Whatever the case, Krishu’s declaration that he wanted to fight Cleo couldn’t simply be shrugged off. It wasn’t just something he’d figured out how to say; he was willing to back it up in action. And it was aligned with other milestones too. Recently he’d become very defiant, refusing to eat at mealtimes, demanding television and/or candy, usually accompanied with the screaming qualifier “now,” just to ensure we were aware of how pressing his desires were. The teachers at his preschool where he went once a week for “structured play” (whatever that was) reassured us that Krishu was simply “feeling out his boundaries.” They warned us that the process could last a while, until Krishu got a good grasp of exactly how far he could push us as parents or test out which techniques worked on us. Only then, when the rules and boundaries had been established, would he settle down and we’d all find our comfort zone.
Comfort zone, my . . .
The most important thing, our confidants advised us, was to be consistent. Krishu was looking for signals from us, to establish limits, and we had to reciprocate. “The one thing you can control,” a child psychologist friend of Candice’s counseled her, “is how you respond to him. Own what you control.”
That last line—own what you control—felt decidedly Vince Lombardi. It sounded so rigid and premeditated, so out of a parenting coaching manual and devoid of the au naturale parenting technique I liked to claim was more my style. But the fact that Krishu was feeling out his boundaries by trying to assassinate Cleo could not be denied nor ignored. It demanded action. I had no choice but to own it, whatever it was.
When I recounted all of this to Papa somewhere along the sixth hole, he nodded in contemplation as if noodling the answer to an elaborate calculus problem. We’d already established that I needed a great myth about unconditional love—and I was on it—but now I wanted more precise and immediate advice.
This was generally the type of predicament that I’d bring to my mother, but she wasn’t available. Mallika was second in line, but she had made it clear that her experience with two thoughtful, nurturing girls did not lend itself to what we were dealing with with Krishu. Beyond all of that, in recent weeks my relationship with my father had evolved considerably. We’d talked about things, both mundane and mystical, more than any time I could really remember. We’d become closer, not just as father and son, student and teacher, but even as friends. Now in many ways the fact that he was the least likely person to go to (for me) for parenting advice made the mere prospect of it intriguing. What was there to lose—I mean, really?
“How does Cleo respond to Krishu?” he asked as he lined up his drive on the seventh tee.
Occasionally she’d growl pathetically or flash her tiny incisors at him, but that was pretty much the extent of it. Generally she was adept at dodging him, even as he evolved his techniques. And by and large, she didn’t even adapt her own behavior. In other words, after she’d managed to elude his latest foray and Krishu had lost his will or placed his attention elsewhere, Cleo eventually reverted to normal. She’d usually go back to sitting in the same location, placing herself once more in his crosshairs, where he’d eventually notice her and his scheming would start anew.
“Either she’s just really stupid . . .” I shrugged.
“Or she’s incredibly loyal,” Papa interjected, and with that, he swung his club and smacked the ball, sending it straight down the expansive fairway. We both watched it roll down the grass with a mix of admiration and surprise.
“I think it’s the latter,” he concluded when the ball finally came to a rest. “Tell me more about how she is around him.”
All observation suggested that Cleo was hopelessly devoted to Krishu. She followed him around wherever he went. At first Candice and I believed that it was because he always had food hanging around him, off him, or on him. But then again, her affection for him preceded his arrival into the world of real food. The day we brought Krishu home from the hospital, Cleo inspected him curiously. What was this? Could she eat him? (Her first question with everything.) When was he leaving? (Her second question.) Once Cleo figured out that he was in the house to stay, she seemed to form a bond with Krishu.
The baby seemed to be the first thing that interested Cleo for longer than the time it took to down a Greenie. And why not? He was her size, after all. He often had a rank odor, which appeared to be a major turn-on for her. And his mood was unpredictable, which kept all of us on our toes. In anticipation of this reconfigured household, I had read a few books (okay, blogs) that suggested that dogs often saw children not necessarily as humans, but as just another part of the pack. And because of their diminutive statures, they often perceived children as competitors for their place in that pack. While Cleo went through her own phase of intrigue around Krishu, trying to figure out how he was going to fit into our previously tight unit, she never appeared to form any resentment toward him, nothing, really, to suggest that she thought of him as competition.
Okay, I knew I was anthropomorphizing Cleo, that I was subjecting her to my own human thought process. If I had learned anything from watching her through the years, it was that she walked to the beat of her own drum. And that drum was more of a banjo. Still, there were things that were just plain to see. At night, we would often lay Krishu to sleep on a bed in his playroom. The vast majority of the time, Candice was the one who managed this process with an elaborate routine involving music and reading and other rituals that only she and Krishu were privy to. During this time, Cleo and I were remanded mostly to the living room. It was my time to watch baseball or basketball games or surf the Internet. Whereas prior to Krishu’s arrival into the house, I could almost always count on Cleo to sit by my side while I indulged in these activities, now her priorities had changed.
