Chapter 1

I returned to my car, from a not-so-roomy toilet after taking the necessary relief-action against an ever-bloating bladder and was accosted suddenly by the sight of a large woolly dog in my driver´s seat. I stopped in my tracks and looked on, stumped.

It was of course our Golden Retriever – Brezel – now firmly ensconced in the small space between the steering wheel and the backrest that I had occupied a few minutes ago. Her long pink tongue now quivering, her large gentle eyes looking morose, and her long floppy ears droopier than ever before added to the solemnity of the situation. She showed all the signs of the long travel she had endured in the dreary depths of an aircraft and along with it perhaps the fear that she would never see us. She made every attempt to be as close to us as she could be.

Vani on the passenger seat implored:  ¨Brezel, please go back to your seat¨.

Brezel just would not budge. Instead, she turned to me and then to Vani again, and then adjusted herself a little more comfortably in the seat.

We had abruptly and quite fortuitously found this gas station off the Amerigo Vespucio expressway, just in the nick of time before our car could have spluttered to a stop in the middle of the cluttered yet fast moving traffic, as if to remind us of the contradiction of such a possibility.

We had just then discovered that there was hardly any more fuel in the tank. The car rental company had filled in just enough gas in the tank to get out of the airport and no more and we had not even realized it until we were in the midst of traffic. It was perhaps a standard practice here, or more likely that we were quite easily cheated as new gringos in town.

It was a city that we had just a few hours ago landed in, on streets that I had hitherto neither driven nor known my way around. It felt as though we had been suddenly transported from a placid ocean to a turbulent ravine.

We had just arrived from the sonorous town of Gainesville to a teeming metropolis of Santiago de Chile. We came from a college town in the United States where wide, long roads were rarely subjected to traffic let alone jams, and where my most challenged driving skill was to stay awake on my way back home from work at the University of Florida in the sultry heat of the summer evening.

We came to a South American city, where drivers were in a great hurry to reach their destinations, even if at the risk of their lives and those of others. We came to a city where people greeted each other with characteristic Latin kisses and angelic affection, and yet when they got on behind their wheels, seemed to take a devilish delight in overtaking others with no warning of an indicator, but honking impatiently at those who were slower than them or who they considered indecisive.

The four of us had landed in Santiago at 8:40 AM on July 27, 2015 on an American Airlines aircraft from Miami, while Brezel arrived around an hour or so earlier on a separate United Airlines aircraft that had facilities for pet transport.

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We had made another move again, after 3 years of living in the United States, to another continent, in a long sequence of moves from India to Singapore to Germany to the United States, to finally arrive in Chile. A new opportunity for a tenured professorship in biomedical engineering and cognitive neuroscience had beckoned me to the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. An opportunity to create and build a new laboratory for the emerging research area of Brain-Computer Interfaces was an added attraction and motivation for me to move to Santiago.

We had many errands to run before we could move. We had to sell our house and cars, take Anirudh and Nayantara out of school, wrap-up my responsibilities with teaching and research in the university, including handing-over my research grants, doctoral students, and the lab to my colleagues who were willing to take over. We had to bid farewell to our newly made friends and colleagues in a town that we were beginning to like and be comfortable in. It was emotionally difficult to leave the place that we had gradually come to feel almost as our final place to ¨settle-down¨. The kids had slowly liked their school, Millhopper Montessori, for its family-like, convivial atmosphere, for its friendly teachers (except one or two as Anirudh and Nayantara would suggest), for the grand plays they practiced and staged every year that the school was famous for. We would part with the new friends Vani and I had made, including my professorial colleagues Peter Lang and Margaret Braddley, and Andreas Keil, and several others.

