Mars the Golden Retriever has chewed slippers, ripped sweaters, and peed on couches, but Yashaswini Bhattacharya still maintains that it is she who is the naughtiest in the house.
“I chase him with my remote-controlled car, and he gets confused and runs amok,” says the nine-year-old. “To make it worse, I keep treats on top of the car so even if Mars is running away, he still tries to come back for the treat.”
But it’s all in jest, and the two are more than friends. “My parents, in fact, got Mars after I started asking for a brother. But now I feel he’s better than a human brother, as I see in cousins, human brothers can be annoying. Not my Mars,” Yashaswini smiles.
When the Retriever came, the girl was only four, and so they’ve grown up together. They play football, tug-of-war...“There was a time when I’d bathe in the bathtub, and Mars would wait to jump in too,” laughs the girl. “He loves the water, and even now, when I go for a shower, he tries to barge in. He often lies on the wet floor of the bathroom, and to prevent odour, I have to chase him around the house to apply dog perfume.”
The two are hand-in-glove. “Once my mother had locked me in a dark room, but Mars went through the balcony and opened a rear door to the room to help me escape. Seeing his genius, even my mother started laughing,” Yashaswini says.
But what he loves more than anyone and anything is the air conditioner. “I could be crying, I could be sick, wars could be waging outside, for all you know, but Mars will not budge out of the AC room,” she assures. “When he was a puppy, he’d rush to defend me if I was getting a spanking from my mother, but now he knows it’s no big a deal and will just turn around and head to the AC room.”
Once Mars pounced on a suspicious man approaching their house, who later turned out to be a delivery boy, but her father, Indrajit, is convinced it was a fluke. “Mars is such a quintessential lazy Bengali boy that even if a thief comes, I bet he’ll go on dozing in the AC,” he laughs.
The name Mars is short for Marshmallow. “We decided on the name as it packs many things in one – marshmallow is a treat, Mars is a chocolate, and I also used to play a video game based on Mars, called the Red Plant,” says Yashaswini, adding that she might have given him a teeny bit of Mars chocolate when she was little.
