Feeding street animals in Corona time

(The feeding pics here are from this morning, at PVR Saket. The last image is taken from the Facebook page of my friend Hemali Sodhi; it's a bit soppy, but so is much of life, I have come to think)

In recent days, when walking Lara downstairs, or walking for provisions through colony roads so quiet that I imagine I can hear every leaf that falls from every tree, it’s been possible to appreciate how healthy and idyllic the natural world is when disinfected of most human activity. A few days back I saw six young tailless peacocks walking in single formation along one of our lanes; otherwise one rarely sees more than two together at a time. And it turns out the air-quality index can reset fast in even a place like Delhi.

It would be too easy — especially for a long-time misanthrope like yours truly— to turn this into a reductive “humans are the real virus/we are the most destructive species” meme. But because a large part of my life in recent years has been organised around street dogs, and because these are very social animals who not just depend on humans for food but also genuinely like being around us (even as they learn to become wary of the many people who dislike them), I have also had access to another vantage point. Namely, how sad and lonesome and empty a human-free world might look like through the eyes of a creature that has evolved socially alongside us over tens of thousands of years, become one of our most steadfast companions, emotionally enriching many of us along the way.

At a personal, immediate level, what’s been most difficult for me the last few days is hearing the new urgency in the barking of the colony dogs in the far distance. Plus the very nervous, agitated or watchful reactions of my home/part-time-home dogs (across two flats) as they hear distress calls from other members of their species. Or the sudden growling when they sense that an unfamiliar creature, terrified and hungry, has drifted into their territory in search of food.


As I mentioned in a Facebook post a few days ago, the dogs living in the PVR complex in Saket (that is, the ones who aren’t being regularly fed by Pratima Devi) have been looked after for years by individual shops and dhabas and secondhand-book vendors. People who have now had to shut shop and head home. Yesterday evening, along with Moutushi Sarkar — co-author of the dog book I am still hoping to get done at some point — I set off to check on the PVR situation. Part of me was prepared for the worst: for the sight of dozens of ravenous dogs fighting each other viciously for food, threatening humans too; an unmanageable situation where our packets of biscuits and paneer would amount to nothing. (And no point being idealistic or sanguine about this: such things *are* probably happening in many other places, and will continue if things get worse and stay worse for weeks.)

Instead we saw small signs, even in a spookily deserted and quiet complex, of the strength of this magical inter-species relationship. A young boy who worked at a dhaba, has to continue living in the complex because he has nowhere else to go, cooks his own daily meals with the most meagre resources, but still worries about the animals he knows well. The elderly bookseller who, filled with unrest, somehow managed to leave his house after two days and make his way back to the complex just to check on his dogs and cats (and gave us instructions about what each animal is likely to eat). The parking-lot attendant and the chowkidar who, despite being in dire straits themselves, were doing what they could for a litter of pups.

Moutushi and I and a couple of others are trying to coordinate efforts towards some regular/semi-regular feeding. It probably won’t be enough (what is ever “enough” anyway, even in a non-Covid time?), and as stocks deplete everywhere there may be enormous frustrations to come. For some of us, it can be a big emotional/mental-health risk at a time like this to take on the responsibility of regularly feeding specific street dogs and pups: they very quickly go from being a mass of yapping abstractions to individual creatures with personalities, they start communicating with you in their own distinct ways (my two big life-altering relationships with dogs began in this way, in the same colony lane, seven years apart) — and if we are forced to stop the feeding it will be devastating. But it’s a risk one has to take. We do what we can.

Inside of a dog (and its writer friend)

[My Forbes Life books column for this month]

It is generally felt that writers tend to be “cat people” much more than “dog people”. If this is true, two explanations come to mind. The first has to do with the personality stereotype: many serious writers are somewhat cat-like themselves – aloof, solitary, prone to hissy fits if something doesn’t go exactly as they’d like it to. These are, of course, generalisations – I have known some gregarious and friendly writers, and a few very social cats – but the broad point stands.

