Every family has a threshold — a line at which the outside world is either let in or kept out. In some families it is drawn at the front door. In ours, for two generations, it was drawn somewhere just beyond it: at the question of whether a dog was allowed to cross.
For my father’s side of the family the answer was never in doubt — a dog was a necessary part of the home, and a house without one seemed somehow incomplete. My mother’s side drew the line differently. They were people for whom the domestic sphere had a kind of purity to guard, and a dog did not belong inside it. If anything, a dog was something to be kept out.
Families distil their traditions, their values, and their prejudices into each generation that follows. My father carried forward his family’s open door. My mother, for years, kept hers closed to all but grudging tolerance. It would take five dogs, over the better part of a lifetime — dogs sent away, dogs that refused to leave, dogs that let themselves in — before her threshold moved as far as it eventually did.
We lived, when it began, in a colony on the edge of the Sanjay Gandhi National Park in Mumbai. Twelve bungalows, each set in almost half an acre of land, ringed by trees, flowering shrubs and stretches of grass. Set in the shape of a closed necklace with an internal road connecting each bungalow and hosting within it tennis courts, swimming pool, and gardens including a deer park, an exclusive Eden in an otherwise crowded, under served, bustling city. Each bungalow was shaped like an open bracket, its open side enclosing an inner garden, separated from the larger outer garden by a mesh fence almost entirely lost under creepers that grew in wild profusion — overgrown, by then, past keeping anything out. When the creepers bloomed, the gardens were spectacular — a riot of colour on a carpet of green, framed by giant mango trees.
It was an idyllic place for a child, and, as it turned out, an idyllic place for a dog.
Our first dog was Tony, an Alsatian of classic build, coloring and temperament, with the kindest, warmest eyes I have known — always twinkling with mirth. For the two and a half years before my brother was born, Tony and I were rarely apart. I thought it deeply unfair that he was bathed only once a week, while I had to bathe twice a day — sometimes three, when I came home covered in mud.
Into this idyllic life came roller skates.
A German family lived next door, and one day they bought their daughter, Angelica, a spanking-new pair. She wore them proudly, zipping around the colony while I watched fascinated. I must have been staring rather obviously, because either I asked to try them or, noticing my curiosity, Angelica offered. Whatever the circumstances, soon enough I was wobbling along on her skates — and then, to my delight, zipping around almost as confidently as she did.
Then Angelica wanted her skates back.
I was slow to return them. At some point she grabbed at me, and in the scuffle I fell.
What happened next happened in a flash. A big tawny body leapt between us and planted itself squarely in front of me. Tony stood there, teeth bared, eyes flashing, a low growl rising from his throat. He did not need words.
The message was unmistakable: mess with him and you mess with me.
Angelica shrieked and ran off terrified. Tony turned back to me as if nothing had happened.
Instinctively, I knew this was not good news. Tony and I were both going to be in a big soup.
I peeled off the skates, handed them to the maid, and ran home with Tony, straight into the bedroom. I was trying to play with a toy when the doorbell rang. It was Angelica’s mother — arms akimbo, face set in fury, asking to see me.
My mother, who had opened the door, remained perfectly calm.
“He’s in his room,” she said. “But why don’t you come in? I was just making some tea — I’d love to serve you some.”
I remember thinking that this was an extraordinarily brave offer of tea, under the circumstances — a door held open, deliberately, at the exact moment it would have been easier to keep it shut.
Mothers are as fierce as they are loving. That day I met the fierce form of both. First came Angelica’s mother. Then, as my mother heard the story, her own expression hardened. The tone in which she summoned us to the living room said it all.
We walked in with small steps. Before either mother could say a word, Tony crossed the room, placed his head in Angelica’s mother’s lap, and began to whine softly, tail wagging. He seemed to be saying: I am deeply sorry. The children were playing, and I should have known better. But my best friend fell after your daughter pushed him, and I just lost it.
Whatever his offence, Tony seemed to know an apology was called for — and exactly where to begin.
Recalling that scene now, I think it was those liquid, mirthful eyes that melted Angelica’s mother’s heart. Her hand reached out and began to stroke his head. There was a silence. And I swear Tony turned his head towards me with a look that needed no translation: Idiot. Stop gawking. Go do the same to your mother!
Tony’s intelligence, his physicality, his temperament did not go unnoticed. A friend of my father’s, who visited often, once mentioned — casually — that dogs of Tony’s calibre found a welcome home in the police, trained in a variety of skills and looked after by professional handlers. My father dismissed the idea outright. But the notion lodged itself in my mother’s mind.
