I guess it is time to tell how Socks came to be a member of the Prasad Family. We had just moved to Singapore in July 1995 and one month later, Aditya and I were having this intense discussion. He wanted me to get him a brother one year older than him or one year younger than him. I was trying to explain to him that with all the advancements in medical science, I did not know how to get him a 9 ½ yr old brother or a 7 ½ yr old brother. Anand patiently heard us go back and forth on this topic for about half an hour and suggested why didn’t we get a dog instead and the thought excited Aditya as well.
Aditya then had another stipulation – we could not buy a dog, but we had to adopt one. As I mentioned earlier we had just moved to Singapore a month ago and knew just one acquaintance there and was not sure how we could go about adopting a dog. Thankfully the Straits Times Classifieds came to the rescue and after perusing it for a few days – we found an ad – Puppies to good home. We called up the advertiser and she asked us to come to her house to see the pups. One Friday afternoon when Aditya returned from school we drove off to find the advertiser’s home armed with a Singapore Street Directory.
We drove and we drove and we drove. At one point Aditya asked if I knew where I was going as we had been driving for quite a while. I told him the Street Directory showed that we needed to drive further. When we finally reached the advertiser’s residence it was at the Seletar Camp and beyond the camp was a narrow stretch of sea and across the sea was Malaysia and we could actually hear music from a radio playing in Malaysia. The advertiser was a humanitarian who rescued dogs and cats in distress. When we visited her home she had 7 dogs 3 pups and innumerable cats. Of the litter of pups two were male – one all black with white spots, one like a Dalmatian and a female – almost all black.
Aditya was very sure that he wanted a male pup – but the lady told him that was not how to decide on a pet to adopt. She asked him to pick up each of the pups and see who bonded with him the best. He picked up the two male pups first and put them down and then picked up the female pup – she gave him one look with her melting eyes and Aditya did not put her down at all. He carried her all the way in his hands to the car and both of them sat in the back seat all the way home. We did not have any dog paraphernalia – no leash, collar, food or water bowls, food etc., We stopped at a pet store near our home and walked in and told them that we had acquired a puppy and they sold us the needful.
When we arrived home, we knocked on the door of our neighbor – a Swiss German family who had a dog and told them about our new puppy and Judith was kind enough to tell us how to take care of her. Our new pup was all black except for four white paws, white on the tip of her nose and tail and a big white patch on her chest. We named her – White Socks – (after the Chicago White Sox baseball team,) but no one called her by her full name – everyone called her Socks and I called her Girl. She had the most pleading eyes of any dog I have seen – as though she had not been fed for a week and we all had to take pity on her. Socks did not know how to bark at all for the first six months – the most that she could manage came out as a strangled cough. We finally heard her bark during a severe thunderstorm which is quite common in Singapore and found that she was terrified of loud sounds. Ever since then whenever Socks barked everyone at home who heard her would go to check what it was that had frightened her.
When she was less than a year old – she ran through the house one day to greet me when I was sitting in the study room with the sliding doors closed as the airconditioner was on. She did not see the glass doors and ran right into it. The door of course came crashing down and Socks ran away. We ran to find her and there were blood drops all along the way. I somehow bundled her into Aditya’s bathrobe which was drying on the clothes line and rushed her to the vet. She had to get about 14 stitches on her chest and paws but thankfully escaped with no damage to her eyes or face.