The second reason is a related one: even pampered, house-bound cats are usually lower-maintenance and less dependent on their humans than dogs are, which makes them better companions for someone who needs plenty of alone time to think about his work, or simply to stare into his computer screen for hours waiting for an elusive Muse to show up. (I have firsthand experience: it took me three days to begin writing this column, largely because of the demands made on me by a puppy we are fostering.) But this is also why it can be so interesting when authors do become close to dogs and write about them. You might get prose that is full of raw emotion, where the writer holds nothing back; or writing that is polished and distant and cat-like on the surface, but with slivers of deep feeling buried within it.

An example of the latter is in one of the finest animal books ever written, the literary editor JR Ackerley's My Dog Tulip, first published in 1956. When we look at Ackerley through a prism of temporal and cultural distance, he seems an archetype of the English man of letters of his generation: reserved, proper, perhaps a little snooty. But to read this book is to find not just a sharp, affectionate sense of humour but a startling candour. And the catalyst for this is Ackerley’s 16-year relationship with his German Shepherd, a relationship that began when he was middle-aged, but which provided him a new perspective on other creatures, on the nature of love, and ultimately on himself too.

One of the wonderful things about this slice-of-life memoir is its combining of elegant, literary writing with subject matter that is usually taboo in polite circles. Entire chunks are dedicated to Tulip’s toilet habits, and later to her sex life. At one point, shortly after making an offhand reference to a historical record of the emperor Napoleon’s “well-formed motions”, our venerable author describes Tulip’s squatting: “She lowers herself carefully and gradually to a tripodal attitude with her hind legs splayed and her heels as far apart as she can get them so as not to soil her fur or her feet. Her long tail, usually carried aloft in a curve, stretches rigidly out parallel with the ground...” But after this almost poetic description, the idyll is broken: Ackerley and Tulip are rudely set upon by a cyclist who objects to a dog using the sidewalk thus, and the elderly writer responds by letting loose some choice cuss-words. Dog-lovers everywhere, then and now, can get seriously worked up in these situations.

As Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, author of The Hidden Life of Dogs, points out in her introduction to a recent edition of My Dog Tulip, a remarkable thing about Ackerley’s writing is that though he leaves the reader in no doubt that he loves Tulip deeply, he never asks us to do the same; he doesn’t construct her as a protagonist with universally desirable qualities. And yet, there is so much grace and tenderness in some of his descriptions, such as the almost reverential one of watching Tulip give birth to her first litter, “licking and nosing this package out of herself, releasing the tiny creature from its tissues […] performing upon herself, with no help but unerringly, as though directed by some divine wisdom, the delicate and complicated business of creation”.

****

The inimitable Groucho Marx once quipped, “Outside of a dog, a book is a man’s best friend. Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read.” The line is obviously funny as a non-sequitur, but Alexandra Horowitz gave it a new dimension by using Inside of a Dog as the title of her book about “what dogs see, smell, and know”. Reading this book, one realizes that the inside of a dog might really be too dark for a human being to “read”.

By drawing upon the word umwelt – used by the German biologist Jakob von Uexkull to describe an animal’s subjective inner life or “self-world” – Horowitz lays out the many ways in which we humans routinely misinterpret or anthropomorphize the behaviour of our four-legged companions; but she also demonstrates that taking a coldly scientific view of animal behaviour does not amount to discounting the higher emotions. When your dog licks your face on your return home, this behaviour may be genetically rooted in the phenomenon of puppies licking their mother’s snout to get her to regurgitate food for them; but over time, in domestic animals, this has also become a ritualized greeting that (in conjunction with other displays such as tail-wagging) clearly says “I’m glad you’re back.”

This balancing act between the rational explanation and the emotional one lies at the heart of many meaningful human-dog relationships, and it reminds me of Arthur C Clarke’s superb story “Dog Star”, which broadly fits in the “science fiction” genre (and is by one of the leading exponents of that form), but is also an intensely emotional tale about love.

