It took 10-year-old Devansh Bose 10 hours to make a “rubber band ball”. It took his dog Pablo 10 seconds to undo it.
Rubber band balls are balls created by mounting one rubber band atop another and Devansh had made his using nearly a thousand of them. “These balls sell for up to Rs 2,000 on the net and I had wanted to put mine up for sale on OLX,” says the boy who wasn’t one bit angry at his dog for undoing his hard work. He simply laughed it off and made another one.
“Actually I love making crafts as much as Pablo loves eating them,” shrugs the fifth grader. “I made a paper gun out of which came paper bullets, I made origami figures, art work… they’re now either in tatters or in Pablo’s tummy. I guess he doesn’t like it if I keep busy with something other than him.”
Devansh loves his dog to bits too. Mother Joie recalls the time they visited Hamleys in the UK and even in the world’s largest toy store, there was only one item the boy sought — a bone for Pablo, which obviously, they didn’t have. So he settled for balls — one for Pablo and another for himself.”
Pablo was brought into the family four years ago to teach Devansh about empathy and sharing, virtues which Pablo has abundance of. “The other day he kept barking non-stop from the backyard. He never barks like that,” recalls Devansh. “My father was the only one home then and Pablo guided him to the backyard, where we later realised a pigeon had broken its wing and fallen. I’m very happy that Pablo didn’t try to hurt to the bird. He wanted to rescue it.”
Well, birds aside, the Labrador eats anything and everything and usually, it doesn’t even matter if he’s hungry or full. Father Arjun feeds him a sumptuous meal of chicken-rice and takes him to the backyard to relieve himself, but if some Jamruls happen to fall off the tree at the time, Pablo pounces on them for dessert and won’t stop till he is physically pulled away from them.
“Mangoes fall off the tree too but he doesn’t try to eat those,” says Devansh. “The mangoes these days are sour so Pablo brings them to me and we play football with them instead!”
