This is an age when we worship politicians like monuments and let monuments fall into decay. It has been described as VIP time, when power is basically impotent but pompous in its display. The marginal and the anonymous fade away, and there is no one to record them, mourn them, tell their stories. Important events in their lives are not seen as history.
A few days back, I saw a stray dog die. He was flung by the force of the truck that hit him. There was not even a yelp of protest as he was swept to the side of the road. He trembled for a minute and then lay silent. It was not as if life came to a standstill. The traffic stood in abeyance for a second and then accelerated in an act of forgetting. Only an old beggar ran up in dismay to the still creature.
I remember the dog, even as a pup. He claimed the road, protesting against every truck that went past. Like all strays he was a character, with a pinched tail and folded ears. He was master of all the dustbins in the area, the scavenger as hero. There is a touch of homelessness about the stray. He was desperate to be adopted, virtually beseeching to be taken home, and yet he had the dignity of homelessness, living ascetically of the little bits available.
Hopeful, yet doomedThe stray dog becomes a metaphor for workers of the informal economy: at home in its homelessness, hopeful, inventive, and yet strangely doomed. At night time in Delhi, as the poor settle down to their scraps of pavement, one often sees a dog regal on a sack, watching traffic. The lazy curiosity of the dog is almost inimitable. He has a temporary home and a master, and he seems content. He knows that citizenship is temporary, which is what makes it precious. Stray dogs have an intelligence that pets lose. They have a galvanic alertness which pets can never rival.
There is something about stray dogs that always haunts me. Their faces are so expressive, almost an indictment of one’s presence and privilege. Yet they demand so little and live on even less. I sat saddened by the death of the dog. It will lie unattended on the road until crows summon a raucous feast on his insides. In a few days, even flies will be indifferent as car after car runs over his remains. There is almost something stark and unsentimental to his ending, as if indifference is the only tribute the city can pay its homeless.
A stray dog becomes as it were the signature of the city. I remember reading the records of the Shah Commission on the Emergency. There is a paragraph where the Commission talks of Sanjay Gandhi driving through the outskirts of Delhi. His car runs over a stray dog, and he is so incensed that he starts the demolition programme, widening the roads of the city the next day.
The stray marks urban space, its eyes provide the only sense of hope, as if only animality of the dog can mark the humanity of the city. A stray is that endearing, devastating combination of obsequiousness and an absent-minded demand for rights and recognition. A pet dog can never quite express it the same way. It takes its world for granted. It is bourgeois in its expectations, even finicky about food. A stray is incessantly grateful and can turn even a dry morsel of a chappati into a princely dish, licking its chops in remembrance. It is shameless in its gratitude.
The fact that it lives on little allows it to celebrate life in a different way. One should watch a stray dog in winter. By seven, the dog has finished its scavenging rounds. It is a fine-grained ritual and dogs almost seem puzzled by what humans leave in a dustbin. The other day I saw two strays pull a huge pizza out of the bin, take a bite, and look puzzled. They virtually abandoned it in embarrassment, nodding sadly as if Indians have forgotten what it means to eat good food. The meal abandoned, they rushed to a lawn and stretched out to capture the heat of the sun. The languorous ease is enviable. While the sun warmed them gently, the dogs stretched out, as if in a luxurious spa, one eye open as a concession to future events. That and an occasional wag of recognition to a familiar face was about all the sign of activity for a few hours. Their bodies heaved in gratitude and the dogs rested in peace, content with the moment. This was a celebration of life, a statement of the everyday affluence of time in the overall scarcity of the city.
A stray dog captures the poignancy of the city, of being and loss on the pavements, the voicelessness of the majority of the citizens, the desperate commitment to a little quilt patch of space which has neither a house nor even a sense of security.
‘Straydoms’ and kingdomsA friend of mine, an ethologist of the city, told me something interesting. He said the West never thinks of animals in any other way in the city except as well-behaved pets. Our city is a place for some forms of wildlife. Stray dogs are an essential part of any city. In fact, he insisted on theorising about it, playfully comparing ‘straydom’ and kingdom. Kingdoms, he said, have absolute power. ‘Straydoms’ have little power, but each and every dog behaves for a few moments like a king. In a city where there is a large number of the homeless, ‘straydom’ is perhaps the metaphor for democracy: where there is vulnerability there is solidarity.
He added that nothing is as pompous and painful as a dog which has been adopted. It wears its collar like a bowtie, marches around as if it lives in paradise, gets conscious of its rights, and snaps at anyone who threatens to intrude its space. As a stray dog, it said hello to the world. As a newly converted pet, it is intolerably exclusive, unbearable, parading its pomposity in a new dance of steps, which is sheer promenade. Oddly, these pets, which at the most responded enthusiastically to the universally inclusive “Tommy!”, usually carry the most pompous of names, masquerading princely genealogies. The instant acquisition of imaginary pedigrees destabilises them. You wonder what happened to the earlier avatar, desperate to love and include all the world.
I still want to mourn the dog that died smashed by a truck. I can still see the reprimand in his eyes. It was a statement, a reminder that animals are part of the citizenry of a city. Our kindness to them is the beginning of the civics of a city. This much I know: it is the animal called the stray dog that humanises the city. No dhaba, no pavement, no procession would be complete without the comradeship of the stray dog. I am not a sentimental, ritualistic person but I went back to the street, put a little cross on the pavement, and stood in silence for a minute.
It felt I owed to my nameless brown friend.
Shiv Visvanathan is a Professor at Jindal Law School.
