Lest They Be Forgotten

Do they shoot dogs in Canada?

(A version of this story was published in Nethra in Sri Lanka in 2008. It also became the first chapter in my novel The Ulysses Man - Blue Denim Press, 2011)

Do they shoot dogs in Canada?

Martin James’s brother Paul was born two days after Easter in 1961. Martin remembered the strange antiseptic smell of the hospital when they visited Mum and the baby; and the smell hovered over the infant even when Paul was brought home, despite the talcum powder and lotions they poured over him. Paul’s arrival saw his parents shift focus from Martin, until then, their only child; they looked distracted, for the baby was colicky at night. They quarrelled. Dad slept in the spare room as he had to go to work the next day, and Mum cried often as she lulled Paul to sleep and stuck a sucked out breast in the little bugger’s mouth. Martin didn’t like Paul much and couldn’t understand why everyone fussed over him.  Dad stopped reading Martin his favourite western comics at bedtime. Dad had stopped reading comics altogether—his one pastime. Dad was so busy.

When they took the baby over to Grandma’s for the official “showing” after the Christening, Jess, the mixed Alsatian, had just littered again. Jess’s litters varied, as different dogs crept over the fence to mate during her heat periods. The pups were golden hued this time, and one lively fellow caught Martin’s attention.

“I want to take him home,” Martin cradled the pup and announced firmly to the shrinking pool of aunts and uncles who were cooing over Paul and passing him around like a rare commodity. Many extended family members who had already emigrated to Australia or Canada would never see Paul, and others in the room—but “in process,”—would probably see him just this once.

 Dad looked up, embarrassed, and stared at his older son. “Let’s talk about it later.”

“No, I want him today,” Martin said, barely holding back his tears.

Grandma stepped into the fray. “Oh, let him have one, child. I was going to put those creatures to sleep anyway. Jess is a puppy factory. The pups grow up and come back to mate with her and it goes on and on…”

So, as Mum and Dad coddled Paul in the taxi, Martin petted the little pup in his arms, naming it Goldie before they got home.

Goldie grew up fast. It ran everywhere, and followed Martin all the time, at first not quickly enough to keep pace, but catching up by the day. The Jameses lived in the Buddhist temple town of Kelaniya, a few miles outside the capital city Colombo. Their home was a townhouse in Perera Gardens, a large estate thick with tropical vegetation. Fifteen rental units occupied the estate: small two and three-bedroom bungalows. The road running through Perera Gardens was sandy and the houses ringed lawns on which large coconut trees sprouted. This was Martin’s, and now Goldie’s, stomping ground.

During the dry season, Martin took his bicycle rim out daily, propelling it with a well-worn stick lodged into the crevice running through its circumference. He ran through the estate, weaving in and out of the trees. The trick was not to let the rim run away or fall down, despite the twigs, cow dung and stones littering the route. With the wind flapping behind him, the familiar confines of the estate were comforting: amused glances from neighbours going about their household chores, smells of curry as he neared kitchens or of smoke when someone was incinerating garbage. As a six-year-old, he could roam about freely and so it didn’t bother him, as it did his parents, to be a Christian in a garden full of non-Christians. This became his and Goldie’s routine for the next six months.

Martin ignored Paul and Seetha the ayah, who carried the baby whenever she was through with her housework. Seetha was an “old maid,” and had no children of her own. Paul had suddenly become “her child” and she would shoo Martin away from the baby.