“I think Cleo has definitely been around for a few lifetimes,” I replied to Papa. “Do you?”
Papa laughed, looking down at Cleo. Krishu pulled at Papa’s sleeve, urging him back to his feet. “Again!”
“Yes,” Papa said. “I think we’ve all been around one another a few times. One lifetime wouldn’t nearly be enough fun.”
WHEN I WAS a child, every so often, Papa used to put Mallika and me to sleep. He wasn’t much into reading us stories, or even telling us stories, but rather would encourage us to tell him a story. He had read in one of his countless books that there was nothing more creatively stimulating for children’s minds than their creating stories. He encouraged this quality in us and today does the same thing with our children, his grandchildren, notably Tara.
This, of course, has generated some family controversy because Tara’s, er, storytelling (aka lying) has proven to be rather prolific. Recently her teachers at school called my sister with some alarm, concerned whether or not on a recent trip to India Tara’s family had been attacked by some British hooligans.
“What?” Mallika responded, clearly confused.
Further investigation revealed something quite fascinating. During a recent trip to India, Tara’s paternal grandfather took her to the Mahatma Gandhi museum in central New Delhi to show her some of the history around India’s struggle for independence from the British. The museum sits on the plot of land where Gandhi was actually assassinated by an Indian gunman, in large part because the assassin disagreed with Gandhi’s peaceful resistance to the British.
It appeared that Tara had taken this emotional journey into her own ancestral history and wrapped it around a more modern tale in which a fictional rowdy British mob attacked her family.
Mallika assured Tara’s teachers that no such incident had occurred.
“Good,” the teacher replied. “Then I assume your in-laws’ elephant is okay as well?”
Mallika laughed along with Tara’s teacher. “Fortunately the elephant is okay.”
Of course, Mallika considered this to be no laughing matter. She addressed it with my father at dinner one night. Perhaps it was not such a good idea for him to continue encouraging Tara’s storytelling skills.
“Nonsense,” he responded defiantly. “We should absolutely encourage it! We should nurture it.”
He looked at Tara proudly. She sat with a conflicted expression, half-embarrassed at being caught in her lie, half-proud of her grandfather’s admiration. Cleo sat dutifully by her feet, curiously with almost the same expression, I thought.
“Tara may be the next Steven Spielberg. Or Jhumpa Lahiri.”
“Or James Frey,” I added.
Papa continued. “Storytelling is how we package our intuition. It means she’s tapped in. It’s marvelous, actually.”
Tara’s smile widened. She was definitely more proud now than embarrassed.
It was funny how things reprised themselves. I remembered some form of this same debate between my mom and dad when I was young and he encouraged Mallika’s and my storytelling skills. I stretched this as far as I could over the years, once telling my parents as a teen after a boozy night out with my friends that I was under the impression I’d been drinking “Arnold Palmers” and not Long Island iced teas.
“Like the baseball player?” my father asked, perplexed. (He never cared much for sports.)
My mom ordered me to bed to sleep it off. “Speaking of Arnold Palmer, don’t count on getting much more than a golf cart when you get your driver’s license next year.”
This, of course, just added to my father’s confusion.
Years later, now Mallika was playing the role of my mom, showing concern that Tara’s creative storytelling skills today might transform into something more menacing and difficult to handle tomorrow when she hit her teens.
“Papa!” Mallika shot my father a look. This time Mallika was not reprising anything. Looking at her, she was my mother and Papa knew it. Mallika didn’t need to say anything more.
“Okay,” he relented. He turned to Tara. “Maybe school isn’t the best place to tell your stories,” he advised her.
That was the best Mallika could have hoped for. There was no way she would convince him that creativity was not the source of all problem solving in the world. Even she had to remember that when we were small he told us that there was nothing unreal about what happened in our dreams, or any memories we claimed to have of lives before this one.
“The only thing not real,” he told us when we were still in elementary school, “is the socially induced hallucination that this is all there is.”
Yes, ladies and gentlemen, I grew up in the Matrix.
There was one particular memory from my days of storytelling as a child that I recalled in light of Papa’s encounter with the pink-spandexed woman at the gym. After dinner and the chilled conversation between Papa and Mallika, I reminded him of it.
“Remember the dream I once told you about where you and I met on a rope bridge in China?”
“Yes,” Papa said without even pausing. “You had a dog with you.”
It’s true. In the dream, we were two peasants, but I was older and he was younger. We were strangers to each other except for that single encounter on a rope bridge that connected two peaks in a mountainous range in China. I had a dog with me and he had a bowl of rice with him. On the bridge, Papa offered me some of his rice and as we sat and ate, we shared our life stories. He was a tea trader who regularly traversed the country from the foothills of Bhutan to the ports of the South China Sea. I was a calligrapher whose services were once sought by aristocrats in big cites, but who now preferred to teach children from rural towns.
At the end of our encounter, I told Papa that I needed to go and that I wanted him to take care of the dog. I explained to him that I was old and didn’t have much time left but that the dog had more living to do and needed a companion. He nodded and agreed to take the dog with him.
