Through an intensely personal experience, Jai Arjun Singh presents a story of love, loss and death in the metro, a site of alienation, growth and glass blocks.
One magical day in July 2008, I saw something that widened my eyes – and would, over the next few years, lead to the opening up of senses and feelings that I didn’t realise existed. Walking towards a rough lane between buildings to check on our water booster, I saw a litter of six tiny puppies huddled together. Perhaps it’s relevant that I didn’t see them from a safe distance: they seemed to emerge suddenly right under my nose. I might have stepped on one of them if my eyes weren’t on the ground in front of me.
What I felt in those first few seconds was generic concern (I didn’t know yet that the pups’ mother was nearby and that the litter was being looked after by two kindly watchmen) and perhaps the briefest tug of a heart-string. At this point I couldn’t even see the pups as individuals, just as a huddled-together mass of vulnerable, twitching life. Even over the next few days, as my mother, wife and I made regular visits to the lane, taking milk and bread, helping the watchmen cope, I couldn’t have imagined that one of those little creatures would become mine in the deepest sense of the word – not my “pet” but in nearly every way that mattered, my child.
I could write a book, or five, on the years that followed, but here’s a quick summary. We got a couple of the pups adopted, three others succumbed to infection and to the wheels of callous drivers, and we took in the last remaining one, who became our Foxie. Though a strong and hugely energetic dog at first, she spent the second half of her short life afflicted by an intestinal condition that necessitated monitoring her diet and medicines carefully, cleaning up after her six or seven times a day, and watching the accumulation of side-effects: she became ill-tempered during the bad phases, occasionally had pain in her hind legs and was so emaciated that most of her ribs showed. Then, just when we thought she was getting better, she passed away on the doctor’s table last year, aged barely four. It was the most devastating thing I have ever faced, or expect to.
Yet her short life opened new doors of perception and feeling. Back in 2008, if asked, I would casually have designated myself an animal lover; today I realize how much I still had to learn. Ever since childhood, influenced by my mother, I had felt a basic tenderness for other life forms (at least, the ones that humans find it easy to relate to) but the animals I had been genuinely close to in the distant past had been cats, which are relatively distanced and independent-minded; perhaps this was a reflection of my own introverted personality. My years with Fox provided a new dimension of experience. They taught me in the most immediate, intense terms what it meant to be in communion with another, emotionally demonstrative being – to pick up on aspects of personality and feeling, even when verbal communication doesn’t exist. I work out of home, which means that during the long months of her illness I was around her most of the time and my daily routine centered around her needs. I was a more hands-on, invested parent than most of the fathers of human children I know – and even some of the mothers.
I should stress that this relationship was very much an individual thing: it hasn’t translated into similar feelings for other dogs. More than a year after she’s gone, the grieving process is still on. I still feel incomplete and numb, afflicted with panic every time I think of those last moments at the vet’s; I have nightmares about standing on a narrow ledge at a great height with her in my arms, being unable to hold on to her and maintain my balance at the same time. And I don’t think I can take on another such responsibility, or make such a strong emotional commitment again in the near future. But speaking in an abstract sense, my time with Foxie heightened my sensitivity towards non-human life. The experience has been one of empathy-creation – the sort of feeling where I might see an emaciated street dog with a hunted look in its eyes and think, “That could so easily have been my Foxishka, if I had never visited that lane, or if we had been a little less concerned.”
Since Fox had a somewhat unusual, elongated body structure and because she stretched out in odd positions, we used to joke that she was many animals in one. When she nibbled on leaves with her ears down, she resembled a goat. Lying on the floor with her arms spread out ahead and her legs on the side, she could seem reptilian: lizard-like or dinosaur-like. There was an odd, camel-like undulation in her movement at other times, and she could be a race-horse when she galloped in circles around the park in her early days. Having seen news coverage of the “psychic” octopus Paul, I could even imagine a skilled cartoonist drawing a picture of an octopus with a round Foxie head, the eyebrows raised dolefully. I haven’t come close to bonding with any of these creatures, but thanks to her I feel like I know them all a little better.
