Two dogs, a parrot & a poet: What's it like to share apartment with three pets?

"This one's Doggy, and that, over there, is Doggy-Dog," says Eunice D'souza, waving towards the adopted strays, as if these are perfectly plausible names for her comrades of a decade. I crouch to take a closer look at Doggy, who, with three-and-a-half wags per second, reminds me of Timmy from Famous Five. His friend reserves the right to personal space, bundling away his shiny fur and liquid eyes under D'souza's bed.

"That wretched dog is much bolder than he used to be," points out the poet and former head of the English department at St Xavier's College. In this house, dogs, like over-familiar family members, respond to nicknames that are special for not making sense to outsiders. She calls them 'old man' and 'brown dog'. It doesn't matter that both the dogs are brown.

"He was just a howling pup when he was abandoned at my doorstep," recalls D'souza in an unintended recitation of the opening sentence of one of her poems, For the love of Lout, my dog. She adds how the other one, hiding from the larger breeds at her Santa Cruz residential society, blackmailed his way into her bedroom. For all his doggy-eyed manipulation, 'old man' is a conscientious soul. "Every time I get a phone call, he leaves the room. But I wouldn't ever ask that of him!" laughs D'souza, her voice drowned by a storm of squawking. "There goes Toto," she sighs, offering multigrain crackers and sympathy to the DNA photographer, who had strayed into the kitchen, angering the remaining half of D'souza's parrot couple. "The female flew away a few months ago. They're always the feisty ones. This male here solely wants to be fed, bathed and spoiled," she winks.

Humour, to the poet, is as important as the company of animals. Her idea of a good laugh is chronicling her motley crew of neighbours in wicked verse, as is evident in her latest book of poems Learn from the Almond Leaf. And D'souza is well entertained given that she lives around a man with 'duck-tailed hair' and pious souls downstairs who scream 'yes, yes yes Lord, yes'. None of these neighbours are particularly fond of her family though. Doggy, "a sniffer of crotches", also "knows too many secrets". Seeing that the same neighbours give her grief over sharing apartment space with animals, her poetry strikes me as spectacularly good-natured.

Space is something D'souza says she'd like for the family. There's little room for Toto to fly around in the 2-bedroom apartment, and although the dogs seem content to camp under her bed, she wonders how many more animals she might be able to befriend if she had "acres of farmland like animal rescuer Fizzah Shah". She then adds how 'brown dog' often appropriates her bed at night, waking her up just because he is bored.

At 76, D'souza, whose novel Dangerlok carries the illustration of a middle-aged woman with a parrot on her head (guess who?), takes her dogs out for a walk at four every morning. "The compound is dark and I'm not thinking about anything other than how not to trip, and suddenly, just like that, my poems come to me," she offers.