Not long after — I was four — Tony and I sat in the garden sharing a mango, one bite for me, one for him, scrupulously fair. My mother, a strict vegetarian, had a heart attack. She rushed into the garden, snatched me away, and took me inside, where I was made to bathe, brush my teeth extra vigorously, and sit through a long diatribe about infections, germs, and every disease a boy could catch eating with a dog.
I suspect the matter might have ended there. But the next morning, perhaps to demonstrate my superior understanding of the situation, she found me back in the garden, finishing what was left of the mango.
The world imploded. She summoned my father and declared that Tony had to be separated from me, forthwith. The family legend has it that my father was more worried about whether Tony might get infected. But quietly, that week, Tony was sent to join the Mumbai Police Dog Squad. There was no scene at a gate, no car to wave off — one day he was simply gone, taken out through whichever door I wasn’t watching.
I never saw him again.
I was disconsolate and my mind could not grapple with the enormity of it. Tony was gone from our home, as far as I understood, because he ate a mango.
Between dogs, we had other pets — cats, tortoises, snakes, monkeys, horses, cows, fish, even a bird. But it was the dogs that dominated the landscape of our childhood.
Years passed. My brother and I canvassed for another dog, and — I suspect more from a lingering guilt over Tony than from the success of our persuasion — my mother agreed to bring home a dachshund pup. Befitting his shape, we named him Longie: black, with tan socks and paws, long and enormously energetic.
He endeared himself to us the moment he arrived. This little pup — an elongated sausage on wheels — dashed about sniffing every corner and piece of furniture, then leapt onto us, licking our faces and emptying our pockets. Every item he pulled out he paraded proudly round the room before dumping it back in our laps, as if to say: you are now part of my family. We fell in love and spent hours playing with him.
Around the time our sister was born, a grand-aunt from Chennai was visiting. As is the wont of children, my brother and I were playing in the room where our infant sister lay on a foam mat on the floor. The game was to jump over her from increasing distances and see from how far away we could without hitting her — a couple of jumps in, Longie decided to join the fun.
If some kids have a bias to underestimating risk to body and soul, some mothers have a knack of appearing exactly when children are having the most fun. My mother walked in just as my brother cleared our sister, barely, and Longie — having bounded in behind him — settled himself on top of her, face bent low, licking hers.
My mother screamed, snatched the infant off the floor, and stormed off yelling for help. A few minutes later we were hauled before a council of grandmothers — paternal and maternal — a grand-aunt, and our mother, and lectured on our unacceptable behaviour. What I remember most is the council’s verdict: Longie would be sent to our grand-aunt’s home in Chennai, where she already kept a Great Dane and a boxer — and no infant.
This time, at least, there would be a door to say goodbye at.
The day of her departure arrived quickly. We knew she would leave for the station that morning. The car came to take her. Her bags were loaded. She paid her respects in the puja room, and my mother met her with the tray of kumkum and aarti. She said her goodbyes to all of us and turned for the car — and that was when my mother called after her: “Hold on — where’s Longie?”
He was nowhere to be found. Everybody called for the dog. We sat on the steps, looking forlorn and detached. Longie had vanished. My father, glancing at the clock, told my grand-aunt she would miss her train if she delayed any further — the dog had probably wandered off somewhere in the colony, chasing a squirrel, best to carry on. As she stepped toward the car, we all distinctly heard a whimper. It took only a moment to trace where we had hidden him in the shoe stand just inside the front door. It was, in hindsight, the least strategic hiding place available to two young conspirators: the one place guaranteed to be opened before anyone left.
Longie went to Chennai as planned. The lecture we braced for never came — small mercy, in a family where every dog, it seemed, eventually had to go.
The next dog did not so much arrive as insist on being let in.
My brother was walking home very late one night when he noticed a small pup had attached itself to him, trotting along faithfully, step for step, all the way to our door. He let himself in and left the pup outside, hoping that it would wander off by morning.
It had not. It was sitting exactly where he’d left it, and the moment the door opened it wagged its tail with the enthusiasm reserved for one’s favorite people in the world. He had spent the night on the wrong side of the threshold and simply refused to accept the verdict.
Micky became a member of the family.
It didn’t take him long to establish who was really in charge of that threshold. If we didn’t reciprocate his warm greeting in the morning, he made sure we knew it. If our eyes met his and we looked away without a word, he made sure we corrected this dereliction of courtesy. He had, too, a working theory of thunder: at the first distant rumble he would abandon whatever he was doing, station himself against the nearest human leg, and stay there, trembling but dignified, until the sky settled down again — as if standing guard were easier than admitting to being frightened.
