“Where’s the proof? Show me the proof!”
She called her brother and asked him if he knew what it was all about. He got unusually defensive and asked, “Where’s the proof? Show me the proof?”
“Listen man, I don’t have any proof, it is just a strange text I received and it doesn’t make any sense to me right now,” Deepa told him and then promptly forgot about it, chalking it up to more of this driver’s craziness.
A few weeks later her mother had some friends over for dinner. There was a lull in the conversation and one of them said, “Oh by the way, the dog is doing great!”
Deepa turned to her mother, “What dog?”
“Oh that pug!” said her mother’s friend.
“What pug?” Deepa asked, the pennies finally dropping.
“Deepa, we haven’t told you but this is what happened…”
Deepa was shocked. “How could you do that? But I am glad you did it,” she said. “Oh my God, I was consoling them and all this time it was you!”
How did it happen?
One day, not long after Deepa left on her trip, her mother Meena and brother Ravi had to drop something at the office after hours. It was 6.15pm, misty and murky outside, and the power had suddenly cut. There was no one around. Meena opened the door and saw the pug chained to the gate.
He looked totally ill. He had a dry nose, didn’t take any notice of their presence, and was chained despondently to the gate.
“Ravi, I think today is the day”
They walked out of the gate, Meena turned to Ravi and said, “Ravi, I think today is the day.”
They had discussed previously how to rescue the dog, but there was no plan at all. They looked up and down the street, the lights and power were off, and the only souls to be seen were a group of buffaloes.
Ravi didn’t say anything. He whipped back, opened the gate very loudly, grabbed the dog, and put him by Meena’s feet in the car. The excited pug immediately peed all over Meena’s feet. Then they sped off.
Meena started freaking out. “How are we going to face these people? What if somebody saw us?”
“No, no, no, we’re doing this!” Ravi exclaimed as they argued, guilt clearly setting in for Meena, on the way home.
When they reached home, Ravi took the dog upstairs and he went crazy. He saw the family’s two female pugs and his new, lead free freedom, and he was out of control.
Ravi immediately took him for a walk to help dispel this incredible energy and he just shat, and shat, and shat… The poor thing likely didn’t want to shit in the small place he was confined in.
Overpowering guilt set in…
Meena, guilt ridden, returned to the scene of the crime at around 7.00pm to see what was happening. The whole neighbourhood were out in their kaftans discussing the event and searching for the pug. Meena kept driving quietly past the commotion.
The landlords made enquiries to their office manager, who had already left well before Meena and Ravi returned to drop those things off, and unexpectedly pick up their pretty pug passenger. He said he had definitely seen the dog before he left. He rang Meena and asked her if she had seen him.
“No, no, I haven’t seen him,” she said acting suitably surprised. She was hoping and praying no one had seen THEM.
She returned home and her strict, Tamil Brahmin friend Saraswati who was staying with them, was horrified at what they had done.
“How could you do that?! You must return him immediately,” she demanded. This made Meena and Ravi feel even worse and more ashamed about what they had done. She impressed upon them how wrong it was, and how she felt bad even by association.
By that time, there was no returning him. Even if they had wanted to, there was no way without revealing themselves. Nevertheless, that night Meena couldn’t sleep. They decided to close ranks and keep it to themselves.
What to do with the precocious pug?
The office was not far from their house, so they had to keep the dog inside to avoid detection. They estimated he had been tied up for about two years, so it was no wonder he just couldn’t sit still.
It was now time to find a good family for the dog as they couldn’t keep him. Aside from already having two, it was too close to the scene of the crime. She tried her friend Maureen who was very active in her church. Surely she could find a good family in that community. No luck. She called various other, discrete people without avail.
The mad driver, Prasad came up to their apartment one day, before the watchman incident, to pick something up from the house. The family’s two pugs were happily playing in the living room, and another bark came from one of the closed-up rooms. It would appear he would later put two and two together.
The following week, while Deepa was still away, they had those friends over for dinner and explained the situation. They said they would see if they could help and a few days later, they called and said they had found someone.
Cocaine joins Hash and Opium
Ravi drove with the dog to his new home. His mum was a single woman who already had two dogs, Opium and Hash, who were well taken care of, ate the best food, and went for regular check-ups at the vet. She happily took him into her family and christened him Cocaine, likely on account of all of his energy.
Cocaine had a ball. In his first week he was still so excitedly running around, he smashed a bottle of vodka and cut his toe. He then lapped up all the attention and love from his new family.
Weeks later Saraswati came back to the house and asked Deepa if she had heard what happened. Deepa said she had.
“It is very wrong!”
“It is very wrong!” she said, still so full of disapproval.
“I think they did the right thing,” said Deepa.
“How can you say that?” she asked with such incredulous venom.
Deepa then understood how emotional she was about it, and how Meena and Ravi must have felt with her feeling that way and expressing herself on the night.
A mixture of guilt and pride
Meena knows she did the right thing, but is still somehow ashamed of the deceitful act.
“It was a death sentence. I’m glad we did it. He really went on and got himself a life,” she said about the liberation of Cocaine. “He was a lovely dog with a lovely face and it was a real shame we couldn’t keep him.”
However, it is not just Saraswati Auntie who serves as a guilty reminder of the pug heist.
“Every time I see those buffaloes down the street, I know they know what I did,” she said, the guilt becoming evident once more. But that doesn’t last long.
“I’m glad they didn’t get another dog though, because I would have had to steal that one too…” she pondered.
The End
Thanks for reading and/or listening. I hope you enjoyed it. If you did, please like and share on social media. I’m on Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin and my handle is @ClaireRWriter.
If you want to work with me, check out my website ClaireRWriter.com and book a meeting.
Until next time!
