What the Dog Saw

or how to recover from a nightmare.

Do you remember your dreams? Or maybe I should ask, do you remember your nightmares? I wasn’t sure how to classify this particular dream I’ve illustrated about my father — it had all the grotesque carnival-like qualities of a proper nightmare:
Public humiliation — being on stage and forgetting my lines
Uncanny horror — being surrounded by people who were familiar-but-not Surreal dream logic — an instrument turning into the moon, turning into existential dread….

But it was also a relief. Grief is rarely simple, and the grief of losing my father two years ago was particularly complicated because he was a violent, brilliant, loving and largely absent parent. This week will mark the longest night of the year (22nd December is the Winter Solstice) and I’m sending you a longish, ultimately hopeful essay I wrote about a dog walking me out of a dark place.

love and light

Nish

At first the grief was a hot burning thing I couldn’t get off my skin. A rash. It followed me around from room to room as I threw things into a suitcase, seeing through me, waiting to be let in.

Barely an hour ago, I’d woken up in my cold bedroom in London to a Whatsapp message summarily informing me of my father’s death in India. A curt but polite text from his other family, essential details and little emotion:

They had been on holiday, he was alone at home. At night, his attendant fed him dinner. After that, he sat outside for a while and serenaded the neighbors. In the morning, the same attendant discovered his body. He’d died of a heart attack in his sleep.

His second family was on their way home to him now.

As a child, I’d played a secret game called What if My Father Stayed. In this parallel universe where he never left my mother and I, my father was an amorphous, mostly positive influence, a kind of genial father-bot. Everything was mostly the same in this world, just slightly more relaxed. We did not worry about landlords threatening to evict us. My mother did not spend all her time at work. If I missed the school bus, he drove me to school. He showed up at parent-teacher meetings, birthdays, graduations — all the photographs meant to have a father-shaped person in them. Crucially, in this world, my mother didn’t spend every waking minute worrying about how to raise a child alone.

The reason his presence never carried enough heft to actually alter the bigger details of my imagined world, was because in the real world my father’s presence and his many absences
loomed large, first threatening my mother and my survival, and later, our joy.

When I grew up, I stopped playing the game because it made me too angry. The morning I learned of his death, I opened myself to the parallel world again. Somewhere, an other-me was packing my suitcase to return home. Other-me was weeping with uncomplicated and abundant grief. My father’s absence was unthinkable to her, as his life was inextricable from hers. He’d been there for all the triumphs and confusions, the birthdays and graduations and everything in between. They fought and made up and laughed and loved each other through it all, until now.

I felt slightly better imagining her. In the real world, I was not going back to India and I could not cry. My new job required me to live with and care for a dog who lived somewhere across the city for the next ten days. I was supposed to be grieving, I was sure that’s what the script for normal human reactions said, but my father's absence was all I had known of him since the age of four. What exactly was I supposed to grieve now?

The hot, burning feeling had entered my brain and was still following me everywhere.

“Are you sure you still want to do this?” my partner asked with concern as I dragged my suitcase out of our door.

“What choice do I have?” I said. “I can’t make a commitment to someone and just bail on them.”
Like my father. I finished the sentence in my head.

*

Back home, news of death brings people to your door. Neighbors, friends, relatives and elders, shoulders to lean on — a crush of people to ease the burden and rituals of death.

These people call a doctor to confirm the death, find a block of ice for the body to rest on, call a morgue, cleanse the body, prepare it for cremation, call a crematorium, call a hearse, call the paper to place an obituary, carry the body, carry wood for the pyre, carry the ashes, immerse them in the holy river. For days after the death of a loved one, some homes in India do not light their hearth at all, and all the food they eat is cooked in someone else’s kitchen.

The purpose of mourning rituals, I realized, was to give the bereaved a script, a list of urgent tasks to complete so they could postpone pondering upon the void of death.

