Abu, there and back again.

Abu’s been around the block further than most dogs (he hitched a ride with us to Singapore and back). He’s been a rambunctious presence in our household since he was a pup; no surprise, then, that we seem able to read his emotions like an open book, and vice-versa.

Even my thinking of taking him out for a walk unleashes his uncontrollable enthusiasm - he jumps around in circles, scrambles down the stairs toward the door, then sits in the corner as I fidget with his leash. Then it’s out the door, master and pet (it’s debatable which of us is which), God have mercy on the plants and car tires on the wayside.

There is no logic to our relationship. Minnette and I love him unreservedly. He loves us (or so his eyes tell) with no less passion. When I first came to Singapore, I had to leave Minnette and the dog behind. Nette would tell me wistfully of their first few months without me - Abu would wait by the window, and wait, and wait. All through the night. That alone guaranteed his trip with us to Singapore, even when everybody else within earshot would tell us it was a bad idea.

Or so common sense would say. His monetary value is zero, except maybe to the kanto boys who have a hankering for askal meat. His breeding is nonexistent, his training is horrible (he only knows "sit", and that only after six repetitions), and he sows destruction in his wake (current tally - seven books, two pairs of glasses, one pen, and three houses’ worth of scratched wooden doors and floors).

But you cannot logic your way to the relationship between a dog and his master. You could try, but somehow the explanations seem to miss the point. Is Abu just the end product of millennia of artificial selection, where the most responsive and affectionate litters survived to breed more responsive and affectionate litters? And if so, so what? Like the Turing Test for artificial intelligence, you can never quantify true love; you can only make a gut-feel approximation depending on the symptoms present. Overwhelming passion. A bottomless capacity for sacrifice. Devotion that asks no questions. Abu stints on none of these. Could you ask for anything less from a loved one? Wouldn’t devotion trump common sense where bringing such a loved one to a foreign country is concerned, and wouldn’t it seem like a small price to pay? I’m entirely convinced that, had it been us on four legs and Abu on two, he would have done the same for us.

To the moon and back.