Instead of sitting with me, she’d position herself outside of Krishu’s door, find her spot on the wooden floor, and hunker down. Usually after about an hour, the door would open and as Candice emerged, Cleo would salute her with a brush along her leg as she passed into Krishu’s room. She’d glance upward with a seeming wink and a nod, an I’ll take it from here.
At first Candice and I paid close attention to this routine, curious ourselves as to what Cleo was doing and also to ensure that indeed she didn’t have any intentions to eat the boy. It all seemed innocent enough. Cleo’s routine generally consisted of a sniff and a lick of Krishu’s crown, followed by her measuring out a safe distance from his legs, where she’d again do her loops before settling down in a heap.
At the risk of sounding overly sentimental, I’ll confess that this was one of the most treasured sights Candice and I ever witnessed. If you watched her closely—and as youngish parents with not much else to do, we did indeed often watch Krishu and Cleo as if they were ranging in a wild animal park—Cleo would initially keep her eyes open for some time and just stare at Krishu as he breathed deeply in and out. Of course, it wasn’t entirely clear what she was thinking in these quiet moments, but Candice and I speculated that it was roughly what we did when we gazed lovingly at our son—that we really, truly loved him . . . and were so damn relieved that he was finally asleep.
When Krishu arrived in our world, he ignited a powerful love in me that I never knew existed. And on those nights, after Krishu and Cleo had gone to sleep, I’d think to myself just how funny it was that many of the clichés I’d heard about having a child were so accurate.
“You can’t imagine how much you’ll love them,” countless friends with kids had told us before we had our own. “Every day gets better,” they’d say with wide smiles. Blah, blah, blah. I’d told Candice while she was pregnant and we had to endure these self-obsessive confessions that we’d never be those people. For some reason I found their unsolicited declarations of love annoying. However, in the privacy of my home, observing my kid and my dog, I was entitled to think along whatever clichés I wanted. Even if I couldn’t fully articulate it, I knew that the love I had for my son was unconditional.
“So.” Papa tapped his pu
tter on the ground as we arrived at a rest stop where we’d share a big bag of peanuts. “What you’re saying is that Cleo’s love of Krishu is special.”
“Sure.” I nodded. Special was a broad description, but it felt appropriate.
“What I mean,” Papa added, “is that her love for him is made up of qualities like forgiveness, patience, grace, devotion, compassion, empathy, and nonjudgment.”
That certainly was a lot more than special. I mulled the words and nodded. They seemed to fit the bill.
For all of his countless daily attacks on her, Cleo never held a grudge against Krishu. To that extent, she certainly was forgiving.
The way she hovered around him, watching over him especially when he slept, demonstrated a degree of grace that was enviable as well.
Devotion?
Check.
Compassion and empathy?
Indeed. All you had to do was witness the few times when Krishu was reprimanded for doing something bad. Sad-faced, he’d retreat to his playroom for “quiet time” and Cleo, his comrade in arms, would loyally trail him.
Nonjudgment?
See chapter 5.
“Well,” Papa concluded as if he’d heard the symptoms and had a diagnosis, “that’s unconditional love.
“Cleo’s devotion to Krishu does not rely on anything other than the bond she has formed with him. Her love for him is timeless and anxiety-free. It’s not grounded in expectations of reciprocity or paranoia about who loves whom more. Presumably she doesn’t worry about the future of their relationship or analyze its history and hold grudges for past transgressions.
“She loves Krishu because of who he is, not because of her idea of him. She loves him the way he is, not for the way she wants him to be.”
Papa laughed. “It’s very nonhuman, the more you think about it. Relationships between humans and their love of one another are frequently more conditional and fleeting.”
Anyone who’s ever been in love absolutely knows this to be true. Love can be passionate and deep, intense in its application and romance, but rarely, if ever, is it unconditional. It’s just not the way we seem to be wired.
“Sure,” Papa agreed with me as we finished off our peanuts and wandered toward the next tee. “But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t aspire toward an ideal, to seek unconditional love.
“In fact,” he said as he reached for his driver and pulled it from his golf bag, “learning how to love one another unconditionally, like Cleo does, can take us to higher states of consciousness.”
BEFORE KRISHU CAME along and shot his arrow through Cleo’s heart, she was almost exclusively devoted to Candice and me. And within that love triangle, despite my best efforts, I knew to Cleo I’d forever remain Candice’s sidekick. They had a special bond. Cleo was more than Candice’s once puppy, a little ball of fur that fit in the palm of her hand. She was even more than just the clichéd best friend. Cleo was Candice’s companion in a way that even I, who had known Candice from the time we were both college kids, never really could be. It was because of her ability to listen and not judge, the joy and innocence she brought to every day, her ability to trust, and more. But most of all, it was her unconditional love.
And even though she played favorites, visibly ranking Candice higher on the chart than me, Cleo had a unique ability to navigate the sometimes tricky terrain of our relationship even in its most intense and rankled moments. This was perhaps no more evident than on the night before our wedding.
As part of our multicultural Chinese-Indian-American wedding celebration, Candice and I had planned a weekend’s worth of activities that included a cocktail party in a quasi-kama-sutra-like lounge, a traditional Chinese banquet, a midmorning Sikh-styled wedding ceremony, all of which would culminate in a blow-out party/reception in a Unity church on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. All in all, we had roughly 450 guests flooding into the city, an intimate gathering by Asian wedding standards.