I thanked him and before we parted, I got on one knee and said an emotional good-bye to the dog.
“It’s okay,” the young man advised me on that rope bridge between those two mountains in China in that life. “We’ll all meet again,” he said.
“I remember that.” Papa nodded his head and we both looked down at Cleo. “So here we are again just like I said we would be.”
In my family we have always believed in a deeper karmic connection among us. This is actually not a belief among us as much as it is an awareness. We have a lot of fun with one another and have a deep admiration for one another. My sister and her husband’s kids are mine and Candice’s, and Krishu is theirs. These days Papa often tweets that his grandchildren are the greatest teachers in his life.
With Cleo, watching the way that she interacts with family, even remote members or those she somehow identifies as family, like Mirna, as opposed to how she reacts to everyday strangers, reenforces the suspicion that she’s been hanging with us multiple lifetimes. More than just the fun we have together, it’s in fact all of the qualities that she’s shown to us over the years—her devotion and trust, loyalty, unconditional love, nonjudgment, and more—that form the mechanics of her self-knowing.
A lot of people are familiar with canine science. They study pack mentality ad nauseam and make heated cases for or against its very existence. They elucidate the fascinating dynamics that link humans and dogs, including the ways in which dogs are able to read even the most subtle gestures, body language, facial expressions, vocal tones, and emotions of their masters.
“But with Cleo,” Papa continued as we propelled the conversation forward on our now nightly walk to Starbucks for an after-dinner tea, “you don’t have to.
“Simple science—the size of Cleo’s tiny head—suggests her brain only has so much capacity. And yet, her emotional resonance with all of us suggests that her intelligence stems from something far more subtle than the brain inside her head. Cleo is tapped in in a way that most humans are not, not
because they are unable to but because they have reorganized themselves and their instincts to not even see or sense what is right in front of them. She is steered by a higher guidance.”
Another revelation for Cleo, I commented as I looked down at her. Indeed she had a skip in her step as we neared the block on which Starbucks sat. Granted, it was most likely due to the piece of cherry Popsicle Krishu dropped after dinner and she managed to inhale before I got to it.
As we reached Starbucks, Papa entered and I grabbed a seat outside with Cleo. She sniffed around on the sidewalk searching for anything interesting as I admired her. It was truly amazing to me how so much of the neuroses we had identified over the years in her could now be transformed into spiritual insight. Perhaps Cleo’s greatest gift was that she lacked the anxiety-inducing need to even doubt or analyze her own intuitive sense. She was uniquely focused on only the things important to her—at this moment the half-eaten apple she’d just discovered wedged between the chair and the wall.
Just then a young man exited the Starbucks. He had a goatee and wore a beanie from which a tangle of hair emerged. He laughed as he spoke into his cell phone.
“Hey, you know that guy I told you that was in line in back of me that looked just like Deepak Chopra?” He shook his head incredulously. “It’s so funny—I heard him talk and he sounded just like him too!”
Chapter Ten
If you could do it all over again, what would you do differently?
I wouldn’t do any of it differently. That’s the truth.
Nothing?
It may turn out differently because I hope I’d do it just as spontaneously as I did it this time around. Most of everything I have this time came effortlessly, not because I wasn’t trying or working hard but because
I took it for the most part as it came. I believe creativity comes from spontaneity, which I’m pretty good at. Some people call it impulsiveness, but it works for me.
“I FEEL GREAT,” NANA ASSURED ME OVER THE PHONE. HE had been home for a few weeks and sounded very much like his old self. He was eager to get back to his routine: going on walks in the park, hanging with his old military cronies, and complaining about Indian politicians. “They’re a useless lot,” he reminded me.
“Your mother said you’re writing a book about that dog of yours,” he said.
“Well,” I started, “. . . it’s really not just about Cleo, but me, my dad, Krishu, and Cleo.” Hopefully, the success of the book wouldn’t be tied to my ability to sell it to my grandfather.
“Sounds fascinating,” Nana replied.
Indifferent? Perplexed? It was hard to fully grasp his tone. “Really?”
“No. Your father writes books about the search for happiness. Your dog—any dog—they are just happy. What else is there to say?”
Indeed.
“Look,” he said. “Don’t bother sending a new copy of the book when it’s done. We’ll just get one from the library. You never know how long we’ll be around.”
“HOW IS HE?” Candice asked as she zipped up a suitcase.
“Totally back to normal.” I smiled.
I confronted the four suitcases, three carry-ons, stroller bag, car seat bag, and “miscellaneous bag” she had packed for our trip.
“It’s mostly his stuff.”
She wasn’t lying. Between Krishu’s clothes, diapers, wipes, foods, toys, books, stroller, car seat, and miscellaneous stuff, my twenty-six-pound son apparently required about four times that weight just to keep him functional.
“Hey,” Candice cut me off before I could even start, “if you want to go through it all and repack, be my guest.”
I shook my head. “I’ll pack the car.”
