Jatasya Maranam Dhruvam,” Lord Krishna advised his disciple Arjuna in the heat of the Kurukshetra battle. An ineluctable law of mortality simple enough to understand as it means every birth is certain to end in death. The difficulty of coming to terms with death is something all of us have experienced with the passing of friends and kin. But when a pet goes, mortality seems to pierce through the shield of philosophy of knowing the inevitability of it all.
Such an event overtook us last week when our pet Labrador, Brando, of 13 years passed on after losing his battle essentially with old age and cancer to boot. He had become such a part of our lives that, perhaps, it taught the lesson about taking a first pet late in life somehow presents greater parting pangs. Even so, we soon realised that to celebrate his life and its precious memories was far more important than mourning his passing.
Whenever Marley would be on television, we would be avid watchers because we could empathise with everything happening in the life of the owners and their dog, accidentally named after the Jamaican reggae legend because his song was playing on the radio when Owen Wilson playing John Grogan was thinking about what to name him. Brando was thought up in honour of the old Hollywood legend Marlon who was such a dominant figure in his films. Like all dogs, he would be lounging on the floor as if he owned the place and, more importantly, he knew it. But the moment the conversation swung to him in any language, he would somehow understand and perk up at once, ears up like antennae, all attention.
The way he threw “attitude” was remarkable. This wasn’t just mutt-like stubbornness on determining that he did not want to do something, like the weekly bath or taking the smelly medicine. The way he would at times show disdain for even his closest buddies showed a spark of intelligence beyond the ordinary. And yet, like a true Labrador so well-known for people bonding skills, he just loved everyone. The only two people he ever bit in his life were closest kin, doing so in strange fights for the affectionate attention of my wife, which he somehow believed was his monopolistic right.
He leaves us poorer for his absence but far richer for the sense of the sublime he brought into our lives. My only failing as a dog owner may have to do with not possessing more beautiful words to describe what Brando meant to our lives.
