The Hindu Business Line : In perfect company

Dog woofs resonate at Perfect Pooch, a pet-sitting organisation run by Sanam Rabadi Karunakar, as soon as a stranger walks in. She orders the pack of dogs jumping in her apartment to calm down and allow the person to come in. As the visitor walks in cautiously, the dogs mellow down and welcome him/her with a shower of wet licks and dribble.

“They get very excited when somebody comes in,” says Sanam in her pleasant Parsi twang. Her husband, Suraj scoops the four-month-old Leo in his arms, while satin-furred Laika cuddles up to Sanam.

Her journey

Sanam, 27, has come a long way since an accident killed her parents and made her a paraplegic, paralysed chest downward. She was only 16 and her sister, Ayesha, who suffered minor injuries, was 13.

Sanam was hospitalised for a year and was in and out of hospitals for the next three to four years.

“That period of my life was the most difficult and I was almost in depression,” says Sanam. But she went in for therapy and decided to take charge of her life. Unable to move her fingers, she used her wrists to paint T-shirts, which she sold through word-of-mouth publicity. She even handled bulk orders of kids’ T-shirts from Kolkata.

Says Navaz Gherda, a caregiver at the Parsi Trust, Kolkata, “She was best at drawing cartoon characters on white T-shirts — Nemo, Tweety, Popeye, etc. I still have her T-shirts; can’t throw or even give them away! Under the circumstances that she worked, her creations were a piece of art.” Sanam’s handwriting was beautiful, despite her inability to grasp a fountain pen comfortably.

Magic in her life

Help poured in from an unexpected quarter for Sanam when Shirin Merchant, editor of Woof magazine, gifted her a black Labrador Retriever. She named him Magic. Magic is an ‘assist dog’, trained to assist disabled people.

“He is trained to obey my voice commands and pick up stuff, open the door and help me around,” says Sanam, who took a course in dog management with Shirin, who is also a canine-behaviour therapist.

In 2000, she met Suraj through a common friend and married him after a courtship of three years. Today, they run a successful pet-sitting business from home — Perfect Pooch. They take in dogs when the owners leave town for work. “I love dogs and when I was thinking of what to do, this seemed like the best thing,” she says. For Suraj, who never had pets at home, it was a new experience but one that he really loved.

Suraj left his job in HR to work full time with Perfect Pooch, and the two, now certified canine behaviourists, envisage starting a dog trainers’ association. They underwent training with leading dog trainer and behaviourist John Rogerson, who is also the founder and lecturer at the Northern Centre for Canine Behaviour, Durham, England.

“We cannot have the training too far from home, since Sanam cannot venture away from the house frequently. We are talking to the school opposite our home to allow us to hold workshops on their grounds,” says Suraj.

Perfect Pooch and its active Web site flooded Sanam with phone calls and emails on how to manage dogs. Her account on the social networking site Orkut now carries the message: “Any dog breeders and dog dealers, please do not scrap me!”

“People are mostly clueless on how to manage a puppy once they buy it in a fit of emotion. I keep getting various queries on how to teach a dog not to eat a slipper or to pee only outside the house,” she says.

The couple have also been going to schools with Magic to demonstrate dog management and talk about welfare of street dogs.”

On the move

Otherwise, Sanam’s outings are limited. An uncle gifted her a motorised wheelchair, which is convenient but does not fit in the lift of her second-floor apartment.

Entreaties to the landlady to allow them to increase the doorframe of the lift have met with resistance. “Suraj, with the help of someone, has to first carry the 90-kg wheelchair down the stairs and then me, whenever we have to go out,” is Sanam’s heartrending comment.

Public transport is not an option for her, but the Gold Cab, introduced for the disabled by Fulora Foundation, seemed comfortable at first. Sanam used it a couple of times, but after a tiff with the driver hasn’t used its services.

“Now when I call the call centre, they ask me to call the driver directly, which I do not want to, since we have had a tiff,” she says. Arun Sabnis, Founder of the organisation and Chief Managing Director of Creator Advertising Agency Ltd, says, “We have only one cab for the disabled in Mumbai at present and it becomes difficult to accommodate so many passengers. We are rolling out three more cars this year, after a prolonged wait for government permission.”

Sanam can be reached at sanam.rabadi@gmail.com and on www.perfectpooch.co.in

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