All said, I don’t want to get over-sentimental about the idea that the inner lives of other beings are exactly comparable to ours. It’s a natural impulse for animal-lovers to project their own thoughts and emotions onto their pets, and to an extent this can facilitate understanding and care – it can be an extension of the impulse that lets us relate to a human being from another gender, class, religion or colour (as the moral philosopher Peter Singer has suggested, “species-ism” is a form of discrimination along the same continuum as racism or sexism). At the same time, there is always a danger of carrying identification too far and seeing an animal purely according to our limited sense of what emotion or self-consciousness is. And that is probably not good for an inter-species relationship.
But even if you accept that one can never really know what is going on in an animal’s mind (isn’t that also applicable to other humans?), there are strong indications for anyone who cares to look closely. Dogs who are well looked-after and well-loved acquire a very particular set of characteristics: there’s a softness in the eyes that suggests a sense of security, a feeling that nothing really bad can happen in their little world; it’s understood that frenetic tail-wagging is the correct response to the sight of any new human. At the other extreme there is the perpetual wariness, the suggestion of fear hardened into aggression, on the face of the stray who knows he’s liable to be kicked. And somewhere in between is the confused, cagey expression of the pet who lives in a house where people give him food and look after him in a detached sort of way, but where affection is in very short supply; a dog who isn’t allowed anywhere near the beds or sofas, who spends most of the day tied up on a short leash and who was quite possibly smacked hard the first time he chewed on a chair leg.
*****
In an essay titled The Creatures we Don’t See, the speculative-fiction writer Vandana Singh wrote eloquently about the self-absorption of human beings, our smug inability to really “see” other creatures. Urban development, as she pointed out, is specifically geared to weeding out the natural world from human lives; it’s based on the hubris that we are exalted creatures, capable of leading autonomous lives in our concrete bubbles, never mind the consequences for the ecology and for our own health.
During my time with Foxie, I got a firsthand sense of how determinedly some people cut themselves off from other species. Whenever I took her down for her walk, I had to ignore hostile stares. There were occasional fights with neighbours who didn’t want to see dogs in the tiny excuse for a park we have downstairs. Even when I assured them that she never used this section of the grounds as a toilet, there were sullen pronouncements about how they would be forced to “handle this situation in our own way”. Over the years, the small but devoted group of animal-lovers in our colony – people who have taken responsibility for vaccinations, sterilisations and food – have constantly face the ire and the bullying of the majority.
There is a tendency, among those who don’t like animals, to get bleeding-heart about “the many human beings who are in an equally bad state – shouldn’t we do something to help them first?” There are obvious logical flaws in this argument: is this a zero-sum game? Is human welfare unrelated to that of other life? And are they saying that we need to completely eradicate all human suffering from the planet – as if that is ever possible – before we turn our attention to non-human animals? But beyond that I find this self-serving argument funny because, in my experience, many of the people who use it are just as apathetic to other humans – the ones they don’t count among family or friends or “equals”, or the ones they don’t expect to benefit from. True compassion isn’t a quality that can be neatly rationed out by withholding it from one species (or social class, or religion, or caste – you pick the group). The people who jump up and down when they see dogs in their precious manicured park… I find it no surprise that they yell just as loudly when the colony’s “lower class” domestic staff sit down to have lunch in that park.
Perhaps, I should end on a somewhat upbeat note then, by mentioning an old woman who leads a hand-to-mouth existence but can still see and feel things that many far more privileged people can’t. Pratima Devi – “Amma” to everyone who knows her – lives in a small shack next to south Delhi’s PVR Saket multiplex, five minutes from where I stay. For over two decades now, though earning a meagre livelihood as a ragpicker, she has been looking after dozens of street dogs in the vicinity: feeding them, getting them neutered, maintaining relations with a local vet and animal-welfare organizations. But she is very far from the cliché of the socially inept recluse who is cut off from other human beings: her warmth and openness touches everyone who comes to know her. I discovered that quality for the first time a few days after Foxie died, when, driven by a need to reach out to someone who might understand, I went across to meet her. She is a constant reminder of what large-heartedness can be, and what it means to see and feel.
