Kishore Singh: Puppy love, redux

PEOPLE LIKE THEM

Years ago, I learned not to trust our children. They'd promise they had finished their homework, only to bring back copies from school with "Incomplete" scrawled in red across the pages.

They'd take permission to stay out for three hours, but come back after five. They'd swear they had eaten their greens, only to be found out when the offending veggies would surface in the kitchen sink. You could be sure when they said they were tracking a project over the Internet that they were downloading music or gaming over the net.

Therefore, it was with a good deal of scepticism that I was bullied into permitting them a pup a year after we'd lost the family pet at the hands of an inept vet.

"Please, please, please," they chorused, when a friend called to say he had a pup going, and were we interested? "No," I said. "Yes," they cried. "Please sahib," the cook added weight to their request.

I called a family conference. "A small pup," I explained, "needs more than just love, it needs to be trained not to mess in the house." "We'll walk him and look after him and train him, you won't even notice he's there," they insisted.

"That will affect your studies," I said. "We'll cram harder and longer," they argued. "You're known for breaking your promises," I pointed out. "Not this time," they affirmed, "you'll see."

That was three months ago. Since then, the pup has lived up to his promise, the children, expectedly, haven't. "Walk him," I tell my son. "I'm studying for a test," he looks up from a thriller he's OD-ing on. "Clean up his mess," I direct my daughter. "I just showered," she says, "why can't you clean up, he's your pup too."

"No, he isn't," I say, "will somebody please rinse out his bowl?" "I did it the last time," says my wife, "it isn't my turn till next week."

Meanwhile, other than treating the apartment as a wall-to-wall bathroom for his ablutions, the pup has eaten his way through slippers and sandals (rendering them useless), gnawed at the carpet so it doesn't have edges any more, made a meal of the upholstery, and chewed up the chair legs so they're all wobbly on their feet.

It's got so, the cook is always pretending to be out walking the pup, so it's impossible to get even a cup of coffee any more, unless you're willing to make it yourself.

Before he'd been allowed home, I'd laid down some ground rules for the pup. "He doesn't get to sit on the sofa," I told the kids, but the pup makes an exception of not having been told and won't settle for anything less than the cushioned seats. "No feeding him at the table," I'd said, but unfortunately forgot to mention he wasn't to be allowed to eat off the children's plates "" so he does.

"He isn't to sleep in your beds," I'd warned them, so, of course, he "only rests" under their quilts. When it's time to take him around to the vet for his shots, amazingly everyone turns busy, so I have to haul him off while he soils the car seat in protest.

He's fastidious too, so he'll only eat what the cook serves fresh. If the milk's a day old, he'll turn up his nose; if the boiled egg has been kept a few hours, he won't have it.

Packaged food is fine, as long as it's gourmet canine chow, not home-ground oatmeal. But when it's time for TLC, it's the kids who're given a tail-wagging welcome, while I'm ignored. "He doesn't love you," justifies my daughter, "because you don't take care of him the way we do."