It begins with the narrator, an astronaut on a space station, millions of miles from earth, being awakened from sleep by a vivid dream where he thought he heard the barking of his dog Laika. She isn’t really there, of course: the melancholy narrator then dips into his memories from years ago and tells us about how, back on earth, he adopted her as a puppy and, to his own surprise, grew enormously close to her over time. However, a devastating separation loomed: accepting a prestigious research position in a space observatory necessarily meant leaving behind his closest friend and companion. “After all, she was only a dog. In a dozen years she would be dead, while I should be reaching the peak of my profession. No sane man would have hesitated over the matter, yet I did hesitate.”

The final sentences of the story – once the narrator has returned to the present and is analyzing his dream and its aftermath – are heartbreaking, because they involve a man refusing to succumb to comforting delusion even though he so badly wants to: a scientist who, after relating a story about an unfathomably close relationship, provides a rational explanation for the “supernatural” event he just experienced. But then, in the story’s very last sentence, he allows himself to get emotional again, and the effect is stunning – a reminder of the dark and mysterious places that can exist inside of both dogs and their humans.

[Some earlier Forbes Life columns are here. And a piece about cat books is here]

There and back again – the loneliness of the long-distance dog

Something wonderful happened today, a very welcome and unexpected end to a matter that had caused us a lot of distress over the past week.

The back-story: for the past four or five years (at least), an unspayed bitch – an excessively fertile street dog who lives in our colony without being regularly fed by anyone – has been delivering one or two litters of pups annually, in large numbers, near our back-lane. The vast majority of them die, of course, succumbing to starvation or weather or being run over by callous or careless drivers; a few survive, growing into skinny dogs, scavenging for food, very rarely getting lucky and fed by one of the approximately 0.005 percent of neighborhood houses that are animal-friendly.

Most of these pups are born and grow up in the same place where Foxie and her siblings were born in mid-2008, and the sound of their mewling often gives me sleepless nights and keeps old wounds fresh. For reasons that have to do with emotional self-preservation, I have kept my distance from this situation in the past few years. But this time Abhilasha and I decided to be a little more pro-active: we took two of the surviving pups to Pratima Devi, assumed financial responsibility for their upkeep, and then set about getting the mother sterilized with the help of Ravi, an autorickshaw-driver who assists Pratima Devi and takes dogs to Friendicoes for operations.

After somehow managing to lure this scared, people-wary girl into our driveway, we kept her locked up there and then got her into Ravi’s vehicle with some difficulty (and this on a mad, mad, mad day where I had to rush back home for an hour or two shortly after getting my dadi admitted to hospital, yet again). The dog reached Friendicoes okay, the operation went off fine, she spent two days recuperating…and then, on the 21st evening, just as Ravi was going to bring her back, she bolted from a momentarily unlocked cage and vanished into some distant nook of Jangpura or Defence Colony.

The search that followed spanned days – with Ravi and his assistants travelling from Def Col to South Ex to Andrews Ganj in pursuit, catching sight of her and then losing sight again – and was always doomed to failure; even if she had been within catchable range, the sound of Ravi’s vehicle would be enough to send her into hiding. It was very upsetting. Here we had been congratulating ourselves for pulling off something important and hard to do, and now it seemed that we had not only separated a dog from her home permanently but also condemned her to being hunted by other dogs in unfamiliar territory. In between my hospital rounds, I kept calling a guilt-stricken Ravi for updates, or arranging for our car to be made available for another search. People who were trying to help would call up, asking me what the dog’s name was, because that might make it easier, and I didn’t know what to tell them: no one has ever given her a name, I had never interacted with her at any length myself; it was becoming hard to explain why I felt so responsible for her welfare.

And then, this morning, I got a call from the guard who sits at the end of the lane and occasionally looks out for the pups. She was back.