I had no body, and no rituals to perform. I tried calling the only other person in the world as familiar with my father’s absence as I. She did not answer. On the way to my dogsitting job, I dialed my mother’s number with increasing desperation, letting the phone ring until the end each time. My mind was spinning off its wheels - where was she? Was she alright?

Selfishly, I felt a flash of anger that she would not come to the phone to comfort me when I had just lost a parent. Did she even know?

When she finally answered, she sounded tired.

“I heard. His wife sent me a text this morning.”

And then, “I was out buying groceries when you called. Is everything alright?”

I sat down on a pavement. I had arrived at my destination and I was completely lost. Was everything alright? Was anything?

In the decades since he left us, the memories of my father had grown smaller, finally shrinking into a series of nights: nights that he came home, smelling of whiskey and smoke.

On good nights, he’d read me a story, or take me for a walk or a drive around the neighborhood. We’d discuss the news of the day, what happened at school and in the newspaper office where he worked in. On bad ones, my father was replaced by a demon made of rage. My mother and I hid on the roof of our building, listening for his footsteps as he roamed the building searching and screaming her name. If he found us, he chased her, dragging her by the hair, smashing her head into walls, tables, toys and bookshelves until everything went black.

After he left, I saw my father on weekends. The rage monster seemed to have disappeared (although he lived on in my nightmares). Divorced, then coupled up, and now married again and father to a daughter once more — my father seemed eager to make amends with me. This lasted seven years.

And then one night when I was visiting him, we went for a walk in the neighborhood. A car
came screeching out of the darkness, hit us and disappeared. I skid across the concrete, my 11-year-old body a maze of cuts, blood and bruises. My father, who took most of the impact that night, lost his memory, and his ability to lead an independent life.

This is how the next few decades passed — my father a ghost of his former self, no longer accessible, and never again accountable to all the women he left behind. I had passed through the stages of grief over and over in the last three decades, until I was finally done. The news of my father’s death was sad, but it was also, I told myself, a release. I was going to be fine. I walked into the house I was going to spend the next ten days in. The dog barked in greeting, each of us relieved that we were no longer alone.

*

In Vedic Hindu mythology, the kingdom of Death is guarded by two fierce four-eyed dogs, Shabala and Shyama, one dark and one with spotted fur. Some say that the dead must pass the judgment of these dogs to enter heaven, and others claim the dogs are guides, who escort humans through the alien terrain of the afterlife.

My guide through the alien terrain of a feeling I wasn’t quite ready to call grief, was Mixie an eight-year old mixed breed dog, the size of a small horse with the temperament of a baby.

White with black and grey markings that looked like she was part Dalmation and partly a trendy cow, Mixie’s genetics were a source of endless speculation at her favourite neighborhood park. Everyone agreed she was a remarkable specimen of dogness, particularly when they saw her gallop, leap and catch a ball mid-air, something she did for hours with relentless enthusiasm every single day.

Despite her extreme athleticism, Mixie was not a high-maintenance dog. At 6 am, I’d wake up and let her out of the house into the yard for a wee, after which she was happy to go back to bed. She ate her breakfast once we were up, after which we’d set out for her morning exercise. Post a hectic and non-stop game of fetch, she’d mellow out, sniffing the grass and loping around the park at a leisurely pace until it was time to go home.

Nothing gives me more joy in this life than the love and trust of an animal, and earning Mixie’s affection — both due to her size and incredible personality — was a big deal. Despite this, I matched her graceful and agile movements with slow, dragging steps all over Clissold Park. I could not believe how replete with self-pity I was, at the child abandoned over and over again, at the father I had never fully known, and who I believed I could not grieve.

Writing on how grief alters the human brain has noted that this heightened emotional state creates new connections in our neurons, which re-shape memories and our sense of time. I experienced both as a kind of madness. Walking behind a dog, arm swinging to throw and catch her beloved ball, I was four, watching my father hit my mother again and again. Cheering her mid-air leaps through tears, I wept at the child I was forced to become — hyper alert of my mother’s every mood and emotion, always fearful of being left behind, eager — no, desperate, to be loved and accepted.

