Heart squeeze

Ninad woke up gasping for breath. The heavy pressure on his head had blocked his nasal passages. A warm, furry, heavy pressure. Messi's favourite spot for sleeping is on the head. The head of the person he snoozes with. i.e Ninad or me.

I wake up these days at 5 minutes to 6 every morning. My internal clock will gradually get in sync with Messi's. It is his furry, padded paws and scratchy nails that wake me up. What he does is probably a caress. A slightly scratchy caress, even his clipped nails are quite sharp. The Vet has told us to file his nails, but we really aren't too up to doing that. Clipping his nails gets him into a tizzy. Filing them would get him totally wonky we fear.

The Cocker Spaniel face, longish, with the tongue all slurpy, trying to lick you as if you were the tastiest piece of meat, is what you see when you open the eyes post the morning caress. And then you squeeze him as he tries to climb on your head. And you try to cover your face with the bend of your elbow as he starts treating you like the milk powder he so loves. The end result is a heart saturated with love and cutesomeness and still wanting more love even after feeling saturated.

Messi has a tail which is almost non existent. The fur is still to sprout on his tail. But it wags. Wags, wags, wags.

The word for overflowing love, felt in the region of the heart, what is it? The love a mother feels for her infant when he is sleeping or cooing, what is it? What is the word that can describe the intensity of feeling that has a throbbing quality in the cardiologist's area of study and also envelopes the rest of the body in a warm happy way?

That is the way we feel for Messi, Ninad and I that is. So do Jatin and Sunita. It is something about the way Messi greets us when we come home and follows us around for no reason at all; and stands on his hind feet so that the paws of the forefeet rest on our bodies; and looks at us with his droopy eyes and wags his almost non existent tail. And the way he sits on his haunches and drools when we eat our human food and don't offer him any because the Vet has told us not to.

It's almost as if he is the manifestation of the happiness that had seemed to always elude us.