This scrawny, aging, mangy creature – weakened and unsettled by the surgery, bearing a very visible scar – had somehow, over a period of three or four days, found her way back to Saket, a good 8 or 9 km from where she ran away. And that’s only as the crow flies: the actual journey must have been a much more complicated one, with many stops and detours. Through the unfathomable traffic of two ring roads and numerous other thoroughfares, through other dogs’ territory, in a city that can be very hostile to strays. And at the end of it, she was reunited with her remaining pup, whom we have been fostering.

It’s one of those animal tales you sometimes hear about but don’t expect to see firsthand. I was looking at Google Maps earlier today, wondering which route she took, and marveling at the many potential hazards along even the easiest of them. What a heroine.

Help needed for Pratima Devi and her dogs

Anyone who has contacts among animal-welfare NGOS, please do help or circulate. Pratima Devi a.k.a. Amma, the beautiful old woman who looks after street dogs near the PVR Saket complex, needs a full-time assistant to stay with her and help her with the feeding of the dogs and other related things (treating injuries, being around when the van comes to take them for sterilising, and so on). She had a couple of boys who were helping out, but they left, and often being in poor health herself, she needs someone who is reliable, sensitive and needless to say, a dog-lover. A decent salary will be paid, of course (this is something a few of us are trying to help out with), and there is enough sleeping room (and even a small cooler) in Amma’s shack.

The best place to look for someone appropriate might be an NGO, but if you know someone else who might fit the bill, please do get in touch. My email ID is jaiarjun@gmail.com, or you can leave a comment here.

[More about Pratima Devi here and here]

Kitty litterateurs: on Suniti Namjoshi's Suki and other cat books

[Did this for the magazine Democratic World]

There was an email forward doing the rounds recently, a comparison of hypothetical one-page diary entries written by two house pets – a dog and a cat. The dog’s entry was short, semi-literate and full of sunshine and cheer, with such exclamations as “Oh boy! A car ride! My favourite!” and “Oh boy! Tummy rubs on the couch!” while the cat’s was written in full, elegant sentences and was sardonic and world-weary: the very heading read “Day 183 of my captivity”.

Anyone who knows the two species well should agree that this is a good summary of their broad personality types. And anyone who knows professional writers – at least the ones who brood for hours over the construction of a paragraph or sentence – will agree that temperamentally they tend to be cat-like: mostly reserved, unsocial and irritable, but willing to purr for a short time if a satisfying turn of phrase has been achieved, or a deadline more or less met. There are also practical reasons why writers are more often “cat people” than “dog people”. Dogs are dependent on human attention, needing to be regularly spoken to and taken down for walks, but cats are more self-sufficient, and hence suitable companions for people who spend much of their time in fierce concentration.

In this light, it is interesting to consider the difference in tone between books about dogs and books about cats. The former – especially the ones about life with a pet – tend to be sentimental and emotionally demonstrative, whereas cat books have a certain coolness built into them. And this can be the case even when they belong to the Motivational or Self-Help category. Take David Michie’s very engaging The Dalai Lama’s Cat, told in the voice of a kitten who is rescued by the Dalai Lama at a traffic signal near Delhi and brought to Mcleodganj, where she soon settles into the temple complex and becomes known as His Holiness’s Cat (HHC).

HHC – alternately known as Snow Lion and, to her dismay, “Mousie-Tung” – spends much of her time in the company of the Buddhist leader, soaking in his presence (“had he recognised in me a kindred spirit – a sentient being on the same spiritual wavelength as he?”) and listening in as he discusses the conundrums of existence. Each chapter follows a broad format where a human character discovers the need to rethink his attitude to things, and the cat then applies some of these teachings to her own situation, with varying degrees of success. Thus, an insight about how self-absorption can make one sick and unhappy (a valuable lesson for writers, as it happens!) is linked to our narrator coughing up fur balls after spending an inordinate amount of time grooming herself. She realises that a period of self-pity combined with fear of exploring a new setting cost her precious time that she might have spent getting to know a new friend; and she is even inspired to deal with her gluttony, a by-product of being pampered silly.