Mixie’s house, a storybook three-storey with a yard and a cycle, became a mausoleum for the childhood I never had. The framed photographs of her family — picture perfect, a loving couple, vacationing with their friends, family and pets — were reminders of the chaos of my own broken home.

In all my pain, anger felt like salvation. I raged at my father, cursed him, berated him constantly for all the ways he had let me down while he was alive. More than anything else, I hated him for losing his memory — the one thing that connected us forever, the one thing he would never be able to apologize for.

In the fugue of the years after his accident, my father’s memory became a sieve. He still remembered me, but only in three convenient details that reflected well on him — thanks to his stubborn tutoring when I was a child, I spoke perfect English. I went to the college he’d always aspired to, as a young Bihari boy in New Delhi. And then best of all, I became a journalist like him.

For my father, I was a benign daughter-bot, the ideal elder child who was never around long enough to irritate him. My visits to his home with his new family grew shorter and rarer. As I grew up, I found it increasingly difficult to perform perfect-daughter-hood without being able to address or speak of the past. Who was I supposed to confront? The fast-talking, charming, quick-witted and violent man I once loved was in a wheelchair. He remembered the lyrics to every old Hindi film song he’d grown up with, and forgot that he had traumatized me senseless when I’d just barely learned to speak.

*

Mixie was a creature of routine, whose joy for each day was never dulled by habit. The one rule her doting parents had asked her to abide by was to stay off their bed — a rule she definitively knocked over, along with a bedroom lamp, on our first night together.

After that night, she and I dropped all pretense of Mixie ever sleeping on her bed again, even though it was a lovely and cushy affair with embroidery that declared it was The Dog’s Bed. Whenever I settled in to sleep, Mixie would whine next to my head, then as if laughing at a private joke, she’d leap onto the pillows, and dive under the covers where she stayed all night. No matter how emotionally ravaged I was, or how tiny I felt in the enormity of my unprocessed feelings, it was hard to stay that way with a big dog literally tucking me in each night. Her presence had the effect of a sentient weighted blanket.

As a result of her separation anxiety, Mixie needed to be in constant physical contact of some form. In the mornings, she awoke the second she felt me stir, ready to clatter down the stairs by the time my feet touched the floor. When I showered, she would follow me to the bathroom and wait patiently on the tiles until I was done. This inseparable and intense companionship meant that a few days in, when I finally began to grieve, Mixie was the first one at hand, offering a comforting paw and sighing deeply at the frailty of the human condition.

It happened one morning. I was drinking coffee in the kitchen, lost in thought, when the unforgettable aroma of East Indian goat curry wafted through Mixie’s yard. I knew that fragrance like I knew my mother’s scent. My father had never been a cook — except when it came to making his famous goat curry. The aroma of frying spices and fat dislodged a memory from the recesses of my brain. The sense of occasion on Sunday mornings when I would accompany my father to the butcher. His instructions on choosing the fattiest and tastiest portions of meat. That aroma wafting through the house. His cooking, which always left the kitchen a mess, and always left everyone wiping their plates clean.

At last, a memory of love. I felt as though my heart was cracking open.

Then it happened again.

Mixie’s neighbors, I later learned, were a Bengali family given to loud arguments that echoed across polite English yards. Listening to the familiar lilt and tone of their voices in the kitchen, I remembered one of my father’s homes in a Bengali neighborhood that I’d visited as a child. One morning, he sent me out to the park to play. He wrote down the number of his flat on a piece of paper, certain that I’d be able to use it to find my way home.

After a few hours at the park, I tried to go back and discovered I was utterly and completely lost. Panicking, walking around in circles, I was ready to burst into tears. Suddenly, I looked up and saw my father, a lanky figure in his balcony, loose cotton shirt flapping in the breeze. He was beaming down at me, clapping his hands in delight. “You found me! I knew you would, you’re such a brilliant girl!” he said. When he opened the door and hugged me, we both ignored the fact that I was holding his address upside down, and the paper was translucent with my sweat.

