Baba was the headmaster of the Juvenile Reformation School in Hazaribagh when he brought Lady home from Calcutta. Lady was the name of his first German Shepherd. She would have been just as old as I was when he brought me. I had heard that he had bought her at a high price from a professional dog breeder. This was remarkable at a time when a school headmaster was not paid the kind of salary that made a pedigreed puppy easily affordable, although Baba’s Juvenile Reformation School was in fact different from regular high schools and he used to be paid more than ordinary headmasters. Baba’s MA was in psychology, but before he began working at this eminent institution, he was sent by the government to Bombay after his MA for a special one-year course.
So Baba was different from run-of-the-mill headmasters and other middle-class people. This was how he resolved to spend a sizeable part of his salary to indulge his fancy for a pedigreed dog. Not that he had to face any hardships during his life as a student. His father gave him an ample allowance when he studied in college and university. I will tell the detailed story of this part of Baba’s life later. Right now, in order to make sense of Dadi’s behaviour in the early years, it is essential that I understand her and Lady’s story.
Baba went to Calcutta to fetch Lady. He had found out before leaving that if he did in fact want a purebred German Shepherd pup, he would have to buy it from a breeder registered with the Kennel Club of India. This was how Baba bought Lady, who was then less than three months old, from an ICS officer. Lady had been properly registered already by the Kennel Club of India. Her full and official name was Lady Love of Amola. The ICS officer had named her for the princely state once owned by his family. This princely state was located in Bengal, and his entire family had a taste for pedigreed breeds. Just as Baba did with all his new interests, in the case of getting a pet dog, too, he held back until he had made enquiries everywhere and spoken to several people in an effort to extract all the information he could about German Shepherds. Lady was black, with the patches of yellow that characterise German Shepherds on some parts of her body.
Baba was about 35 when he brought Lady home, and Dadi, about five years younger. In keeping with her nature, Dadi looked after Lady with great care. She was a strict vegetarian, and, leave alone eating meat or fish, she did not even allow either of them to be cooked in her kitchen. But she did not object when Baba began to buy meat for Lady and cook it on a separate chulha in the yard. Baba made sure nothing was ever wanting when it came to Lady’s food, and when she was six months old, he began to give her a bit of obedience training, such as calling her to himself with a command, or asking her to sit, and so on. This was the time Baba procured a copy of a famous book meant for training dogs professionally, which was extremely useful for dog lovers. It was written by the king of the princely state of Bhadri in Uttar Pradesh. The book was titled Train Your Own Dog, and it used the medium of illustrations and sketches to explain step-by-step how one’s dog should be trained so that it can not only guard its master in a professional manner but also help the police to capture thieves and other criminals. What is notable is that at the beginning of the sixties, books like these were not published in India, and even if they were, they were not publicised properly. This was the reason this excellent book, written by the king of Bhadri, was rather famous among dog lovers, and was also quite expensive by the standards of that era. But because it was for Lady, Baba wrote to the publishers and had the book sent to him through VPP. Such was the intensity of his ambitions for Lady.
Juvenile convicts used to be brought to the Juvenile Reformation School to be reformed – criminals who had not yet reached adulthood and had not been apprehended for heinous crimes. Pickpockets, thieves, troublemakers, and so on. Alongside basic education, these youngsters were also given vocational training so that they could become self-reliant once their term in reform school had ended. Baba was thoroughly familiar with the mentality of such youngsters, which was why he never felt uncomfortable in their company. He introduced Lady to his juvenile delinquent students, and they used to help him train her by acting as decoys, as the book instructed. Sometimes Baba would ask one of the boys to play the role of a thief. He would drop his handkerchief and hide somewhere nearby. Then Baba would tell Lady to look for the boy acting as a thief, which involved making her smell the handkerchief and then giving her the command to search. Sniffing at the boy’s footprints, Lady would take the route he had taken to track him down.
The campus of the Juvenile Reformation School was well spread out. Its main building had till recently been the central structure in the famous Central Jail of Hazaribagh, the same jail from which the renowned freedom fighter Jayaprakash Narayan had escaped. After Independence, the Indian government changed the purpose of the buildings and set up the first juvenile delinquent reformatory, as it is referred to in conversations, in eastern India. Select people from the state education service were appointed to this institution, and this was how Baba came to spend the first ten years of his working life here.
The quarters that Baba was given from the institution were not particularly big, but there was a large open expanse of land attached to it, in which he made a beautiful garden and kept two or three cows of his own. These were not hybrid cows like the Jersey cows or Holsteins of today. Baba would hand-pick his Indian cows from the cattle fair at Sonepur and make them comfortable so as to ensure ten to fifteen seers of milk from them every day. People from the surrounding areas would visit to see Baba’s cows for themselves. Lady delighted in all of this. Baba never allowed anything to be lacking in her diet. Even though he knew Dadi had been brought up in a strictly vegetarian family, he prepared her to accept the fact that meat would be cooked for Lady in the house, even if it was only in the courtyard. Lady used to get her fill of milk to drink, and she had arrived at a loving understanding with Dadi. Baba made full use of the training he had given Lady to strengthen Dadi’s attraction and love for her. Whenever Dadi visited one of her neighbours, Baba gave a command to Lady, who responded by walking right next to Dadi, matching her step for step. Whenever Dadi gave her the command of “sit”, Lady sat down without protest, not moving from the spot. When Dadi started walking back home, Lady, too, rose to her feet and walked back with her, exactly as though she were Dadi’s bodyguard. Now these were the things that made Dadi’s chest swell with pride, for her friends in the neighbourhood never tired of lavishing praise on Lady’s appearance, her measured movements, the way she followed Dadi’s instructions to the letter, and her discipline. There was one particular trick of Lady’s that was a favourite of Dadi’s. Baba had trained Lady to follow a specific command to stand on guard. So, whenever he parked his cycle and gave the command, “Lady, guard,” it was impossible for anyone to even go near the cycle, never mind touching it. Dadi would sometimes take her youngest son – who was barely four at the time – along with her and demonstrate Lady’s abilities as a protector to her neighbours by ordering Lady to guard him. These were unique experiences for the people of the neighbourhood. They had never seen such a restrained and disciplined dog. There wasn’t even a television service in those days, so they could not have seen anything similar on TV either.
So this was what the attachment between Lady and Dadi was like at the time. What had changed, then, for Dadi to have made such a scene when it came to me? To understand this you have to first comprehend Dadi’s personal background and history. For this, you might as well read the diary entries she wrote herself.
Excerpted with permission from Our Madhopur Home, Tripurari Sharan, translated from the Hindi by Arunava Sinha, Simon and Schuster India.
Disclosure: Arunava Sinha is the editor of the Books and Ideas section of Scroll.