Terrace doors in the house were usually kept shut, but Micky introduced us to the southerly wind that blew in from the sea, cooling the rooms and bringing a certain lightness to the afternoon. He seemed to know, before anyone else did, when it was coming — scratching at the terrace door, waiting for a human to step up and open it for him. One afternoon the breeze arrived earlier than usual, and so, impatiently, did he.
He learned to bring the newspaper in from the doorstep for my father’s morning coffee, and to carry in the milk — teeth placed with a care that left neither a bite mark nor trace of saliva on either.
It was my mother who noticed this first, and who, without quite admitting it, began leaving the milk packet a little closer to the gate each morning. She still spoke of him, in company, as “the children’s dog.” At home, though, she was the one who saved him the last piece of toast, and the one who complained, more than anyone, when he was too unwell one week to take his evening walk. Mostly, he slept at the centre of the room during the evening gathering, and I noticed that her chair, more often than not, had drifted a little closer to wherever he lay.
Micky never left home. He died at the ripe old age of fourteen, on the right side of every door he had ever cared about. His was a loss much grieved — the family had lost a wise old gentleman, and my mother, I think, grieved him hardest of all of us.
Names in our family were always chosen by my mother, and they were always literal. Longie, because he was long. A cat named Blacky, because she was black. Two tortoises she named Slow and Poke, which she found very funny — until the day they went missing. She had never heard of turtle soup, and was aghast at the very thought that someone in the colony might have.
Her crowning achievement in this line was to name an Alsatian my brother and I presented to my parents: Tanzy, in remembrance of their years in Tanzania, from where they had returned to Chennai — a dog named, fittingly, for a border they themselves had once crossed.
By then we had moved from the bungalow colony in Mumbai to a house near the beach in Chennai, and it was there that Tanzy grew up. As a pup he looked like a small bear — round, black and fluffy, with big eyes buried in a thick bush of hair. As he grew, he came fully into his colors: a classic German Shepherd, a rich black coat with dark tan markings in all the right places. He stood alert, majestic, ears pointed upwards, shoulders back, tail falling like a waterfall, eyes watchful and sharp. He rarely barked, and he followed my father everywhere, always at heel, never more than a nose away. When visitors arrived he would circle them once, giving each a sniff, then return to my father’s feet, having decided, in his own quiet way, who could be trusted through the door. My father used to slouch; that stopped with Tanzy. A man cannot let such a magnificent animal down — he has to stand as straight as the dog beside him.
Every morning we walked with Tanzy on the beach, an hour or two, no leash required. He stayed at heel, ran to fetch a ball or a stick, but never wandered off to explore unless permitted.
Micky had almost converted my mother into a dog person. Tanzy made her a dog lover. There is a distinction. The first allows you to live with dogs; the second demands that you must always have one at home to complete the family. By now, she was on the other side of her own threshold.
Given how faithfully Tanzy kept to every boundary set for him, it is perhaps fitting that his story turns on the one boundary he refused to cross.
His pedigree was formidable — a grandsire who had been a two-time world champion, a sire owned by a breeder whose bloodlines were closely tracked and much admired. He won local championships effortlessly, and it was not long before the family felt the pressure to enter him at the national level. He made it to the final — and was disqualified, because he had only one scrotum. Dogs have two, but occasionally the second fails to descend. Tanzy’s had not.
The competition had raised expectations among breeders, and the pressure this put on the family did not end with the disqualification. Undeterred, the breeder arranged for a mate. A dame was brought home to pair with Tanzy. She was held by her handlers in the middle of the driveway, the front gates locked, and Tanzy was encouraged to mount her.
He walked up to her. He took one look at her snarling face, held fast by her handlers, back legs splayed — and bolted. He bounded to the gate, forced his head through the bars, and began to howl: the cry, it seemed, of a tortured soul dying to be set free of this abominable treatment.
The owner lady was not amused. “It’s a family trait,” I said, lightly. “The men in our family are easily intimidated by our womenfolk.” My grandparents, watching the whole drama from the porch, found it hugely funny and laughed; my sister and mother threw daggers at me instead. I rescued Tanzy, packed off the dame, and went back to my room.
