The Boy Who Waited for His Poop, And Other Small Miracles

On the 10th of May, a routine walk through Cubbon Dog Park changed the shape of our house - and, four months later, the shape of a puppy's legs.

His name was Archie. Four months old, golden-eyed, with front legs that bowed outward in a way that made him look like he was permanently bracing for a fall. A bout of parvovirus a couple of months earlier had left more than a memory - it had left his bones bent, still soft enough from puppyhood to have curved under the weight of illness. Below: picture of Siddhu with Archie the day he sauntered into our lives.

We didn't plan to foster him. We just couldn't leave.

The Ordinary Miracles First

Fostering, in the beginning, looks a lot like parenting a small, furry, extremely opinionated toddler. Archie learned to wait for his food. He learned the furniture was off-limits, mostly. He learned the invisible boundary lines of the house. And our two five-year-olds, Ollie and Maggie, who had never had to share their humans with a wobbly-legged interloper, learned patience in a way that quietly rearranged the pack.

Then came the unglamorous part of fostering that nobody photographs for Instagram: the vet visits. Dr. Harshitha at Charlie's Pet Clinic and Dr. Lohith at Bangalore Pet Hospital became fixtures in our week. X-rays. Blood panels. A Vitamin D deficiency, corrected over three weeks of injections that Archie forgave us for almost immediately, because that's the thing about puppies: they forgive fast.

And then, the harder question: could his legs be fixed?

Dr. Lohith thought so. Archie was still growing, which meant his bones still had room to be told a new shape. Surgery, done now, could correct 75 to 80 percent of the curve. Done later, it might not be possible at all.

The Part Where Strangers Show Up

We didn't have the money sitting around for orthopedic surgery. So we did what foster parents increasingly do - we asked the internet for help.

I did not expect to cry over a crowdfunding page. But within a couple of days, strangers - people who would never meet Archie, never feel his ridiculous ears, never watch him fail spectacularly at sitting - had funded his pre-surgery tests, the surgery itself, medicines, and the therapy that would follow. Both clinics quietly reduced their fees where they could. My friend Aparna and her family took him in for a weekend so we could travel, folding him into her own life without hesitation. Below: picture of Archie chilling at Aparna's, with her cat.

It stopped feeling like my project. It felt like Archie belonged, in some small way, to everyone who had chipped in.

Three Hours, and Then the Real Work

The surgery took three hours. They were the longest three hours I've had in recent memory - the kind where you check your phone every four minutes and reread the same sentence in a book without absorbing a word of it. When Dr. Lohith called to say it was successful, I remember the exhale more than the words.

What I hadn't braced for was what came after.

Archie couldn't walk. He had to be carried for everything - outside, back in, every single time. For the first couple of days, he didn't poop, and I will say without embarrassment that when he finally did, we celebrated like it was Diwali. That is what recovery from surgery on a small, healing body looks like: not a triumphant montage, but a household reorganizing itself around one tiny, immobile creature's bathroom schedule and cautiously waiting.

Two weeks in, the staples came off. The bandages came off. And slowly, almost cell by cell, the puppy came back - running, tumbling, being generally ridiculous, legs straighter than they'd ever been. Below: picture of Archie post surgery with much straighter legs.

The Bittersweet Part Nobody Warns You About

Here is the part of fostering that people don't talk about enough: you do all of this - the injections, the 3 a.m. worry, the crowdfunded surgery, the poop celebrations - knowing that if you do it right, he leaves.

A lovely lady named Padma reached out, she wants to foster Archie with the possibility of adopting him. We visited her home, met her family, and watched Archie and her senior dog Pedro take to each other cautiously at first and then settled down and even napped, the way dogs sometimes just know. If all goes well, Archie will walk out of our house on his newly straight legs and into hers. Below: picture from Archie and Pedro's first meeting

It will feel like losing something. It will also mean we did our job.

That is fostering, in full: you love a creature back to health with the express intention of handing that health to someone else. It is not a smaller kind of love because it has an ending built in - if anything, it asks more of you, because you show up fully for a story you know isn't yours to keep.

Somewhere out there is a puppy or kitten who needs exactly this - a temporary home willing to become, for a little while, an unconditional one. If you have room, even for a season, foster one. You will not regret the poop parties. I promise.

The secret is...

