The Underdog? Under the dog!
By Bharat Shekhar

Knowledge is power, the power to escape a fate worse than death -that is if you have the wisdom. Had I known about the presence and especially the proclivities of Humpty Dump, the pint sized hump dog from hell, I would have taken hasty, evasive action. I may not have attended the meal to which I had been invited (to be honest to which I had lobbied hard to
be summoned). Or I may have claimed to suffer (quite truthfully) from 'being-pounded-by-a-hound-o-phobia', and requested the host and hostess to lock the little bundle of misery up in some soundproof dungeon. At the very least I would have worn an extra thick pair of
socks and put on some shoulder padding. As it is, I did not have a care in the world and entered the brute's lair with a carefree song on my discordant
lips.

Was this kind of behavior suicidal or just plain silly? As a Dodo in the seventeenth century, I would probably have initiated a tourist discount for hunters moving into Mauritius. Had I been a dinosaur some sixty five million years ago, I may have started a signature campaign in favour of activating dormant volcanoes, kept vigil, and prayed for underprivileged
meteorites to visit earth.  The background to the sordid incident is simple. New neighbors had just moved into the house next doors. I did the neighborly thing and got myself invited there for a meal. A fly sidling into the web of a spider presuming it's in for a free lunch and a good time could hardly have been more mistaken.
 
Well, the evil hour of my destiny, I mean, the time for the Saturday lunch arrived. At the doorsteps of a huge building, a motley crew greeted me. Despite the warmth of the day, the ice took a long time to break. While waiting for the thaw to set in, I took account
of my surroundings.

At some subliminal level the house's architecture and my hosts' appearance complemented each other.  The house was big. But the costly artifacts that stuffed its nooks and crannies to overflowing had squeezed all the air out of it. There was mad medley, a haphazard juxtaposition of expensive possessions with no logical reasoning behind their placement. Whalebone Eskimo sculpture vied for space with Mogul miniatures. Grandfather clocks partially obscured modern paintings. Pots containing fake flora lined an ornate fireplace. Fauna, in the form of decapitated and stuffed animal heads, frowned from the walls at
the frolicking below. This was rather strange in the home of professed vegetarians.  As if offering thought for food, dozens of bookshelves dotted the dining room. They contained literature whose sheer range would have churned the most eclectic of stomachs. Classics clashed with cookbooks. Pornography cohabited with poetry. Encyclopedias lay entangled with 'aerobic exercisers'.  The pride of place was occupied by literary masterpieces. The mint condition of these volumes clearly indicated their meant to be shown off and not read' status. On the other hand, well-thumbed racy thrillers lay half-hidden in obscure corners. There were self-help/divine revelation books and cookbooks. The self- help books were disguised to look like cookbooks (all that Chicken soup for the sole business). The cookbooks consisted of recipes on how to mask vegetarian food to taste like non-vegetarian delicacies. All in all it was a joint where money had been used to ' throw up' bad taste and hypocrisy.

The occupants of the house were (with the exception of Humpty) large. They attempted to shroud their physical size and lack of social grace with an excess of ill-matched jewellery and antiseptic airs. Can you imagine we were served mock tails in lieu of alcohol?
The hostess babbled on like a brook with verbal diarrhea- disgorging badly digested coffee table volumes on 'obscure facts designed to bore guests to tears'. Her talk ranged far and wide. Any issue- from Aramusk to the Aral Mountains, from high-rises to Himalayas, from Zulus' to Xenophobia was game. It did not matter if those topics were far from the mind of her guests. The absence of interest on their faces only seemed to spur her on. The host was a shopkeeper with an interest in spiritualism. He tried to sell me a copy of a book on 'corporate spiritualism' that he'd recently published. And that too before the first course was served! Then there was an assortment of aunts, cousins and children about whom we will learn as the tale progresses.

Anyhow, the meal progressed as meals with comparative strangers ordinarily do. There was a lot of polite chit-chat and there were a lot of awkward silences filled by overeating and over-complimenting the hostess.

Post lunch, we were seated back in the drawing room. The silences grew ever longer as full bellies added their weight to eyelids and dragged them down. It was during one of those 'yawning' gaps in the conversation that I first noticed the dog. What I thought was a
dirty rug (and thus a discordant note in the otherwise plush interior) suddenly moved and yawned.  "Nice dog", I said, thinking I'd found a topic of conversation that would tide me over a particularly embarrassing lull in the proceedings. "What's his name?" Humpty Dump I was told. "Humpty Dump?" said I, "That's a strange name." With a smile, the hostess
told me it suited the dog well. I wondered how.

My hand automatically reached down to pet the little bugger. It was a fatal mistake. I should have remembered the saying about letting sleeping dogs lie.

Humpty cocked one ear. His head turned slowly in my direction He released an enquiring snuffle that was filled with lewd suggestion. The normally goofy Apso eyes hardened (not the only parts of him that did, as I was to discover soon). Apparently something in me met its approval. Deep called to dog. With a little hop (a big one tucked in-between its hind legs I'm willing to bet), he clambered on top of the divan where I was seated.   There was a bit of a pause in the proceedings. After some heavy breathing and spittle chucking through his buckteeth, Humpty straddled my shoulder for 'intimate' inspection.  In his attitude there was none of that tenderness so necessary for a long-term relationship, none of that Romeo and Juliet kind of stuff. He combined the professionalism of an agent provocateur with the
aplomb of a bucking bronco climbing a trick rider Before commencing proceedings, he barked once as though to say, 'Don't take it personally. Necessity is the mother of this union'.

