Travels with My Charlie

My dog Charlie just died. He was a likeable chap. Only a dog enthusiast would understand what I mean. Charlie was nine. Missed double digits by nine months. Never caught so much as a cold in his time. All he, or I for that matter knew about veterinarians was that they were people who gave dogs their yearly shots. That’s it. I never needed to know things like ‘which vet to go to’, because Charlie was so resilient and tough, it never seemed to matter. Then, a few months ago, intestinal cancer forced him to go under the knife and not come out of it long enough to tell the tale.

I remember his first dogfight. He almost killed his mangy foe. I am a humane individual and quite frankly never DID approve of his fights. Even told him so every now and then. Nonetheless, that first battle, where I was powerless to stop him, he quite simply doled out one hell of a beating. There was one moment where both dogs paused to catch their breath. The image is ingrained in my mind. He had his jaw firmly locked onto his antagonist’s neck - blood all over.

As far as I am concerned, his bark and bite were quite evenly matched. I lectured him about this matter, but he sat back, licked his wounds and stared through me like I was an idiot. And perhaps I was. After all, I was talking to a dog. Still, he DID listen - sometimes.

When we lived in F-8, he OWNED street forty. It was his, and he shared nothing. From his home and hideout - the terrace that looked onto the street, he peered down and barked at anything or anyone with the gall to traverse his street. No one was exempt. Bicycles, vehicles, people, cats, dogs, F-16s every year on the 23rd of March and birds that invaded his airspace - nothing got through without its fair share of hair-raising snarling and mad barking.

People who don’t like dogs, or just haven’t ever owned them, can never understand what it means to lose a dog one took for granted for nine years. Yes, I loved Charlie, looked after him, fed him, walked him and generally kept him out of trouble. But by saying I took him for granted, I refer to his existence. He was always THERE. When I came home, I could always count on him being there. It was routine, and routines are not meant to be broken. When they ARE, one feels uncomfortable and distraught. So, when the last of the lethal injection disappeared down the syringe and into his vein, I lost my routine, and more importantly, my oldest friend.

We buried him at the bottom of the garden and planted a fruit tree over his resting place that we fondly refer to as ‘The Charlie Tree’. My mother named him after John Steinbeck’s Charlie.

Three of my greatest friends Osman, Nadia and Yasmeen were present at the funeral. And not just to humour a friend who overdoes things; they were there because they understood the significance of the silence that shrouded Bani Gala that day.

Charlie was a character - astoundingly humanlike. Proud and obdurate, he was just like anyone else in our family - he never did anything I told him either. People invest vast quantities of time and money to train their dogs. Charlie wouldn’t hear of it. He was his own man, and everybody who knew him was well aware of this trait. To cite an annoying example: whenever Charlie managed to flee the premises (despite frequent walks on a leash), he was no one’s dog. Even ‘free spirit’ doesn’t fit. His whole demeanour would transform and he would become someone whose way any sane person would stay out of. Getting him back home would become top priority. The words ‘Charlie’s out!’ would ring through the house, causing everyone to freeze up for a moment, then come alive and bark orders at each other. We would all drop whatever we were doing and join in the hunt. Our methods may have seemed unorthodox to outsiders, but as far as we were concerned, they were the select few ways to get him home where he couldn’t attack anyone just for the fun of it.

Knowing he loved car rides, we managed to pull up alongside him, open the door, and let him jump in. However, this particular method only worked twice. The third time he got wise to us. Another time when we were chasing him in the car and came to a halt the same time he did, he ran up to the car, and stuck his head through the driver’s window at which point my mother grabbed him by the collar while I went around the car and grabbed HIM.

Proud father of twenty-two (we don’t know who was responsible for the other eight), Charlie was, for some odd reason, petrified of his own flesh and blood. Sure, confronting and beating to a pulp fully grown dogs was no problem, but leaving him alone with a few innocuous pups had him running all over the place while they gave chase imagining it to be some sort of game.

Charlie never feared heights. Quite the opposite, in fact. His exuberance on the terrace in F-8 was the cause of his falling over the railing once, and jumping twice. The fall was quite nasty: he slipped over the railing, fell six or seven feet, bounced off the neighbour’s wall and onto their driveway. That was the ONLY time I ever heard him yelp with pain - BEFORE he got sick of course, and had to undergo all sorts of unpleasant procedures. He stoically endured much pain in various dogfights when other dogs’ jaws were shut tight over his ear, leg or tail. But he never yelped. He was absolutely fearless. This trait often landed him in trouble. There was once a time when he ran off and made straight for a property that housed several abnormally large Bull Mastiffs. Bounding into the lions’ den, it took a deep cut under the eye to make him realise he was grossly outnumbered and outweighed.

His departure left our house empty and far too quiet. The other dogs don’t jump and bark with joy the way he did when he was served dinner. I can’t see him from the guest room window anymore. I never need to wake up in the middle of the night to see what he’s been barking about for the last thirty minutes. I don’t need to be worried sick he’ll get shot when he gets loose anymore. His kennel has been taken over by Tigger. Even Soots seems to wonder what became of that bloke in the next enclosure, even though she loathed him. Ziggy is new to the household, and everyone in the family adores her, but it has to be said. She’s no Charlie. None of them are…