The Dog is dying..

" Not the same dog.... but he also stands witness to human disloyalty"



The beautiful black and white dog, the one with the eyes of a child, is dying. And I am leaving this place.

The beautiful black and white dog, the one you would want to adopt as your own child, if you knew how to—he is dying. He has a hole on the left side of his body, near his heart, a deep wound, a fresh wound. There’s no way he’s going to live for more than two days. And I can’t do a thing about it.

I can’t do a thing about it, because my own life, at present, is a bit of a mess. For some time now, I have been alone and on the move, stumbling on from one dream to the next, making pilgrimages of hope, or flights of escape—escape from the pain of my invisible wounds. No home, no family, no commitments, no set of people anchor me. At this moment in my life, I am not on talking terms with anyone powerful enough even to get something organized for myself, let alone for a dog.

I first made the dog’s acquaintance when I was eating my first meal of the day near Inshara hotel JP Nagar why I went their is another story. His eyes, pleading: and I knew I had to share. Even though I grew up in a hypocritical valued family; imbibing the value that, with so many humans who were starving, you never gave good food to dogs, only the kind you yourself couldn’t eat (bones, leftovers), or the food that was so cheap it didn’t make a difference. I didn’t give him much on the menu, but I did give a major portion of bread which I threw near him. I learned to hold the pieces above his head, waiting for his expectant mouth to soar in the air to catch it as it dropped from my hand. Those eyes: there was nothing I couldnot refuse those eyes, those bottomless pools of sadness and innocence. The only way to live was to avoid those eyes, because if I kept looking into those eyes, I would have to take him home
But I had no home, or a place I can call it lovingly my home and I felt as homeless as the dog. (No, don’t insult me by calling the apartment I rent short-term a home; it’s just a couple of rooms without a bed.) The only kind of home I could take the dog to was a home with a compound, a small garden—not an upper block slept by me with the old grumpy landlord with his equally old grumpy wife infesting the ground floor. Apart from the eyes he was shabby with fleas all over… open wound… cant take him home

True, it’s still a bed and a roof and a couple of rooms, and lots of people don’t have these, and lots of people don’t have a fraction of these. And yet, I can’t live here anymore.
Why? It is many things. For example, that this is located in one of the most wretched parts of the world…India,, oh yes I was a patriot once but it was sucked out in these 23 years living here and though there are many wretched parts in the world these days, this is high on the list. It smells of graveyard and lost hope, especially my room where lot of dreams were made when I was high on drugs and shattered when I wake up from sleep long past noon everyday.
It’s a dog’s life for the people of my type( I still don’t know what type it is) but humans have type, and for the dogs, it’s even worse, it’s a Valley of Tears—because they get beaten, kicked, starved, and run over by automobiles. Except at nights, when the formerly asleep or intimidated dogs awake, become kings of no-man’s-land, and the citizens cower in their houses and apartments, hoping to snatch some sleep. Late night is when the dogs come to life, and summon up enough courage and aggression to fight the Great Dog Wars, and also to conduct the Great Doggie Choral Symphony of Bangalore. Which includes dozens of different doggie yelps, whines, yowls, barks, and nondescript sounds simultaneously blending into a Great Caterwauling River of Noise (music to dog’s ears) that would have forced Zubin Mehta into retirement.

The black and white dog. Sorry, I forgot about my black and white dog, and my life on high chemical road. Just finished my cycling through introspection and was going to take my first bite that’s when the dog came, and saw me, and he was more frightened than ever, starting at even the slightest sounds of approaching motorcycles, and then I noticed the gaping hole in his stomach, and I knew he was gone, knew I had no alternative but to feed him one of his last meals. I gave him my first piece of bread, half-eaten, which he ate gratefully. I was meditating whether to give him a second, when I realized he was gone.

Why can’t I do anything about it? I don’t have a phone number, one on which I can enquire about some Dog Rescue Association, and even if I could summon the energy to go to a phone booth, I have faced tragedies for sometime now, helplessly, mutely, and I know that the tragedy of the dog, simply being part of the huge tapestry of tragedies that is our own life, is one more I’ll have to accept as somehow being part of God’s plan. Of course in a typical movie plot, or even in the plot formula mentioned in Tarzan and Rudyard kipling's book, the failing protagonist would, at a moment like this, be suddenly energized, and in a heroic turn and climax, rescue the dog and win the respect of the viewer or reader. But none of these plots come in terms with real world theme; if they did, the hero would remain paralyzed, even after seeing the dog that MUST be saved. He would overcome his guilt by writing an article just like me today.

So let me speak of my soon-to-be-ex-friend, the dog. Most Indian stray dogs, in this part of India anyway, are brown, shades of brown. They have frightened, shifty, surreptitious, begging eyes, their expressions anxious or sheepish. But their coats are not very appealing. Cosmetically, they occupy the bottom rung of the aesthetic ladder. But this dog had the traces of having, the whites snow-white, the black like polished black marble coat not very long back as the dogs don’t have much life span give or take few years back he was loved pet of someone taken out for walks, on excursion a member of upper middle class family( cause his eyes water when he eats those bread crumbs I gave or so I think );And his eyes: I want to nuke that cliché of corny seduction from my vocabulary, but can’t help using it this time: his eyes are limpid pools, pools you can get lost in.

Sitting here at office or call my peaceful graveyard where I am bugged only by scattered few Americans who have no better way of killing their time but to make toll free calls in the middle of the night, I am already preparing his obituary: He was a Sensitive Dog, a dog for the ages. He was unlike the other dogs, who spend their time gossiping in Pizza hut, Barista or dancing their stregthn out in TYKA or just watching the Ten Sports Channel. But he wasn't cut out for the life of the streets, he wasn't made for this cruel world. He needed an owner to take him in, to love him, to love in return. And when finally, he woke up to the evil that lives in the hearts of men--and in the hearts of bad dogs--his innocence was finally shattered, and he couldn't take it. It broke his heart. I saw it in his eyes, the last time I saw, the look of shattered innocence and pure terror. It was this invisible wound, rather than the circular physical wound, about one inch deep, that killed him."

The beautiful black and white dog, the one with the eyes of a child, is dying. And I am wishing farewell to all my dreams.
B bye, ex-dog. See you in Heaven, maybe pretty soon?

[P.S. I have great doubts about publishing this, yet, why do I decide to go ahead? Because though readers can wait, me and the dog cant. I have this secret, totally improbable fantasy that somehow someone, somewhere, will at the last moment save this dog . . . and then, once it is healthy, give it to me: by which time I will indeed have a house with a small compound and garden a lucrative job, loving woman and parent. Is it true when we say it’s a dog life that we all live and dream