Rani was entitled to pets and cuddles all day, but she was not allowed on the bed. This was Tara’s rule. Her problem wasn’t some puritanical belief that dogs are filthy, although Rani certainly is, or that everything must always be its cleanest version, although she is a bit neurotic. Her insistence came from the claim that she was allergic. To what, you ask? Good question. The list gets longer each time. “Dust, grime, dog hair, pollen, things that look or feel gross, crumbs and bits, particles - especially on surfaces, listen why can’t you shut your iPad and put it away before you fall asleep in one second, plus, you know I have bad sinus issues.” Really anything that Rani could bring back from her walk and leave on the bed. This always seemed like a convenient way to think about allergies. The way some kids develop an “allergy” to vegetables around the time they learn the word.
Apart from this official policy, Rani and I also had an under-the-table arrangement. She could hang out on the bed sometimes so long as any trace of this was removed after. No dirt or foreign bits could be left behind. And we had to pretend like nothing was going on. Rani and I snuck around like we were having a dirty affair. We would wait for Tara to leave for court in the morning, and once I locked the door behind her, Rani would slowly climb out of her cushion, stretch, get ready for the upgrade, and walk towards me with her tail wagging. Her little black eyes would tell me to get my hands ready to massage her belly . She would watch patiently as I’d put a sheet down on her spot in the corner. Then, without invitation or warning, she would jump up and become the small spoon.
I would work from home, so unless we were interrupted by meetings, Rani and I did this several times a day. The frequency of our cuddling resembled the frequency of my smoking back then. One as soon as I wake up, one after breakfast, one before lunch, an extended half-asleep one after lunch, to be savoured, and one in the evening before Tara was back. I would perform an extensive sweep of the place when she was on her way back: violently dust the bedsheet and mattress to get rid of any loose hairs, use the hair-dryer and vacuum cleaner, comb the whole thing over again and again with a lint roller, and as the last step, put on the torch on my phone to pick up stubborn bits with my fingers. If a forensic team showed up to collect DNA samples and paw-prints, they would leave empty-handed.
Despite how this sounds, there was no real deception. Tara had lived with us long enough to never expect full compliance. She was okay with the odd breach if things didn’t get out of hand. My obsessive cleaning and keeping up of appearances were just our way of being considerate.
But contrary to popular belief, Tara is human too and needs her own dose of Rani cuddles from time to time. In one of those marital moments of confession without consequence, she told me once, slightly drunk, that sometimes when I wasn’t home, she would lie in bed and summon Rani. At first, Rani would wonder if the offer was genuine or a test, but Tara would whisper sweet nothings and pull her up. Rani would go around in circles three times and become, as Tara called it, a jalebi. Tara did not find it hard to switch between these two modes, petting her in bed one day and making no eye contact the next. My absence was essential to her making an exception, though. While she trusted Rani’s ability to follow her commands, my training was not very good. I had that face – the Well-if-YOU-can-then-WHY-CAN’T-I??? face. Before we knew it, I’d have split the bed into three equal parts and given Rani her own bedside table. Tara felt it best that I didn’t get involved.
This is how things went on for about five years. We had found a perfect, uneventful equilibrium; everyone was happy and nobody craved change. Then one day, without much notice, we went from a family of three to a family of five.
On Day 1, our three-year-olds were terrified of Rani, something Rani had never witnessed before. For the next few days, she presented her cutest self in an attempt to convert them, succeeding entirely by Day 7, by which time Rani was now terrified of them. Once the kids understood that she was careful enough to not hurt them, all they wanted was to be her favourite humans, and they simply would not leave her alone. They tried everything to become friends with her. They pulled her ears and her tail and tried to paint her nails; they climbed her like a horse and wouldn’t stop laughing when she got away dropping their backsides to the floor. They inspected her teeth and lectured her about brushing and then forgot their objections when she licked their faces.
Once the wild, unstoppable only-child, Rani was now seven, and had considerably less patience and energy for this sort of thing. The noise was too much for her and none of her usual tactics to take space worked. For instance, when I would smother her and refuse to let go – her polite licks turning to polite growls – she would free herself and hide under the coffee table in her safe spot. Me following her or fitting under there was out of the question. But if there’s one thing the kids enjoy more than hiding under tables, it’s hiding under tables with their dog. Sometimes after the girls squeezed into her spot, she would come running to me and place her chin on my knee, looking up desperately as if to say, “What the fuck have you done? Who are these random children and why are they in our house?”
A few months in, after things had settled down and become uneventful once again, the girls started waking up in the middle of the night to come to our bed. Many parents will put a stop to this before it becomes the norm. Not us. The kids and us had met each other a little late in life and we all wanted to make up for lost time. We never even considered sending them back to their room.