The vet said I had to run her everyday and I hated running, so I taught myself to ride a bicycle for the first time at 35 and then taught her to run beside the bike. She loved doing that – except when she saw something which frightened her. Her reaction was to sit still and since I was in motion, I would fly over the handle bars of the bicycle. To this day I have scars on my legs from my initial ventures with Socks. Once I had trained her to run along with the bike, Aditya had this bright idea of taking her for a run while he was rollerblading. She took off with all her enthusiasm and Aditya could not keep up with her pace at all and shouted for me to rescue him. If we all went out together on the bicycle, Socks had to be in the lead, no other bicycle could go ahead of her…
After three years of living in Singapore we moved to Kobe, Japan. Socks was extremely friendly with everyone she met and also all other animals. Other animals did not return the favour though. Our very first week in Japan, on our evening walk, we could hear some animal rustling in a small wood near our home and Socks of course went off tail wagging to say Hello. The ‘Eno Shishi’ or wild pig was not at all pleased and came charging at us and Socks and I ran all the way to our gate and shut ourselves safely behind it. We stayed in Kobe for just one year and returned back to Singapore. Strangely though she was born in Singapore and was returning there, she needed to be quarantined for 30 days. She had never been in a closed room ever since she was born and when we brought her home after the 30 days, she wanted to see us all the time and chewed down two doors – when we were away from home running errands.
We stayed in Singapore for 6 more years and then moved to the US. Socks had always been an outdoor dog – (she has short black hair typical of Asian dogs) till we went to the US – when she became an indoor dog due to the drastic change in weather…I would say US was the place she enjoyed the most for many reasons – she had so much room for herself. Our house was on a 1 acre lot and none of the properties have boundary fences. So we put down an electronic fence at the perimeter of the property – and she wore a collar which detected the electric charge if she ventured within a couple of feet of the fence and she stayed well within the fence. Everyone who came to the house – friends, workmen, service people, and delivery people – all of them would make a fuss over her – pet her and talk to her. This was a strange contrast to the 9 yrs she had lived in Singapore – where most people would first ask to leash her up when they came to the house as they are all terrified of dogs…
She had the largest number of beds in our Cincinnati home. Her official bed was in the butler’s pantry but she slept there only when we went to our bedroom at night. If we were in the kitchen, then she had a mat under the kitchen island. If we worked in the study, then she lay down on the carpet in the foyer so that she could keep an eye on us. When we sat in the family room, she had a huge 6 ft 12” thick furry pad in which she was almost lost. Her fifth bed was her travelling cage piled with her blankets in the garage when we were away at work.
She was diagnosed with arthritis about 6 months before we came to Dusseldorf so she was put on pain medication and glucosamine tablets for her joints. When we moved to Dusseldorf in end March last year, she was fine in the service apartment. Two months later we moved to our present apartment and this apartment had two balconies which literally hang over the pavement below. Since she used to like the outdoors so much we put her travel cage which was her bed again in the balcony, so that she could see all the people walking below and in the park across the road. But one of the very first times I left her alone at home and returned, I heard like a child crying and was wondering who was not picking up their little child.
On entering the apartment I found that it was Socks crying, she was sitting inside her bed in the balcony and crying like a human child. Ever since then we found that she preferred to stay inside the apartment when we were away rather than in the balcony…
She also had the maximum number of visits to the vet since we came to Dusseldorf. She was losing sight and hearing and was put on another medication to help build up the blood vessels to her eyes and ears. Just this year she had been X-rayed twice, had a full sonogram (it was the first time I saw images so clearly on a sonogram), steroid injections on both her back legs at regular intervals after a bad fall in July and protein supplement in her food everyday to build up the muscles in her legs in addition to her arthritis & sight & hearing medication….
The end came very quickly. The kennel owner rang up Anand on the 22nd of Dec saying that she had licked clean a 2 cm patch on her left foreleg and pus was oozing from it. They took her to the Emergency clinic the same evening and cut open the abscess, cleaned and bandaged the foot and put her on antibiotics and anti-inflammatories. By the 25th she had licked clean another patch on the joint of her right hind leg and by Sunday she had done the same to her right foreleg and pus was oozing from it too. The vet at the Emergency clinic told us that if it was just one abscess they would even amputate her foot but it looked like all her joints were hurting her too much and she was biting them in order to relieve the pain – so we decided to let her go…
Not at all an easy decision to make after having her for 15 ½ years through 4 countries and 9 homes, but we could not bear to see her so helpless or in pain. We are hoping she is happily running around in doggie heaven somewhere…
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