It starts in the middle with Ponni.
My grandmother, for all her faults, could not be matched in her wit. In her life, dogs came to her — a series of dogs, most of whom just appeared around her. It is not uncommon in India; they come to you, the stray ones, you feed them and they hang around. They gradually become yours. She later remarked to me about one of the strays that adopted her, “Look at my Mani, it is a gentleman dog. Waiting patiently by the door. Look at yours, at your side, it just begs for food”. Now you know why I said she had many faults.
But Ponni was different. Long before I was born, one of her sons brought this pup to the house, a Pomeranian that actually was an Indian Spitz.
Each morning, my grandmother went to the tiny cow-barn by the house to negotiate milk from the cows. Once done, she would return to the house to prepare coffee for the family and start the day.
On her way back into the house, carrying fresh milk, still warm, Ponni would wait by the entrance. My grandmother would pour a bit into Ponni’s bowl and Ponni would lap it up happily, the first person in the house to have had their morning beverage, a right on which it [1] insisted.
Ponni had a round arm chair. All the children in the house had been photographed in that chair but it belonged to Ponni. Some mornings, my grandmother would be lost in thought, probably the usual morning jitters. She was a mother of eight who worked as a teacher. Just the prospect of that morning coffee service for the family seems daunting to me, but few things daunted her in life.
She would enter the house, forgetting to glance at the eager pup looking up at her. My grandmother would realize her mistake in the kitchen, but it would be too late. Once that threshold was crossed, Ponni became unassailable. For Ponni, it was warm milk or nothing. I wonder if there was something in that milk that made everyone in that family irredeemably stubborn.
My mother herself is uncharted territory before her morning filter-coffee, which has to be scalding and perfect. The heat seems to be oxygen.
And so it was for Ponni. My grandmother would return to Ponni and apologize, and pour the milk in its bowl. She would coax and beg, but Ponni would remain unmoved. No amount of threats or pets would shake its will. It would climb into its chair, and curl up in a white ball, and remain there all day, the milk in its bowl untouched.
On Sundays, Ponni would sometimes get meat. It would eat till its belly was brimming and then it would sleep on its back for hours, cotton tummy up, paws in the air, too full to move.
I never met Ponni, it passed years before I was born. But it lives on in legend, generations forward. And now, each time our tummies are full, we do a Ponni impression in our house.
You have probably come to see, perhaps even before me, that this is a eulogy. “She stuck her face and went”, my mother would say to mirrors. I inherited her face, and her ardent love for dogs. People say many things about her, and those things are true, I have seen that too. But the facet of her that I knew as her grandchild fits flush with the image of a warm grandmother.
[1] — it is a term of endearment in my household.
