My Dog Child-Bhola  
 

Bhola came to us from the street in 1996 when he was about 3 to 4 years of age, after the death of our rabbit children Guchu and Fuchu.

Both my mother and my mother-in-law were with us at Delhi in December 1995 and January 1996, the winter season at Delhi. They used to chat under the Sun in the morning outside the back boundary wall of our quarter at Minto Road. They also took tea and eat breakfast, snacks in the rear courtyard.
 
 
Bhola who used to stay in our colonies also used to enjoy the Sun sitting in their company and he also used to get his share of snacks from them. But he never disturbed them nor ever entered our house. But his look was domestic and their was a desire in his look to be permitted to enter into our house. I could guess that Luna(Bubu) would like Bhola to come into our house and my wife Runu will not have serious objection to it. Thus on a holiday morning I asked Bhola "Come" and immediately he jumped into our house.

From that day till his death on the 14th January, 200 7, Bhola remained with us as our family member.
 
 

The first thing after wecoming him, our duty was to name him. I kept his name as "Bhola",  because of two reasons. It is a holy name being one of the names of Lord Shiva and other reason was that in my childhood, I have seen another pet dog in our house whose name was Bhola. He bit mostly everybody in our house but spared me being a child.

 
   
 

Once we named our new family member as Bhola we came to know that, since Bhola was our colony dog earlier, so many people in our colony knew about his early history. We heard that initially he was a pet of a foreigner when his name was "Jimmy" from whom one of our neighbours brought him and kept with him. But one night there was a robbery in his house when Bhola did not bark nor resisted the thieves in committing the robbery. So my neighbour got furious and drove him out. We also came to know that Bhola thereafter, for about six months, continuously stayed outside the rear door of my neighbour's quarter. But my neighbour neither opened the door nor allowed Bhola to enter into his quarter. Thus Bhola had to go to streets and became a so called "Street Dog". But his earlier stay with a foreigner and with a family man probably left that look in him showing that he is interested to become domestic.

  
   
 
Initially, after coming to our house, there were some teething problems. Every night around 2.00 a.m Bhola used to knock the rear door so that we open it for him to go out. He used to cross the otherwise busy Minto Road  which at time, hardly had any traffic. But after Sun rise the road used to have huge volume of motorable traffic and Bhola  was intelligent enough to understand that attempting to cross the road may cost his life. So I along with Luna used to take our car in the morning to the other side of the road, and Bhola always happened to be delighted seeing us with the car and jumped into it. This was our daily routine for about a month. Bhola's always compelling us to wake up for opening the door for him to go out in the dead
 
   
 

hours of night, used to annoy us. It caused frustration in us thinking whether it will be possible for us to change his behavior from street dog to a pet. But one morning we saw Bhola injured and long bleeding scratches all over his body indicating the possibilities of his coming in contact with barbed wires or some other reasons. We were surprised that thay day of his injury he never became restless in the night to get out of the house and started becoming pet to us.

 
   
 

Bhola was liked by all neighbours of our Government colony. He had the capacity to snatch love from others hearts. He was handsome also. He sometimes used to produced crocnch like sound and looked at us during such cronching expecting to be appreciated. He was a great lover of car rides. We took him to so many places in car including Sri Vrindavan for pilgrimage. We shifted to our own house in the month of April, 2004 along with Bhola. Bhola's favourite resting place was a sofa in the living room so that he remains amongst all of us and nap. God allowed us his sweet company for eleven years. He died at the age of about 14 - 15 years on 14.1.2007. We buried his body in the banks of Yamuna Canal under the serenity of grown up trees.