As an old cynic wary of quick-fix advice and pat life lessons, I am not really a fan of this genre. But The Dalai Lama’s Cat worked for me because even in times of emotional epiphany, the cat nature retains a certain distance. At one point HHC overcomes her feelings of distaste for a new arrival, a dog named Kyi Kyi, when she learns about his sad back-story. “We reached an understanding of sorts,” she says, but then she quickly adds: “I did not, however, climb into his basket and let him lick my face. I’m not that kind of cat. And this is not that kind of book.”

Such emotional reticence can make brief, unexpected flashes of sentimentality very effective. Suniti Namjoshi’s recently published Suki, a tribute to her deceased cat, takes the form of conversations between human and feline. They talk about such things as morality, social injustice and hypocrisy, and the tone is mostly droll, faux-philosophical and chatty (or catty). But there are deeply affecting moments too. At one point in the middle of a casual conversation, the ghost-cat remarks that towards the end of her life it had been painful for her to open the cat-flap to go outside, and the author responds with a spontaneous cry of “Oh, Suki!” And another exchange, where the cat mentions that she would have liked to meet the author’s family (who were not animal lovers), should cut deep for anyone who has ever had a special, intense relationship with an animal and been unable to share it with their human world.

At the same time, one knows that these conversations are fictional, that Namjoshi is imagining things about the cat’s inner life and rendering them into human language. And so, the book becomes as much about the author herself – it is a form of therapy, a way of examining her deepest feelings, including love, grief and regret. This is also a reminder that there are many types of cat books. Cats can be used to examine a particular milieu as in Pallavi Aiyar’s novel Chinese Whiskers, in which the adventures of two Beijing cats give us a window into aspects of Chinese society including insularity, city-dwellers’ prejudices against migrant workers and the materialism of the young. Or they can serve purely representative or symbolic purposes: Art Spiegelman’s brilliant graphic novel Maus depicts the Holocaust by drawing Jews as mice and their Nazi oppressors as cats, but there is no pretence that the book is about animals.

Even overtly cat-centric books like The Dalai Lama’s Cat don’t always try to provide a detailed picture of the feline world and its tactile sensations, which is why Nilanjana S Roy’s delightful The Wildings, and its sequel The Hundred Names of Darkness, are such unusual additions to the kitty-lit corpus. These novels try to imagine what the world might feel like to a cat, from the furniture and carpets inside a house to the smells and textures of the outdoors, or the visceral knowledge that a predator is stalking you in the darkness. And an important plot device is the concept of “linking”: the feral cats of Nizamuddin, Delhi, can transmit whisker signals to each other across vast distances, allowing them to form a network that humans around them are oblivious to. 

This should resonate with anyone who has long-suspected that there is something otherworldly about cats; that they aren’t letting on everything they know; or that they are, like the cat in that diary entry, plotting something diabolical. “When my cats aren't happy, I’m not happy,” the poet Shelley said once, “because I know they’re just sitting there thinking up ways to get even.” Or to telepathically work themselves into the next book or poem.

[A post about Suniti Namjoshi's The Fabulous Feminist is here]

Haathi ras - on an elephant trail

[From my Business Standard column, and a sort of extension of this post about animals in films]

“Just think – in India, you would be worshipped,” says William Gull, the royal doctor, to Joseph Merrick, a patient so severely deformed that he is mockingly known as the Elephant Man. The scene, depicting a fictional meeting between two real-life people in London in the late 1880s, is from one of my favourite books, the graphic novel From Hell. Gull is consoling the unhappy social outcast Merrick with a reference to Ganesha the elephant-headed God, but there is also a dark subtext, in the linking of a benevolent, twinkling, pleasingly rotund deity – the remover of obstacles – with a “mission” that leads to a long trail of blood in the streets of the East End. When Gull seeks the Elephant Man’s blessings later in the story, he is embarking on a very macabre act, one that most Ganesha-worshippers would decidedly not approve of!

