CHENNAI: It’s been exactly a month since that fateful evening when an under-construction building brought infamy upon Moulivakkam. And of the 61 survivors of that pile of mortar and steel, barely anyone is left in the city — all of them would have scurried their way home to villages in Odisha, Andhra and rural Tamil Nadu. But there’s one resolute survivor, left without a home or a family, whose tale will have several twists of the tail as Tuesday dawns.
Sathyaraj’s son Sibiraj, has come forward to adopt one of the pups rescued by the Blue Cross of India, from the Moulivakkam building collapse. The actor, who just completed shooting for a film called Naaykal Jagirathai (in which he co-stars with a Belgian Shepherd), confesses, “I’ve always wanted to adopt an Indian dog, but we have three dogs at home and it just wasn’t possible.” As his movie’s post-production work is moving well, Sibi says that one of his friends from the cast mentioned that a dog from the collapse site was looking for a home and was at the Blue Cross campus in Velachery.
It may be recalled that two female mongrels (a 7-month-old and a 9-month-old) which were being raised by the construction workers, had been pining for their owners till they were rescued, “They were in a petrified state and weren’t eating or drinking water, and it took a while to rehabilitate them. Unfortunately, the older one is a little ferocious and I have sent them to our shelter in Kancheepuram,” said BCI’s ever-affable General Manager Dawn Williams. After Trisha, Sibi’s adoption move will be sure to help the organisation find homes for the hundreds of dogs and cats they save off the streets.
So will Sibi’s current canine posse - Mike (a golden retriever), Oscar (a fox terrier) and Dolby (a boxer) — get along with their newly adopted country cousin? Sibi laughs, “I’m sure they’ll be more than happy. We’ve adopted a litter that a dog had on our street and they were okay with that. In fact, we didn’t have space at home, but now we’ve built a whole kennel at the back, so we can easily accommodate the new dog.”
Taking care of the dogs may fall to the folks at home — with father and son busy shooting — but Sibi has one task as he heads to Velachery to bring their new family member home: “I have to think of a name for this one! I put a lot of thought into naming all our dogs as you can see,” he says seriously.