Once upon a time…
By that I mean a couple of years back. When I was still single
and so were my friends. Like little whiny bitches, one of our favorite pastimes
was to day dream about the kind of women we would be married to. One of me
mates was pretty darn sure that he would have an arranged marriage. Not because
he wasn’t progressive or couldn’t woo girls with his sheer alpha male looks and
gait. No. He wanted to have an arranged marriage because he was pretty sure
that his folks would pick a kingfisher calendar girl for him to be married to.
There was another mate of mine who wanted to remain single and another, who
just like me wanted our lives to resemble an Aditya Chopra movie.
Fast forward to a couple of years later, the domino effect took
place reminding us of this thing called life and this phenomenon called time.
Domino effect, for those of you who are still young and single - It is that
particular period of time when you start getting news that one of your friends
is going to get married soon. Calls are made to every other common friend
except the person who is actually going to get married. Questions are raised,
judgments are passed. Soon, one after another, more and more of your friends
get married. Soon enough, you are the last person who is still having sex without
your parent’s approval. You eventually meet the person you want to marry and
you get married. But by this time, your friends and their spouses have had
unprotected sex and you keep thinking, ‘seriously? Like SERIOUSLY!’
Suddenly you are the weird fellow you always were afraid you
were going to turn into. That single man, your parents introduced to you as
‘Uncle’.
So, amidst me silently screaming ‘seriously?!’ I got
married.
Flashback five months back from today, missus is at home,
feeling bored and decides she is going to foster abandoned pups. Flashback to
twenty one years back, I am pleading me parents to get me a dog. They deny my
request. So obviously I gleefully roll my tongue out when my missus gets time
to look away from her phone and informs me about her decision.
Fast-forward to two days later, missus and me find ourselves
surrounded by three furballs the size of your fist. I did find myself
controlling my urge to kick them around like I was back in school playing
football with a tennis ball.
And this is where things get interesting in a very epiphany sort
of way. Suddenly, I had three living creatures taking a glorious shit on my
carpet and pissing on nice cotton bedsheets. Suddenly, I found myself asking
the question, ‘How did my father handle all this behavior of mine?’ Having
taken vows and signed legal documents which consigned me to be an equal partner
to my missus, I found myself scooping shit off carpets, feeding milk and
singing lullaby. As few of the pups got adopted, I used my Jedi powers and got
my missus to adopt two pups. But there is a reason why she is my missus. She
soon caught on to the fact that it was me all along who wanted dogs and hence
scooping shit largely fell on my well moisturized hands. The pups kept growing,
their dietary needs grew. Thanks to Tim Berners-Lee, missus decided to start
the pups on a diet of chicken liver and rice. I went and purchased chicken
liver, believing that I would also eat some when me missus cooked it for the
pups. Not realizing that what I actually like are chicken gizzards and NOT
chicken liver. (A whole different story altogether)
After 36 hours, with the poop-bin smelling like chicken liver
paradise, I suddenly realized how new parents don’t think twice before changing
diapers. How, they apologize when their babies pee over them. Suddenly I
realized I am a father to two adorable living embodiments of 'awwww'.
I soon found myself proudly showing off pictures of me dogs to
anybody and everybody. I was turning into that very person who I made jokes
about and despised. So I learned how to keep quiet and stopped posting pictures
on Facebook and Instagram. I learned to not scream with joy declaring how smart
my dogs were when they learned how to pee on their pee mats and not on the bed.
I learned not to google for doggy universities for the gifted when they learned
to play fetch.
Fast forward to the present, I don’t wince when I open their
poop-bin and the enveloping smell of canine feces smothers my face and
threatens to date rape me. I don’t squelch when I pick up a pee mat weighed
down with litres of piss and put it for wash. I whistle and a pair of wagging
tails running to greet me makes me the happiest man alive.
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