All my life I have been like the elder brother of Ishaan Awasthi from Taare Zameen Par – disciplined, hardworking, smart, focussed. I have been very duty-conscious and attached to my studies, and later work, at an emotional level. By that I mean, I would get drunk on success and feel a high that’s out of the world when I delivered something complicated or if my work was appreciated by someone. Equally I’d be gutted for days at a mere tsk tsk of disapproval from someone, rethinking every choice I made along the way, kicking myself for slipping up, reconsidering my right to continue living. I am not exaggerating. This has been my life since the time I could read and write, since the time I was appreciated by my mum (who I had put on such a high pedestal) for being appreciated by someone else that mattered – my teachers, the principal of my school, my boss (I used to copy and paste appreciation emails on chat to her!), my performance ratings, etc. I had put my self-worth in the hands of other people and their validation of my efforts and outcomes, and even before I had realised, I was a slave to others and their opinions of me.

To the people-pleaser in me (which was my whole being), it was not about whether something I did or delivered gave me happiness, it was about whether it made my boss or my colleagues happy. It was not about feeling proud of what I had done, because how does it matter if nobody else took note of or appreciated it? And the horror that one negative feedback or one “I expected better of you” would bring! I’d curl up in bed, crying myself to sleep not because I didn’t do something right but because I let someone else down. I wish I were lying. The ONLY thing that I did because it gave me happiness and I had zero interest in the opinions of others was the work I was doing with my street dogs. I did it for myself and nobody else.

I was in therapy to work through my issues with stress and anxiety due to my core need to please people around me. While I was making (very) slow progress with it I realised something really big had to happen to shake me out of this. And boy, it did! I found myself with more than the normal amount of time on my hands for the better part of last year – work was slowing down, and the organization was preparing for a big reshuffle/downsizing of the workforce. I had more time to reflect, I journaled like crazy, more time to go on long walks, spend more time helping dogs, hitting more yoga classes – and I had something of a breakthrough. Somehow, I started giving less importance to what others thought of me over a period of time (that I started that with my mother-in-law might have made it easier 😉)

Things that I’d usually freak out about stopped having such an effect on me. To everything bad that was happening, my only response was, “I see that, and I am ok”. God, what have I become! I still have a long way to go in fully empathizing with everyone all the time with an open heart, but if I progress like this I just might! What happened to the little girl who sang because she needed to hear others clap for her? The one who wrote fast because her teachers were impressed with her writing speed? The one who loved going up on the stage because she felt she had to prove to everyone in the audience just how good she was? The one who stopped singing because that one time she completely blew her performance?

Sometimes life feels hard because we make it so hard for ourselves, by being so hard on ourselves. We think people remember us by our mistakes and we must be right ALL THE TIME! That is a lot of pressure. There is no magnifying glass that people are using to look at us. Even if there was, they are probably too busy looking at themselves with it. What’s most important is that we take the time to do things that bring happiness to us. And that in my case…. 

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Remarkably Bright Creatures

Last week Sabal bought me a gift, this time something he’s never bought for me earlier - a book. Given he is not a reader himself, he said he never knew whether I’d like a book he’d buy, but this one he said “gave him a feeling that I’d like reading it”. It was titled “Remarkably Bright Creatures” by Shelby van Pelt. I loved the blurb. But it had to wait for a couple more days until I finished the book I was reading then. (I cannot read two books simultaneously, can you?)

The book starts off in the small town of Sowell Bay in around 2019-2020. Has fascinating characters including but not limited to Marcellus, an extremely intelligent, observant and thoughtful giant Pacific Octopus who is the hero of the story. Tova, over seventy years of age with no kin, forms a beautiful relationship with Marcellus. It is not just the two of them though - through them we meet most of the other residents of Sowell Bay, each unique and kind in their own way. There were times when tears would roll down my cheeks as I tipped my hat to the incredible strength of Tova, the love and kindness of Ethan, the ever supportive Terry, the friendship of the Knit-wits, the naïveté of Cameron and of course the remarkable insights of Marcellus. 

There was a comment from Prasath to my earlier post (A decade later) about how living is what we do in the small, everyday moments of life and I can’t agree more with that thought. This book taught me another valuable lesson, we never forget the ones who leave us (they do continue to stay with us in our memories of the small moments) but we move on. We must move on, no matter how big the tragedy that brought us down was. It touched a nerve for me and gave me a quiet strength which I feel in my heart but can’t seem to put into words. 

I highly recommend reading this, for it felt like a warm cup of hot chocolate on a cold morning, when you want to wrap a blanket around your shoulders only to find your cat tucked in nicely and you just don’t want to disturb him. You know this happened.