Matty came into our lives uneventfully – no date to remember, no event to celebrate, nothing. She came simply. She was in truth quite ugly – an unkempt coat, dirty eyes, bad breath maybe (never really checked on that!) and an unbelievably matted tail – hence her name. And owing to her looks, she neither had many friends nor a fan following. She did not even have an owner. Whoever looked after her did so out of sympathy. A few meals here and there and a rare pat here and there.
For us what started as a casual, non committal, sympathetic feeding turned out in time to be a routine Wednesday chicken lunch and Friday/Saturday egg meal for Matty.
She started to recognize us as well as her name. I still remember vividly, the way she would come galloping to us when we called out her name. Her matted tail turning clockwise and anticlockwise in rhythm as though she was dancing in joy at the thought of food. She would jump all over us leaving her paw marks on our clothes. It was such a sight to watch. For a long time we thought that Matty was male until one day, Peter discovered she was a She. Don’t ask me how he found out considering Matty was quite furry and she had no tell-tale signs of being female.
One day some Good Samaritan trimmed her matted tail which made her look a little less scary. We continued to call her Matty anyway. After Sam, Peter was my partner in feeding Matty. Some people thought she was weird, how could she wag her tail in joy and bark angrily at the same time. Some others thought she was mad and dangerous.
Matty’s later days were quite troubled I think. She fell seriously ill. At one point she was so ill that she could not lift herself up to find food or even eat what was fed to her. We called in CUPA to take her and treat her. When she returned after 4 days in the hospital, she seemed better. There was hope. At least she started to move around and eat. But quite obviously she had lost her balance – physically as well as mentally I think. It was sad to see her, her head tilted to a side unwillingly, trying to walk straight but bumping off into things that came straight at her. It was sometimes scary, even for us, the way she looked while we fed her – her head tilted looking at you with those sad eyes.
She became slow and almost lost her hearing. Even then, when you called out her name loudly about 5 times standing 5 feet away, she would look up at you, with a gleam of recognition in her faint eyes. She’d try to run to you with her failing body which had no control on where she was going. You’d have to support her so she could hold up and not topple off while she sniffed and bit into her chicken pieces. Those were my last encounters with her.
While we contemplated on calling CUPA again, asking them to keep her for good or may be to put her to sleep even, to relieve her of her sufferings, she went away. She left our lives as silently and simply as she had come.
