Every morning, A. Kalpana follows a lockdown routine. She soaks five kilograms of raw rice in a few plastic containers at her house in Bharathi Nagar in Neelankarai, East Coast Road (ECR), before heading to a local store to buy three dozen eggs. Her mother and sister wash the soaked rice and keeps it ready in a decades-old pressure cookers. When Kalpana returns with the eggs, it is mixed with the rice, and soon, food is ready for stray dogs.
The route begins at Neelankarai and ends at the Marina, and she stops wherever a stray dog is found. When Kalpana arrives, it is meal time for these starving canines.
She doesn’t mind making that long drive from Neelankarai to Kamarajar Salai, one bit.
The cooked egg rice is kept in large containers.
Her uncle V. Balaji ferries her in a moped, They are stopped half-a-dozen times on this route by the police, and after being asked why they are out, and when they give the reason and show the containers filled with cooked rice, they are allowed to go on.
“Unlike Eliot's beach where one can find many houses along the seashore making it easy for stray dogs and birds to get their feed, there aren’t many houses or settlements along Marina beach. That's the reason we go all the way to Marina to feed the strays there,” says 35-year-old Kalpana, who is nursing a heartache, having lost her son to electrocution.
Inspired by information about volunteering work of this kind posted by individuals on Facebook since the beginning of the lockdown, Kalpana has been feeding the stray dogs.
She is helped in this work by neighbours who give her some rice for this work. Besides, a domestic help, she has been persuasive in getting residents of half-a-dozen homes at an apartment complex on ECR to donate rice towards feeding the strays.
“She is working in my house for more than four years. When she told me about the plight of these stray animals, we gave away the free rations that was given to us. As everyone cannot venture out now, it's good that we encourage such people who have a heart to do this service for the strays,” says Devi Mohan, a designer and entrepreneur from Neelankarai.
Kalpana says, “Once normalcy returns, these stray dogs and birds will find ways to feed themselves. Until then, the four pressure cookers in my house will be busy making a meal for them every day.”