We had come to like our four-bedroom house, with its large front and backyards that Floridian houses boast of, its large warm swimming pool, its ¨dog-run¨, that was Brezel´s own exclusive backyard, replete with banana plants, orange trees and other shrubberies.  I would miss the wooden swing in the backyard on which I spent many a lazy afternoon with a book under its sheltering roof. I would miss the weekends when I would pretend to mow the lawn and rake the dried leaves in the backyard to a mound. I would certainly miss the pool where I lazed with a cold beer or a German Riesling in the summer heat, while the kids and Brezel jumped in and out of the pool and caused a merry ruckus. I would, of course, not forget the couple of occasions when I spotted a certain green snake in the pool and used a pool cleaning net to fish out and throw it over the fence, lest the kids fear entering the pool again. I would also certainly miss the cul-de-sac besides our house where Anirudh and I on occasions played street cricket.

We were good friends with our neighbor Francien and Mark. Francien was a hair stylist as well as a successful realtor who had made much money out of renting out or selling houses in Gainesville and in the surrounds and was building a big house on the Floridian coast for them to live in later years. They had a big boat that Mark used for his weekend recreation including fishing.  When not in use the boat was parked in the shade of big trees in their yard. One could also see a bunch fishing rods leaning against the side wall. On weekends, Mark was usually seen pottering around in the yard, mending the boat or his fishing rods or cleaning one of cars or motor bikes. When I happened to be in my backyard at the same time, we would wave out to each and say hi in greeting, but not more.

They had eight cats, some of which were often seen perched on top of their boat or lazing under the shade of the boat´s hull. Some of these cats sometimes wandered onto our side of the yard and crept over the ledge of our air-conditioning unit seemingly to peer inside through our living room window. On these occasions, Brezel who seemed to dislike cats with all her being, would run to the window and bark with ferocity. The fur along the length of her spine would fluff and rise up in a magnificent columnar tuft and would not come down until she had calmed down again. The cats seemed to delight themselves in perking up and rankling Brezel. You would see them take turns to come over and have some sly entertainment at Brezel´s cost. Sometimes Brezel would dart through our back door, by the side of the swimming pool, rushing across the back yard, all the while growling and barking, until she reached the fence from where she could see her tormentor in full view and would not stop barking until the cat moved away or we called Brezel back into the house.

This went on for many months, until one day Anirudh was about to take Brezel on a leash out for a walk in the neighborhood. As they were walking out across the side of our yard closer to Francien´s house, Brezel spotted one of the cats crouching on the lawn looking at her with alert eyes. She growled and bolted towards the cat. Anirudh tried to hold on to the leash with all his might, but Brezel´s pull was too strong. I saw Anirudh momentarily airlifted and dropped down with a thud on the grass, while Brezel having gotten rid of the leash from Anirudh´s hand, continued her pursuit of the cat with greater speed. I saw Brezel catching the side of the cat with her large, furry paws, the cat squealing and tumbling, nevertheless regaining and escaping into Francien´s kitchen through a cat flap on the kitchen door. Brezel presently screeched to a halt in front of the door, disappointed to see no more of the cat, and continued to sniff around the house in the hope of finding her feline foe. After that day there was a certain marked reduction in the nonchalance of the cats, but their occasional curiosity at our living room window would continue to irk Brezel.

The dense woods in the estate we lived in and in the surrounding areas meant there was always a chance of a stray possum, raccoon or an an armadillo walking into our backyard, especially in the nights. Brezel who could smell them from within the house, would get agitated at the nocturnal activity of these invaders, and would growl and bark, and scratch the back door as if to say, let me out and I will show them that they can not get in without asking.

Anirudh who was always thinking up new plans came up with the idea of catching the stray creatures in a cage to teach them a lesson.

¨I don´t want to torture them, or even keep them. I want to just give them a little freight and then let them go¨, he explained to me.

¨But we don´t have anything to catch them with.¨, I said. ¨Besides, it is not nice to even give them a little freight. The whole land here belonged to them years ago you see, and they are just coming back to their old home.¨ I added trying my best to nip in the bud an over-zealous project that was brewing in Anirudh´s mind.

(Will be continued)