Henry with Jai Anand Dehadrai and Mahua Moitra
There are times when one yearns for time travel. Fervently wishing for the time machine – in any of its iterations from pop culture or high physics theories – to be a reality. How else would Alexander Pope be here today? Though this author deems her writing to be all kinds of spectacular, she wouldn’t blaspheme by touching a subject that only the 18th-century English poet should be allowed to handle.
Henry, the Rottweiler.
Pope would have written a mock-epic about the life and times of this magnificent dog who may, or may not, end up bringing down political and legal careers, industrial houses, and even governments. All animals are equal but some are more equal than others. Henry is that extraordinary beast who may go down in history for causing one of the most lurid political scandals of our times. Something that merits a sequel of Pope’s 1712 poem The Rape of the Lock.
Henry’s human parents were once together and he had a happy home – safe from all the bad press his “aggressive” breed has been receiving of late. Henry, the gentle giant, has his own Instagram account, in the true tradition of 21st-century beau monde. But someone has cast their evil eye on Henry. Yeah, even dogs are not safe from the voyeuristic bad energies of people who claim to be ‘friends’ but really aren’t. Yes, those very people who look at your posts only to find something you can be ridiculed about behind your back. This bad breed struck poor Henry and his parents separated, and what followed next would have shocked even Homer or Valmiki.
Pope, however, would have rubbed his hands in glee and gone on to write about individualism that can only assert itself through material acquisitions. He’d have called an emergency meeting of his Scriblerus Club to discuss the alleged matter of scarves, handbags, iPhones and accessories, on one hand, and the fury and pathos of a jilted lover on the other. Of course, Pope would not have taken any prisoners and mercilessly attacked the smallness of big people.
What Pope would have also done, through his fine lines of satire, is showing that institutions and individuals can only be brought down from within. That it takes only one collaborator, like Clarissa in The Rape of the Lock, for all hell to break loose. When the integrity of any institution or individual is exposed to be as delicate as an Hermes scarf, claws come out on all sides. It takes a Henry to create one such collaborator. While FIRs, affidavits, defamation suits, and their counters continued to emerge in the public domain, Pope would have set his eyes on Henry, the mute witness to a distasteful farce around his custody that has now engulfed multiple political parties, industrial houses, high net worth individuals, and many a personal relationship.
Does Henry want to be dragged into this circus of human follies and foibles? Probably not. Does he want his legs massaged? Maybe yes! Does he want his Daddy around? Who is to say? Poor Henry is no Callie, the adopted dog of neuroscientist Gregory Berns who collaborated with her Daddy when he wanted to use his decades-long experience of using MRI imaging technology to study how the human brain works to figure out what dogs think. Callie braved the MRI world – intimidating enough for many human beings – to let her Daddy study her fine doggy brain. The findings are recorded in one of the most outstanding science books of our times, How Dogs Love Us: A Neuroscientist and his Dog Decode the Canine Brain.
Henry loves us, all of us. Maybe he manifested it all. It was his prayers at the altar of the Canine God that brought this story of corruption, and counter-corruption to light. Maybe he had had enough of the shenanigans of the high and mighty. Maybe he doesn’t want to be used as a bargaining chip in committee enquiries and court cases. And Alexander Pope would have been his ally, his storyteller, the keeper of his conscience – yeah that rare thing that human beings are quick to rid themselves of.
Maybe, just maybe, he did not even want to be called Henry.
(Nishtha Gautam is a Delhi-based author and academic)
Disclaimer: These are the personal opinions of the author.