There it was again — a memory filled with love, a memory I had clearly repressed and masked with anger. Once love let the grief in, it would not leave. The way that anger had given me momentum to keep moving all these days, grief brought me to my knees. Mixie settled on the kitchen floor next to me, where she stayed for the next several hours. A complicated loss is still a loss, I repeated this sentence to myself. Said it over and over again until the words made no sense, like they were from a language I could not understand, and was trying to learn, a combination of syllables intelligible only to a chosen few.

*

I needed closure. In the parallel universe where he stayed, I’d once imagined confronting my father about the fact that he was a wife-beater. Other-me was fifteen, or maybe sixteen in the fantasy, and she was in a bad, dark mood even in her relaxed world.

“Why were you such an insecure and weak and pathetic person, dad?” she asked. “Did you realize what you were doing to ma? Did you think about how it would affect me? Did you care at all?”

Father-bot would be angry, maybe even enraged. He would scream at other-me, refuse to engage with my disrespectful tone, maybe even leave the house for a while. I imagined he would come home later at night, drunk and repentant. He would confess to being a functional alcoholic, the pressures of his job, his insecurities and anxieties, how he had failed my mother as a partner. He would realize that no words could undo the past. Unlike our other fights, this one would take a while to recover from. Would we ever recover? I think this was around when I stopped playing the game.

In my desperation for answers now, I wrote to a psychic I’d met a few years ago. She warned me that it was too soon after my father’s death to contact him, and that he wasl likely to still be in a state of limbo. “I can sense that he is eager to speak with you too though,” she said. “Let’s give it a try.”

I sat by Mixie at her favourite window seat and called the psychic on her phone. My father, she said, was in a state of great agitation, pacing around her room non-stop and speaking very fast.

I asked her to ask him what other-me had asked father-bot. Why had he hit my mother?

“He says he’s sorry about what he did, he was suffering from undiagnosed depression and a drunk,” she added “He also very much sees himself as a victim in the situation.”

That sounds like him, I agreed.

I told her about the game I played as a child — did he ever think about what it would be like if he stayed?

“In that parallel world, your father would have had an obedient daughter who did as she was told, and in exchange he would have done everything he could to make her life easy. It would have been a world built on his benevolence and favor, do you understand what he is saying?” the psychic asked.

“Everything you are right now is who you were meant to be. Your father is asking you not to give your power away by imagining what could have been if he stayed. He is proud of who you are, right now.”

I felt a knot loosen inside me. Growing up with my mother, I had learned to see her as her own person, a woman whose entire life did not revolve around me, who became my best friend in spite of being my parent. My father, on the other hand, had been ossified by my grief as The Parent who Left — the personification of abandonment. The psychic told me nothing I didn’t already know, but hearing her words, my grief and I were one at last. I was four and eleven and sixteen, I was all the ages I had been when my father broke my heart, but I was also firmly rooted in the presnt, building a life from the wreckage of his mistakes, becoming a woman who knew how to survive a storm. I could finally let go of the fear of being left behind. I could finally hold these memories of my father — the good and the terrible ones — without anger, and try to understand the broken man inside of them.

By the time I hung up our call, it was time to walk Mixie again. Most evenings, we repeated our throw-and-fetch routine at Clissold Park, but that day, Mixie had other plans. She veered off our regular route and dragged me with great determination towards a different place where her family sometimes walked her.

“A cemetery? Mixie, are you serious?”

She ran ahead, grinning at me over her shoulder, tongue lolling out of the side of her mouth, eyes pleading at me to chuck her ball. I couldn’t help but laugh. Trust a dog to remind me of what I needed to remember the most — in the midst of death, we are alive. Let us play until the sun sets.
Tomorrow, we begin again.