Which may be a reminder that elephants can mean very different things to different people. (So can Gods, of course, and elephant-Gods.) A famous manifestation of an elephant as a blank slate is in the parable about a group of blind men, each with a very different idea of what the animal must look like. There is also Jose Saramago’s novel The Elephant’s Journey, in which an Indian elephant makes a long, dangerous journey from Portugal to Austria in the 16th century, becoming a symbol of what is possible, and inviting a range of perspectives from various observers.

A few days ago I attended a talk by the writer and academic Rachel Dwyer, about elephants in Indian cinema. Using stills and clips, Dwyer touched not just on relatively objective elephant depictions in such films as the 1937 Elephant Boy (originally shot as a documentary, later re-edited into a narrative-driven feature) but also on such filmi archetypes as the “moral elephant” (the one pursing bad guy Pran through the jungles in the 1955 film Munimji) and the “secular elephant” – as in the ending of Haathi Mere Saathi, where the dead body of the elephant Ramu is taken on a sort of multi-religion pilgrimage, past a mandir, a masjid and a church.

Many of us tend to patronise films like Haathi Mere Saathi these days. We laugh, or cringe, at some of the cheesier animal depictions from old Hindi cinema, such as the revenge-seeking dog Moti in Teri Meherbaniyan (sample of such mockery in this old piece), the resourceful, infant-rescuing hawk in Dharam Veer (likewise), the snake who thinks of a human woman as its maa in Doodh ka Karz, and the pigeons who have flashbacks in Maine Pyaar Kiya. And there is sometimes a reasonable cause for cringing: these are simplistic forms of anthropomorphising, of imputing human emotions and deeds directly to animals.

But as Dwyer pointed out, there is also something immediate and moving about scenes like the one where a number of animals, including tigers, emerge from their cages to mourn Ramu’s death and there is a remarkable series of close-ups of animal and human faces. In this light, perhaps the most interesting part of the post-talk discussion was the idea that the use of animals in Indian art was rooted in a closeness to the pastoral way of life, where (as one attendee put it) “touching the skin of an animal” was a natural, desirable sensory experience, and where observing animals became a way for humans to understand or articulate their own feelings and relationships.

The only real way for humans to emotionally relate to an animal is by anthropomorphising, and we see this in our traditional storytelling forms that stress the interconnectedness of life, such as the Jataka Tales, about the Buddha’s animal forms, or the myths about Vishnu’s avatars, which blur the lines between God, human and animal. There may have been a natural transition from these forms of oral and written storytelling to the heightened emotions of Sanskrit and Parsi theatre, and thence to the distinct forms of expression in commercial cinema. 

And in this context, it is notable how a film like Haathi Mere Saathi – which, on the face of it, is just lightweight entertainment for children – stresses the importance of animals in the ideal of a “Pyaar ki Duniya” (the name given to the private zoo established by the Rajesh Khanna character) and even shows a distrust of sterile modernity, as represented by the big, flashy car that breaks down and has to be pushed by elephants in the film’s title song. As Dwyer pointed out, Ramu displays many of the emotions from the Indian tradition of navrasa, including shringaar (aesthetic appeal), karuna (compassion) and haasya (laughter). Elephants can be even bigger and more capacious than they first appear.

