Kishore Singh: 'Pet'ty affairs

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The first pets we had was a family of cats that quite simply adopted us in Calcutta, and whenever my father was transferred, they travelled along with the baggage and adapted themselves to every new home like veterans.

By the time we got to Shillong, there were "" kittens included "" eight of them. Unfortunately, my father's official house was located in between Nagaland House and Mizoram House, and when one by one the cats kept disappearing, we knew they had ended up on our neighbours' menus.

Which must be the reason we opted for dogs next, a chocolate-coloured Apso, then a white bitch, and lots and lots of puppies, some of which stayed with us. By the time my father retired, there was a medley of strains in the canine family including a Himalayan mastiff that had been a gift from the king of Bhutan "" which we inherited.

Unfortunately, for all his high pedigree, the mastiff had tastes that were low and common and included abject adoration for the cleaning woman's wheelbarrow. He smelled so much for sitting on the rubbish that we let the cleaning woman keep him.

For a time thereafter we were pet-less. But old habits die hard, so before long we were happy to accept a friend's gift of a Labrador puppy. Labs are as affectionate as they are hungry, so when he wasn't accepting scraps from the table and making eyes at the fridge, the puppy was gnawing at table legs and carpet ends.

He ate my rubber slippers, my son's toys and my daughter's diapers with as much relish as the marinated chicken he'd sneak away in the blink of an eye. He chewed up books and swallowed the better part of a pullover without any signs of indigestion before we let him go.

Next was a kitten, one that was never house-trained, so every time we came home, the smell was enough to knock us out. She soiled behind sofas, in the balcony, on our bed "" but never, not once, in the sand pit for the purpose. When we were angry with her, she'd jump on to the neighbour's balcony, as a result of which he did not speak to us for a long, long time.

The kitten grew into a sneaky cat that learned how to get into the freezer. She killed pigeons and ate them messily in the living room. And when she had kittens, she ate those too. At some point she decided she preferred the outdoors to the apartment, and once the house had been disinfected of foul odours, we were less distressed about our inability to find her anywhere in the neighbourhood.

If we wanted any more pets, my wife said, we had to ensure they were neither messy nor smelly, so we filled an aquarium with fish, and for a while things were fine. Till, for a party, wanting to have a lily pool as the evening's talking point, we transferred the fish into a large urli and floated some flowers and candles on the surface.

In the buzz of the party, the poor fish were soon forgotten, so by the time the candles had petered out, the dripping wax had fried them to death. For a long time after, the children were inconsolable.

We relented with another pup, a Daschund this time, but he caught a stomach infection and could not be revived, and so we had him replaced immediately after by another, born unfortunately with congenital mange. He pulled through, however, though he is bald in patches, and graying prematurely, just like his owner.

My brother, though, has got his first pet, a Labrador for his son, and we're taking bets on how many days (and chewed slippers) it will be before they announce his sell-by date.