What followed can only be described as embarrassing. Not for the dog of course, who proceeded to hump away with the unfocussed ardour of a house pet in heat. If past experience had taught him anything, it was that this was as good as his sex life was going to get. So the pooch slobbered away, unmindful of the spectacle (and the mess) he was creating on my shoulder. No it was uncomfortable, awkward and generally annoying for
the rest of us in the room. Or was it? I certainly was experiencing extreme discomfiture, for soon the mangy cur was huffing and puffing with all the enthusiasm and energy of a steam engine that sees a station in sight. Someone in the room should have had the decency to end my misery and the dog's ecstasy by pulling us apart. But did they?
Oh no!
The hostess declared "Humpty's so naughty!" in a neutral tone that clearly indicated that she was stating a fact, not extending any help or even expressing any sympathy. She then went on to speak on weightier topics that required her urgent attention. These notably included the fair weather that we were experiencing, our chances of winning the world cup and the recipes she'd used to make lunch. There was even a bare bone analysis of recent bye-election that had taken place in a remote corner of the country. But was anything offered in the form of practical assistance?
Forget it!

The host's approach was even more insidious. He entirely ignored the incident. His attitude suggested that he was on the verge of attaining Nirvana, of removing himself from the yoke of eternal birth and rebirth. He appeared to have reached a stage of Yogic detachment where a herd of rampaging elephants would not have ruffled his Kurta. So a single hump hound humpin' n houndin' a solitary guest was hardly going to be worth his notice! His serene glance in my direction confirmed my suspicion that he was too far gone into the void to be bothered by any excrescence clinging to my shoulder. The conversation veered
around exalted subjects such as the Vipasana form of meditation, Ashramas, maintenance of decorum and dignity in public and the dangers eating of non-vegetarian substances as they brought on undesirable appetites such as sexual desire. And all this while his damned dog was huffing and puffing with the finesse and decorum of a pole dancer doing a
particularly complicated number!

In a marked contrast to the indifference displayed by the host and hostess, their son seemed interested in the proceedings, excessively and ghoulishly interested. Pimpled, pre-pubescent and precocious, the boy belonged to the chromosomal (x or y I forget which) generation that believes in calling a spoon a spade. He moved in for a closer look at the action. After a detailed inspection, the son of a so and so declared, "He's horny!" Meeting my horrified and scandalized glance, the boy amended, "The dog…I mean". After a while he too lost interest in the proceedings and went outside to do whatever it is that boys of his
age do when communing with nature- fly a toy aero plane, pluck the wings of passing butterflies...

Well, at least the son believed in the purity of my intentions. There was also a gnarled and ancient grand aunt present, who in pallor and vintage resembled the Holy Ghost. Her disgusted glances showed that she was convinced that I'd seduced the dog. She told me in no uncertain terms to leave poor Humpty Dump alone. As though catnip can leave a cat alone, as though the bottom of a ship can leave barnacles alone? The injustice of it all was beginning to get to me when the dame's daughter, who was a psychologist of some sort proceed to rub salt in my wounds.  She spoke of the phenomenon of sexual deprivation in pets due to the absence of loved ones of their own species. Her voice brimmed with sympathy (for the pet) as she said that such deprivation often led to the transference of
err.. affection by the pet to objects that resembled most closely members of the opposite sex. Oh God! This meant that in that entire room, it was I who looked, smelt, felt and tasted most like a bitch. What a blow to my evolutionary arrogance and male chauvinism!

The room was abuzz with casual conversation. The topics seemed particularly insensitive under the circumstances. A 'professor type' held forth on the 'horny' layer of the skin. He played on the obvious, circumstantial double entandre and was rewarded by some very annoying tittering and giggling. To the professor's left there was a lively debate on the size
of the needle, the area of administration and the amount of pain induced by rabies shots. There was a general consensus that these injections were only effective without the aid of anesthesia. A 'know-all type' demonstrated, very realistically just how an eight-inch needle was jabbed into the unprotected stomach…By now I had lost any remaining interest in
the proceedings.

Meanwhile the pooch's passion had attained a pitch that indicated he was about to peak. Thrusting and parrying like a fencing expert who's found rhythm, the hound was not merely huffing, nor merely puffing, but also howling loud enough to bring the house down. The
side of my shirt that'd fallen foul of him resembled a mud field after a particularly vicious game of soccer. Just as I had given up any hope of deliverance, just when I thought that the little devil would be permanently attached, would always have my shoulder to 'cry' on, he stiffened in the middle of a thrust, gave a gasp and then keeled over. I thought Humpty Dump 'd suffered a testosterone-bursting stroke. But before I could quietly rejoice, he got up (a little shamefacedly I thought) and assumed his former rug like position. I smelt something rotten in the vicinity and understood (to my everlasting horror) why
Humpty was also called Dump!

As I whipped out my handkerchief to clean up the mess HD's hump n dump had created, I noticed that the others around the room were looking at their watches. Suddenly, the grandaunt gave a crow of delight; "I won. Hand 'em over." The rest of the audience groaned, reached into their pockets and handed over some money to the old so and so.

Seeing my mystification, the grandaunt (whose personality seemed to have transformed from ethereal to earthy) guffawed. "Oh! Mr. Shekhar. Humpty Dump likes to have a bit of harmless fun with guests and so do we. Bets are placed on whether the Dump will take a
'liking' to the caller, and if he does, we move to the second stage of the jackpot. Now the betting centers on the time that he'll last or before the visitor will up and leave. To let Humpty have a fair chance, we try our best to maintain calm or even confuse the sacrificial goat, I mean guest. Today, I knew I had a winner. You look so much the Dump type. So I gave Humpty Dump thirteen minutes to err…fire from both barrels and won."

Under the circumstances, I made as dignified an exit as was possible. Humpty had the lust word. 'Woof", he grunted in satisfied post-coital torpor and languidly settled down to await the next victim.

 

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