If you are as antique as me or worse, you must have watched countless movies of the 70s and the 80s where Bollywood’s Veeru Paaji a.k.a. Dharmendra had repeatedly professed his eternal love for the blood of the canines. If Shahrukh couldn’t do without spreading his arms, if Salman couldn’t without removing his shirt, our Dharmu couldn’t be in a movie without saying, ‘Kutte, kameene, main tera khoon pee jaunga!’ There is a certain nasal technique to this dialog which I remember practicing so many times to get it just right. Why? To effectively scare off the street dogs while staying safely behind father’s marriage-gifted Grasim or Vimal or Digjam trousers.
After growing up I thought this was unfair. Why should every dirty, lecherous, murderous criminal be compared to a perfectly venerable animal like the dog? More importantly, why should someone thrashing these scumbags intimidate and humiliate the species by announcing to consume their blood? As it is, most of their brethren, bereft of any special government schemes or general public sympathy, are usually found without much blood while rummaging through the garbage dumps at night.
Makes simple sense, right? My relationship with the species, however, is anything but simple.
It all began with a black and white puppy father brought home one evening without telling anyone before. While we kids were elated and licked it more than it licked us, Ma wasn’t impressed, expecting to have been consulted first. It didn’t last long in our house after inflicting as much as a scratch on my sister. A couple of years later my mother was followed and bitten twice by street dogs while disposing off lunch leftovers in a pit. I faintly remember her exploding pain and howls, her belly swollen like a football after taking several thick punctures around the navel in a government hospital. The antidote those days were exceptionally crude and painful, eligible to be wished upon the worst enemies.
I don’t remember if I was fond of dogs but was certainly enamoured by the stories of their bravery closer home. For example, in the remote West Bengal village of my grandmother the only thing that stood between their house and the repeated attacks by thieves was their dog. A super loyal, super smart creature that could always figure out poison-laced breads thrown at it and never failed to foil any loot attempt until it was ruthlessly knifed one day. Similarly, my maternal grandfather’s house had another, aptly named ‘Tiger’ which fought off a leopard before being found dead in the morning, having succumbed to its injuries.
After growing up I was by no means a dog lover. I had hardly been kind enough to toss a slice of bread or a biscuit at them in spite of they circling and begging me, wagging their tail as if we were childhood friends. However, as far as I remember I had never been unkind to them, at least in the physical sense. I was saddened, if not heart-broken, to see the nude, fur-less, wrinkled, grey-skinned dog roam around our house having been singed by someone’s hot water. Occasionally I might have used certain derogatory phrases without their knowledge but never attempted anything more in spite of several demanding circumstances. Of course, for a scared under-insured officegoer like me who prefers to take the four-wheeler each time instead of risking riding the bike, dogs on the streets hadn’t mattered. They were, like other human beings on the road — as my grandfather would put it — simply madness on the move, an indistinguishable element of the gigantic chaos we call as roads. Their barks, their chases, their savage attack on one another other for a morsel of the roadside spoils hadn’t been visible to me. Until one day, that is!
This is how it happened. While I was busy buying a Bhakur from the vendor, a black and white dog lay coiled around its own legs, its eyes half closed and tongue touching the ground. It seemed like the least harmless thing in the universe, perfectly occupied with itself, its nose softly blowing the dust it slept on and its visibly well-fed body rising and falling in perfect synchronization with the subtle oscillations of its tongue. Unaware of its intentions, I hung the black polythene on the helmet lock of my black Pulsar and turned on the ignition. As I let the clutch go and revved the engine, the beast leapt up like the released catapult, charging towards me with a short, loud bark. While the engine took its sweet time to accelerate, it pierced its teeth into my left knee and ran along, a part of my bottle-green trousers’ leg firmly between its jaws.
Desperate, I put the bike on full throttle, managing somehow to keep balance. It was all instinct because I had never ridden so fast before; I was too stunned to understand what I was doing. Though our ‘best friend’ was in no mood to let go of me, it began to lose against the might of the 150cc engine. Before letting me go it ripped off a part of my trousers which thankfully wasn’t a pair of jeans. Luckily, the bleeding wasn’t bad because the impact of the bite was almost entirely borne by the seam. Trembling with shock and anger I kept riding away until I was sure the monster wasn’t following. When I finally looked back to check if the fish bag was still there, it was, only without any fish, fluttering merrily with its gut spilled on the crow-infested road. As a fish-losing Odia on a spoiled Sunday I had a violent urge to go back and run my bike over that bastard. But urge has no relation to courage. I didn’t want my other knee to also meet the same fate.
Before I could completely recover from the shock, another incident happened late in the night, around 1 am, while I was riding fast on an empty road. That attack, even more unprovoked, deposited a permanent chill in my spine. While zooming away from the spot, for a moment I looked back to see the dog barking furiously under a pool of street light, frustrated by the minor miscalculation on its part as it watched its scared prey vanish into the dark.
After two such unfortunate incidents, the animal no more merges with the crowd. So I have begun to notice more how these quadrupeds have prospered and multiplied, their brown presence overlapping with every sphere of human existence. However, while I try to maintain maximum distance when biking or cycling or walking, I have also come to realize that there is no escape from them. They are everywhere: milling about on the road, under Railway ticket counters, near the Panipuriwallah’s wheels, outside temples, inside the office campus and sometimes even alighting from my apartment stairs like a satisfied guest.
To vent my frustration while not being unkind to the species, I only state the Darwinian fact spoken in the manner of a curse: ‘Hat! Kutte ki aulaad.’
As I write this, my five-year old daughter comes to call me for the dinner, sees the cover photo of the dog on the screen and asks me, ‘When do you think I will have grown enough for you to get me a puppy?’
‘Never,’ I say to her, believing deep down that I am lying, and watch her face drop. I pick her up to my lap, kiss her and tell her, ‘Only when you are big enough to save your dad.’