Somehow, though, amidst all of this madness, with family in town from all the four corners of the globe and shacked up in various hotels and relatives’ and friends’ homes, I managed to find myself staying all alone in my midtown apartment. Candice, meanwhile, had moved her wedding wardrobe to stay with family in their hotel. Out of respect to whatever traditions had managed to penetrate our nontraditional wedding weekend, Candice and I hardly saw much of each other except during the formal events. Considering all of this, we had determined that Cleo was best off staying with me during the chaos.
In the midst of all of these activities and obligations—not to mention the momentous specter of entering into marriage and all of its for better and for worse implications—I found myself greatly comforted by Cleo’s presence. In the week leading up to the wedding, I often found that when I returned from late night last calls of bachelorhood with my friends, I was unable to drift into sleep. Instead, I’d lounge on the couch, the most expensive thing I’d ever purchased in my life prior to Candice’s engagement ring, with Cleo draped over me. Together we’d watch SportsCenter or old movies.
As the wedding day drew closer, our bond intensified. In recent years Candice had become the person to whom I expressed my hopes and fears, dreams and trepidations. Now, not only was I restricted from seeing her, but she was also the source and object of those emotions. Cleo, on the other hand, was free and available, her calendar completely devoid of any other commitments. She was willing to indulge my confessions and anxieties, especially if they were accompanied by bagels, pizza crust, deli meats, or the other late night munchies I brought home. The night of the prewedding Chinese dinner banquet would require all of her skillful listening and more.
Banquet meals are traditional affairs in Chinese culture. As in Indian culture, food is not just a way of demonstrating a family’s prosperity, but the more diversity of it, the greater the celebration. Candice’s family had organized a gala affair, packed with multiple courses, an open bar, and lots of extended family. While everyone had a splendid time, indulging in shark fin soup, crab dumplings, and more, Candice and I carried out our duty, shuffling from one table to the next, welcoming extended family members we hardly knew who had come to bless us with their presence.
It was a “grin and bear it” affair from beginning to end. For Candice, this effect was literal; she was squeezed tightly into a traditional Chinese chi pao. I had joked with her leading up to our wedding that, like a good Chinese bride, she had spent months shedding pounds (and by all appearances a few ribs as well) to get into that dress. Her restricted gait—she shuffled slowly from one table to the next—made her wince every step of the way. My feigned disposition could really only be attributed to the fact that I just plain disliked, and was no good at, being social. There was only one way I was going to parade around for hours in front of family members I didn’t recognize and indulge in conversations about things I didn’t care about: alcohol.
As we moved around the banquet hall I kept a bottle of Tsingtao beer in my palm, nursing it slowly between winks, nods, hand-shaking, and fake laughs. Sprinkled between gulps of beer came toasts with jolts of a concentrated rice wine. By the end of our seemingly endless greeting parade, Candice could hardly stand because her dress was so tight. I could hardly stand because I was so drunk.
“Bro, you may want to slow down on the booze,” one of my friends advised me as I staggered to keep my balance. “You’re getting married tomorrow after all.”
“No, bro,” Candice’s brother ominously countered as he poured another shot of rice wine, “if I were you, I’d drink more. After all you’re getting married to my sister tomorrow.”
Still, further solidifying that I’d truly found my soul mate in Candice, she managed to pull me aside and confide that she’d thought up an exit plan to get us out of the dinner. Was this girl great, or what? We weren’t even married yet and she was already greasing the wheels for me to slip out of cumbersome family obligations. She went over the plan. We were skipping out on our own banquet in order to get ready for the
big day tomorrow. Remarkably, amidst this elaborate banquet affair, Candice had been able to hatch the perfect plan and she now confided it to me.
If only my elevated blood alcohol had not gotten in the way of my seeing straight and hearing clearly. If so, I’d have understood that the plan included our leaving the banquet together. Not me leaving my bride-to-be on the street corner. In the rain. In her tight-fitting chi pao. With no money.
By the time I reached home, I had multiple messages summoning me to the hotel where Candice was staying. My bride wanted to see me. That was all.
Still none the wiser, my only warning came from Candice’s soft-spoken mother. “Be careful,” she whispered as I entered their room.
Over the course of the next twenty minutes, the floodgates opened and the emotions poured out.
How could I possibly have just left her on the side of the road?
What was I thinking?
How much had I drunk?
Was this a sign of things to come?
Did I even love her?
I stumbled and mumbled. Stammered while hammered and struggled my way through admissions, apologies, denials, deflections, defenses, promises, and pledges. Was it simply an inebriated transgression, Candice wanted to know, or a pattern of behavior, intimating a lack of readiness to truly take on the obligations and responsibilities of marriage?
Whoa. A lifeline perhaps? Nope—not even my charm and wit would save my ass this night. Soon Candice sent me on my weary way, instructing me to think about it overnight, if I was really ready for the plunge we were about to take.
Walking Wisdom Page 13