In the early nights of this migration, Rani did nothing but deliver long, disapproving sighs from her cushion. My sense is she trusted us to do the right thing and put a stop to this; to treat the kids at par with the first-born. She would probably have settled for many reactions. We could have just ignored them as they stood by the bed hoping to be picked up, we could have said “No. Down. No bed. No bed”, we could have collected their bodies into compact balls and slid them off to the floor. But no, they were treated - openly every night - the way she was treated only sometimes, and only when nobody was looking. Us opening the edge of the blanket to tuck them in and holding them tightly through the night must have seemed outrageous to her.
One night she took matters into her own paws. When Juni entered our room half asleep, Rani took it as her cue. She got up from her cushion, came to my side of the bed, and without sound or ceremony or even the pretence of seeking permission, climbed up the bed, and lay down in her jalebi curl. “Rani…Rani…get off”, I whispered, trying to warn her before Tara would notice, like I was alerting a thief to the presence of a cop. Tara spotted her immediately: “Rani get off the fucking BED”, she yelled. Rani stayed. “Rani….PLEASE”, I begged. Tara tried to wipe her off the bed like spilled milk, but each time she nearly managed this, Rani persisted and came right back.
Tara walked over to my side, but before she could pick her up Rani lay on her back and turned into a long, flat noodle. Maybe she understood that it would be tougher to collect her if she spread herself out. Tara finally succeeded, gathering her limbs and physically lifting her from the bed to her cushion. Rani didn’t protest. She just sat in her cushion. It seemed very much like Tara had won. But once Tara got back under the blanket, Rani quietly climbed up once again. This time Tara yelled and pointed to the cushion, “Rani GET DOWN you silly dog”. Rani continued to make full eye-contact with Tara and almost as a courtesy, offered up her most persuasive eyes. To a stranger, this may have looked like “Please?” but really it was just “No, thanks”. The battle between Tara’s frustration and Rani’s resilience went on for a while like a good rally. Tara would win, Rani would return, Tara would try again.
When we fell back asleep, it was just Tara, Juni and me on the bed. Runi was yet to walk over, and Rani was on her cushion. A little later in the night when we were woken up by Runi at the loudly creaking door, we found Rani fast asleep in the centre of the bed on top of the blanket. In her typical smooth style of rebellion, she had obeyed mom and when mom looked away, done exactly as she pleased. In our house, it is rare to see this kind of courage. Just for tonight, Tara thought to herself as she pulled Runi up next to her, just for tonight.
Very few nights over the next year were spent without all five of us on the bed. When we moved into this house, Tara’s parents insisted we take their shaadi bed. They had nowhere to put it but didn’t want to let it go either. I thought this was unnecessary. The bed is much too large for two people; it can easily fit five and feels almost like it was designed to make you notice the distance rather than bring you closer. Turns out that for four years the bed was just waiting for the entire family to grow into it. It’s a bit small for all of us now.
Do not be fooled into thinking this arrangement is free from problems. Every person only looks out for themselves on that damn bed. Rani gradually moved from her small, allotted patch of bed in one corner right into the middle. Whether she wanted to be close to everyone or simply pull rank is hard to say. All we know is that she has turned into a small, unshakeable landmass. Her trigger movement of three circles in preparation to become a spiral jalebi involves swirling every bit of blanket under her paws like a whirlpool, leaving very little for those of us on the edges. The kids lie between Tara and me, and at some point, get too warm so they throw the blanket off their chests. They free their legs by pushing the covers down. With all this rearrangement, I wake up freezing in the middle of the night. Rani will wake up and change her position, violently sneezing at us in the process. I am trapped in the corner, balancing on my side, because to lie flat would be to crush Runi’s arm. And I have, on countless nights, been woken up mid-dream by a sleeping toddler kicking me in the balls.
After the initial power struggles between the two of them, we have now ended up somewhere in the middle, at another equilibrium of sorts. Tara has been surprisingly gracious in accepting partial defeat. In return, Rani does not gloat. There are days and weeks when we see Rani on the bed and don’t stop her; others when we ask her to come up and she responds with a wagging tail but does not move. Now an old lady, it seems she wants to do things on her own terms: pick her own spot each night, and sometimes pick solitude over company.
On some nights Tara and I stay up doing nothing after the kids have gone to bed. We notice that Rani has gone missing. She’s not in our room or the study or the common spaces. The door to the kids’ room is slightly open, and we find the three of them fast asleep, Rani in the middle.
And on some days Rani and I relive our former, secret life. Mornings when I wake up exhausted and, after the kids are at school and Tara is in Court, try to shut my eyes for a bit. It’s hard to go back to sleep once the noise and movement of the day has begun, but the grand-old lady of the house comes up to lie next to me, turns into the small spoon and we both fall asleep.
absolutely adorable!
Yet another hilarious piece, Maanav! As this story shows, Rani is aptly named.