After Tanzy passed on, my parents never got round to keeping another dog — I suspect Micky and Tanzy between them had used up all the emotional bandwidth they had left to give. My brother, meanwhile, kept three beautiful dogs: a Jack Russell terrier named Jazz, a boxer named Kali, and a massive Alsatian named Dobby. In time, I inherited Jazz from him. Kali had passed away from ill health by then, and Dobby went to live with a farmer with a large holding, well suited to a dog his size.
Jazz was four when she came to live with me. She died at twenty. The sixteen years we shared were a love story of their own — and, of every dog in this family’s history, the one who cared least what any door or gate had to say about where she was and wasn’t permitted to go.
Jack Russell terriers are notoriously possessive, frenzy level energy, high-maintenance dogs, deeply inquisitive and quick to view every other dog as a fox to be attacked. Where Tanzy never strayed from a heel, Jazz never heeled unless she was on a leash — and even then, only just. A leash, after all, is just another threshold with a rope attached; Jazz treated both the same way.
We were living in Bandra at the time. One evening I came home to find the whole house in turmoil. The front door had been left open, and Jazz had slipped through it and disappeared into the busy streets outside — the first dog in this family to cross a threshold entirely on her own initiative, with no help and no permission. Petrified at the thought of losing her, I jumped into the car and began a sweep of the surrounding streets, block by block. After an hour of increasingly desperate driving, we turned down an adjacent road — and there, sauntering along at the end of a makeshift leash, was Jazz, leading a man in shorts behind her. I asked my driver to stop and wait for them to reach us. When they were about ten feet away, I shouted her name. Jazz took one look, bounded out of the man’s grip, and leapt into my arms, yelping as though I were the one at fault. The man, backing off and stammering, explained that he’d found her wandering anxiously, nearly run over by a bus, and had caught her and fashioned a leash to keep her safe. I was simply grateful to have her back.
We were walking very early one morning — early December, misty, a slight chill in the air, very few people about. On a whim, I unleashed Jazz, and she immediately began exploring every nook and cranny within reach. As we turned a corner, I saw, a beat too late, a woman walking a dog several times Jazz’s size. Before anyone could stop her, Jazz had shot forward, body low to the ground, and launched herself at the other dog’s neck. The dog stood there, bewildered, absorbing the assault, while its owner went hysterical. I reached them a moment later, caught Jazz by the scruff of her neck, and yanked her off. A firm pat, a leash, and I made her sit at a distance while things settled — the only boundary she ever consistently respected being the one I physically enforced.
The other dog, recovered now from its bewilderment, strained at the end of its leash to get at Jazz; its owner held firm. Jazz, for her part, showed no interest at all — she sat to one side, the picture of complete indifference, as if the line between another dog’s territory and her own had never occurred to her, and never would.
At that time, we lived in a ground-floor apartment with a garden, and the garden had its own boundary: a compound wall, low enough to sun yourself on, high enough — everyone assumed — to keep most quarrels at a safe distance. Before Jazz, the garden had seen only birds, insects, the occasional field rat, and a few cats, all coexisting under the terms that wall implied. Her arrival tore the terms up. Where cats had once sunned themselves lazily, licking themselves clean, now they had to stay above Jazz’s jump height — Jack Russells are natural climbers, and higher than most creatures expect. Rats, insects and birds fared no better; a lapse in concentration could prove fatal. Jazz had, quite clearly, become the apex predator of this small jungle, and the old wall meant nothing to her at all.
And then came the strangest comeback story I have witnessed. It was the cats — one in particular — who worked out how to exploit her instincts against her, using the very wall Jazz had rendered meaningless. Whenever Jazz spotted a cat, she shot off in hot pursuit; if the cat sat on the compound wall, she would leap and snap at it from below. Every other creature in the garden concluded that discretion was the better part of valour and kept well away. This cat decided otherwise. It found a perch exactly high enough to be out of Jazz’s reach, but close enough to sit squarely in her face — and, almost deliberately, every morning, it would climb lazily up to that spot and call out, loudly, drawing all the attention it could. Jazz would tear off barking and spend the next several minutes bouncing furiously beneath the perch, trying to reach her. The provocation and the response would continue until Jazz, exhausted, limped back into the house and flopped into her bed. Peace would return to the garden. I swear this happened every single morning — the old wall, for all that Jazz had made a mockery of it, still finding a way to keep just enough distance between two creatures who would otherwise never leave each other alone.
My mother spent the first part of her life keeping the threshold shut. She spent the second part of it unable to imagine the house without something on the other side of it, waiting to be let in. Somewhere between Micky and Tanzy, the door stopped being a question and became, simply, a door — something you opened, gladly, because someone you loved was standing on the other side of it, waiting.