[Also see: this post about the birth of Ganesha and the bathroom battle; this one about elephant-headed transcribers in Ekta Kapoor's Mahabharata, and this one about Temple Grandin's book Animals in Translation. And some elephant photos from a Sri Lanka trip]

Dog, giraffe, cat, bear: beastly scenes in four MAMI films

[Free-flowing post; meaning-seekers, abstain]

When watching a rush of unrelated films in a short span of time (as I did at the MAMI festival last month) and without needing to write structured things about them, I sometimes find whimsical ways of relating the films to each other, or “arranging” motifs in my head. One thing that struck me was the use of animals in some of the films I saw: animals as sentient creatures in their own right, or as symbols, or pretexts for our understanding of human characters or events; different ways of showing animal perspectives and asking us to consider if they mean anything in themselves, or if they constitute a variant on the Kuleshov experiment, where shots of a blank-expressioned actor were intercut with various objects, so that the viewer imposed his own feelings on them. Anyway, here are fragmented notes on four films:

1) In the last post, I mentioned the very sweet dog – named “Boy” by his human – in Jafar Panahi’s Closed Curtain. On one level Boy is a symbol, a commentary on Panahi’s real-life situation as an artist denied freedom. Much the same way as the screenwriter in the film’s first half must keep Boy shielded from the outside world – and the animal follows him around everywhere – Panahi is forbidden to air his ideas (and yet his ideas and fictional creations don’t stop pursuing him, demanding every moment of his time). 

But within the narrative, Boy is also a creature capable of feeling – intelligent and alert, and very much alive. As he tails the screenwriter around the villa, tennis ball in mouth, the bond between them is evident. And these qualities contrast with the horrible TV images shown in the film of other dogs being brutalized by the Iran authorities – animals in various stages of torture, dead or dying, barely recognisable any more as creatures that were once capable of showing and receiving love. One thing that so distinguishes dogs from most other species – and a foundation of the long and mutually beneficial hominid-canine relationship – is their eagerness to make and maintain eye contact with humans. Psychologically, it helps if there is a certain amount of visible white in a dog’s eyes, and the dog in Closed Curtain has one of the most expressive, “human-like” gazes I have ever seen in an animal. (Casting here is as important to the film’s effect as it is with the human roles, and I imagine it was as carefully done.)

2) The giraffes in the good-natured film Giraffada are another matter. Early in the story we meet a boy, Ziad, who feels a deep connect with two giraffes in a Palestinian West Bank zoo, but the affection is not reciprocated in equal terms: the film doesn’t depict the giraffes as meaningfully interacting with the humans around them (and some of this has to do with our own perceptions of these outlandish, extra-terrestrial-like creatures, which make for funny Facebook profile pictures when you get a riddle wrong: it is hard to relate to them in the manner that one might with dogs, and they certainly don’t make eye contact with us in the same way). After the male giraffe dies, we see the bereaved female wandering about her quarters, craning her neck about as she (presumably) searches for her mate. It is a touching sight, but her loss is not presented in overly sentimental terms - there is no romanticising about giraffes mating for life, like some birds and animals do. Her dead boyfriend can be replaced by another male, hence the plot of the film: Ziad’s veterinarian father must put himself and his family in danger by smuggling another male giraffe in from an Israeli zoo.

The trials of this new male giraffe (named Romeo) reminded me a little of Jose Saramago’s The Elephant’s Journey – a book about another long, hazardous journey and about impossible-seeming things that may become possible. Like Saramago’s elephant, Romeo the giraffe is a blank slate that can stand for different things to different people. One basic yet effective shot catches the film’s attempt to set the wonders of daily life (and of life itself) against grand ideas about nationhood or religion. As Romeo lumbers through the West Bank in the film’s final stretch, he passes a prayer-house where a group of men are doing the Sajdah. At the precise moment that they raise their heads after bending their foreheads to the floor, the giraffe passes the window in front of them, and the sight is so astonishing that they stay frozen in place and forget to continue the rest of their prayer routine. Temporarily at least, the Grand Design has taken a backseat to the here and now, to the possibilities of the real world.

3) An early scene in the Coen Brothers’ Inside Llewyn Davis (full disclosure: I only saw half the film since I had to leave for an urgent appointment) centres on a cat, who has rather inconveniently become the responsibility of the film’s protagonist. And as Llewyn travels in an NY underground train, the cat slung over his shoulder, there is an unusual sequence: the cat is gazing out the window and we get a series of images of stations gliding past that obviously represent its perspective (Llewyn himself is facing in the other direction).