The hitch, of course, with going to Canada was Cleo. In years past, we’d taken her with us, even smuggled her into fancy resorts where dogs were outlawed. But this trip bore the “international” stamp, and Cleo was clearly a domestic mutt. I sensed from her the same sentiments I had. Canada was more a cousin than some distant relation and, well, in our family cousins were essentially siblings. But that would hardly fly with the border agents. No doubt about it. Cleo would be staying home.
Our default had always been to leave Cleo with my sister or my mother, but since we were all traveling together this time around, those options were out. So was the long trip to Candice’s mom; Cleo was simply too old to endure it. We never even considered leaving her with the local vet, who would keep Cleo in a small cage and give her only two walks a day. And we knew better than to look for a house sitter/dog walker. With Cleo’s dynamic mix of unfriendliness and growing neurosis it would be the nanny interviews all over again. As for sending her to someone else’s home, well, that would be like asking the neighbor if we could set up a sleeper cell in the living room.
“Take her to one of those fancy doggy day cares,” one of Candice’s mommy friends advised her over coffee one day. She “bumped” the details of one she recommended from her iPhone to Candice’s.
I went online to check it out. The steep price meant if we were to pursue this option, we would become those people who spent insane amounts of money to make sure that our dog lived the cushy life. Still, I knew just how to justify it:
Seven nights at doggy day care: $350.
Special low-fat dog food for old bitches like Cleo: $10 a day.
Guilt-free vacation for Gotham and Candice: priceless.
A young woman named Missy led us on a tour of the facility. A spacious play area annexed the bright lobby. Big dogs sprinted in circles playing games with friendly trainers. Separated by a sturdy barrier sat a smaller pen with dogs more Cleo’s size lazily lounging around, sniffing each other, and playing with plush toys. Sun poured through big open windows. A fresh breeze ensured that too much of a doggy smell never lurked.
Missy observed me scrutinizing the playpen where presumably Cleo would end up. Never one to really “work a room,” Cleo might not cut it with the others, I thought to myself. She really wasn’t much of a networker, much more the type to keep her snout to the pavement, and well, keep her snout to the pavement. Missy confirmed that the dogs were given free range in these areas and spent the majority of their days hanging with each other, playing, and wandering around in circles.
“Don’t worry,” she assured me, “anytime any sort of tension breaks out, we separate them so nothing builds.”
In particular, mealtimes were specifically set aside and food was kept in separate areas to avoid skirmishes between the dogs. If Cleo were to stay there, Missy told us, she could expect a private dining period every morning and evening during which a trainer would provide her with personal attention, making sure she got her full meal. Candice and I exchanged glances. Things were looking good.
At night, there was a heavily pillowed area where the dogs lounged out and got their rest. Owners were encouraged to bring unlaundered T-shirts and leave them so that their dogs had something identifiable to lie out on, a reminder of familiar and comforting smells. All in all, our tour did nothing but reassure us that we had at last found the solution to our long-standing problem. Candice in particular was enormously pleased, so we agreed to give it a try. Missy escorted Candice to a private office to fill out some paperwork while I hung back, content to check my iPhone for e-mails and hang by the play area, where a dozen or so dogs were racing back and forth playing.
After a few minutes, a young man entered the room and stood beside me. “What’s up, bro?” He gestured toward me with a slight tilt of his chin. It was a “guy greet” and I reciprocated the signal.
“Bro” held about half a dozen leashes, but what got my attention were his heavily tattooed arms. He had what are commonly referred to as sleeves, tattoos covering his arm with no sign of any un-inked skin. Not an inch. He wore a snow hat, a blond goatee, and a T-shirt with STAY SUCKER FREE printed across it.
“My name’s Nomi, bro.” He stuck out his hand to shake mine.
We exchanged a firm shake.
“One of these your
s?” he inquired, gesturing to the dogs in the play area.
“No.” I shook my head. “She’s coming tomorrow.”
“Ah, a bitch.” He smiled and nodded. “Like literally, right? What’s her name?”
I was taken aback. “Um . . . Cleo.”
“Um Cleo or just Cleo?” He laughed. “I’m just playing with you, bro. I’ll keep an eye out for Cleo. I walk the boys and girls,” he said, and then shook his shoulders and danced to a beat that was nowhere to be heard.
We stood for a moment while I tried to reconcile Nomi with my image of what a dog walker should be.
“You know what this place reminds me of ?” Nomi nodded, referring to the play area in front of us.
I shook my head.
“Prison.” He smiled. “I mean, not that neither you or me would know what that shit is like, right, bro?” He winked at me and smiled. “Like seriously. Like this is the yard, right?”
My only experience with prison yards (thankfully) were the terrifying MSNBC documentaries I sometimes watched late at night. Even they gave me nightmares.
“Like check it out,” Nomi continued. “See when a new dog comes in, they’re released into the general population right here. They need to figure out how to play it, you know? Like either they need to just flat out assert themselves, like locate the top dog and just go after that old dog and make it clear who’s boss now so all the others know. Or you know, go more covert. Just slip in all Mossad, find your Bloods or Crips and swear allegiance, you know? Just watch my back, right?” He laughed again.
Walking Wisdom Page 21