Me and Flash - The mischiefs continue

Ayesha Saeed Malik

4th Year MBBS

Hi there folks!

I am back again with more dog tales more like FLASH tales. He is 7 months old now. A lot has happened since the last time I wrote about him. For example, how I overcame my animal fear, I don’t know if it’s only ‘my’ dog I have learnt to be not afraid of, or if this new earned courage extends to all animals…

 Okay so this is from a very long time ago; my brother and father weren’t home and Flash was only just a babe, we had made a routine for him where we’d take him out around 6 or 7 in the evening, every day. Now, Flash stood alert in front of our main door as per his schedule, waiting for someone to come out and play with him. In those days, I was too afraid of him to have given ‘taking him out myself’ a thought but God damn those puppy dog eyes! So, I said my Darood Shareef and Ayat tul Qursi, opened the door and then closed it the very next instant because there he was, ready to jump up on me!

‘Yikes! What do I do now? Why aren’t Sarmad and baba coming home? Somebody’s got to take the poor thing out for a walk!’ I thought more like yelled at the walls, in exasperation!

‘Okay, deep breaths, Ayesha. You need to be brave. You are afraid of your 2 months old pup!?! Shame on you!’ That is how I summoned my inner superhero. ‘Here goes nothing!’ and with that, I left the safety of my abode to tend to my dog’s luxury play time.

 If I may summarize this, I’d say it was a TERRIBLE experience that ended with me calling my brother and complaining to him how Flash had misbehaved to a level where the guard had to ask me to escort him back home from the playground, and how then Flash had leapt on him, angrily. I mean Flash was justified in his own right if you ask me, how the guard dare ask him to abandon his playtime! How dare he! But what I was most infuriated at, was how Flash had publically embarrassed me by not listening even to my pleas and grovels and how he had continued to mercilessly chew on various aunties’ dupattas despite my threats! This disastrous experience made me vow to myself that I’d never ever, ever take him out again!

The other day I, my brother and my father all took him out for a walk when a car slowed down in front of us. The man behind the wheel rolled down his side window, stuck his head out, (now if I mention how the beauty of my beloved Flash makes everyone stop in their tracks, you’d think that this would be another of those occasions) greeted my father and said, ‘Mujhay lagta hai ap ne mujhay pehchana nai hai.’

Baba: ‘I am afraid, I didn’t recognize you, sir.’

Stranger behind the wheel: ‘Ji wo us raat apkay kuttay ne meri biwi ka dupatta kheench lia tha.’

All of us glared at Flash and muttered incessant apologies to the man. Flash on the other hand, wasn’t repentant at all. He is an arrogant and un-apologetic dog.

On another occasion my cousin came over to meet us. She’s had two labs before. She loves dogs and so she thought that she should extend the same courtesy towards ours but a few seconds later she ended up begging Flash to let go of her dress. Did flash listen to her? Of course not!

 We’re still reminded to the day, of how he ruined a really expensive dress to which we say, ‘We warned you not to get too close to him when he is in one of his moods’. We don’t actually say that now, we just apologize on our dog’s behalf.

Another cousin of mine came to visit us, now this one isn’t too fond of dogs so he kept his distance from Flash. He avoided going out when Flash wagged his tail or had one of his ‘hyperactive’ moments. But none of those extra careful protocols mattered when one night Flash decided to chase him all the way down to the other end of our street, letting him go only when he (my cousin) jumped on a slide where Flash couldn’t reach him. My cousin stayed up there for quite some time before my brother came to his rescue and held Flash back.

This dog and human chase has traumatized my cousin to the extent where I think he won’t be able to trust dogs ever again or go near one, for that matter. Of course, we had to apologize to him too for causing him a PTSD.

The stories don’t end here, I doubt if they’ll ever end because Flash’s too naughty to allow that! He is a good dog, sure he can be a little strong headed (well a lot) and he tends to make us his puppets at times (all the time), he sure as hell can embarrass us, but deep down he’s the world’s best dog!

We love him probably more than we love one another, which reminds me of the time when my father gave my brother’s breakfast to Flash, telling my mother it’s be okay if my brother skipped his morning meal for a day. Yesterday, before anyone of us had a bite of that cake, baba took a huge chunk out for Flash, ‘I mean, it’s totally okay for us to wait but flash shouldn’t, am I right baba?’ The first thing my father does after coming home, is to take him out for a walk, I think that’s what everyone of us does; we say our Salam to Flash before we say it to one another.  

My father loves cars, he really does! Now you’ll be surprised to find out how he completely ignored the fact when Flash bit down on my car front, using it as his teether, or how he nailed down baba’s car or how he chewed down my car’s mudguard entirely because he was getting “bored”. I’d like to draw some comparisons here about how if we had in anyway harmed the cars we would’ve suffered dire consequences but for that rowdy dog, my father would turn a blind eye to almost anything.

For me and my brother, our father took immense pleasure in our academic performance             , loved the limelight when people would congratulate him on our success but with Flash he takes absolute delight in how people would come up to him to compliment on Flash’s killer looks. My father met an uncle from one street behind ours, who owns two adult labs and one lab puppy. He counselled my father a lot about training dogs and told him how our lab is prettier than theirs. My father came back home with a huge grin on his face.

 I told you, he’s very proud of Flash’s looks. Oh and by the way we’ve had some two to three proposals for Flash too, but we’ve turned them all down. Flash is too young for that kind of a thing.

However, Flash can be a little too much at times, many a times mum has threatened to give him away when we won’t listen to her or when Flash has broken the zillionth pot plant at our house or if he has  nibbled on the laundry she put out on the wire  or when he sneaks in through that door we had especially put up to keep him out of the backside of our house or when he has torn her important tax documents from the UK to shreds or how she sometimes has to wait outside in the cold until we hold flash down and signal for her to enter into her own house, so he can’t jump up on her in his excitement on seeing her after a full day (I might’ve forgotten to tell you about how my mother is scared of him, I mean every day we’ve got to leash him up or hold him down when mum has to pass by, she refuses to walk past him unless the above pre-requisites have been met. But mum is also the first one to get my father up from his sleep every morning sharp at 6 to give Flash his breakfast, she has her own kind of love for him.)

As of right now, Flash is basking in the summer sun, soaking some vitamin D while I dedicate yet another piece of my writing to him. On this note, I and Flash bid you all a good day, until next time amigos!