All that the camera appears to be doing here is impassively recording what the animal sees – there is no attempt to imbue the visuals with meaning, to be funny or droll or cute, or to suggest that the images mean anything to the cat. The whole thing has a touch of whimsy or randomness (and whimsy is very important to the Coen Brothers’ universe), though some incidental meaning emerges when the cat – probably dazed and panic-stricken by the rush of images – slips out of Llewyn’s hands and runs down the length of the compartment before he catches up with it again.

4) And a film where the animal in the title never appears, though humans have taken its place by the end. Denis Côté’s Vic + Flo Saw a Bear finishes with an intensely unpleasant, difficult-to-watch-and-listen-to scene where the two protagonists (former convicts and lesbian lovers) are ensnared in a pair of cruel, sharp-toothed bear-traps. Throughout the film, the line between civilisation and the jungle has been made indistinct: Vic and Flo are trying to start a new life, but we never really learn what terrible things they may have done in the past, and if redemption is a realistic possibility for them. Do they even seek it, or are they wild beasts trying to escape the trappings of human society and return to the natural world?

And by the end, that line may have been completely erased. The two women are reduced to the state of the culled dogs in Panahi’s film – their howls come to sound more like involuntary bodily reactions than as expressions of thinking, feeling personalities, with the result that even as we shudder at their fate, it becomes difficult to relate to them. A sentimental viewer might say the scene invites us to reflect on the horrors that humans routinely put animals through, but I think the film is more detached and nihilistic than that. Nature is unspeakably cruel, it says, and nature includes human beings with the traps they construct, for themselves and for others – the mechanical contraptions as well as the emotional ones.

[Related posts: on animals in Teri Meherbaniyan and Mon Oncle; on Temple Grandin’s Animals in Translation. And two other posts about MAMI films: Qissa and Closed Curtain]

Fox troth - a column about hidden senses

[Did a version of this piece for Kindle magazine’s anniversary issue about sensory experiences that sometimes remain hidden from us, or that we don’t open ourselves to. I hadn’t intended to write about Foxie for a while – not for official publication anyway – but this seemed to fit the subject, so I drew on some of the things I have written earlier. The magazine website is here, and the illustration on the left is by Soumik Lahiri]


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It was a magical moment, one I often relive and dwell on. One afternoon in July 2008, walking towards a rough lane behind our building to check on our water booster, I saw a litter of six tiny puppies sleeping together. Perhaps it’s relevant that I didn’t see them from a safe distance – they seemed to materialise right under my nose; I might have stepped on one of them if my eyes hadn’t been on the ground.

What I felt in those first few seconds was generic concern (I didn’t know yet that the pups’ mother was nearby, and that they were being looked after by two kindly watchmen) and perhaps the briefest tug of a heart-string. At this point I couldn’t even see them as individuals, just as a huddled-together mass of vulnerable, twitching life. Even over the next few days, as my mother, wife and I began visiting the lane, taking across milk and bread, helping the watchmen cope, I couldn’t have imagined that one of those little creatures would become mine in the truest, deepest sense of the word – not my “pet” but in nearly every way that mattered, my child – and that the next few months would see the opening up of senses and feelings that I didn’t know existed.

I could write a book, or five, on the years that followed, but here’s a summary. We got a couple of the pups adopted, three others succumbed to infection and to the wheels of careless or 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 carefully, providing medicines with each meal, 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, suffered from pain in her hind legs, was so emaciated that most of her ribs showed, and when I took her for a walk downstairs she spent her time not running around after a ball as she once had but sniffing around for the sort of food we had to deny her at home. Then, just when it seemed her condition had stabilised and she was regaining the old spirit, she passed away on the doctor’s table last year, aged barely four.

It was the most devastating thing I have ever faced (and even that is such an understatement, it feels almost indecent to write the sentence). Yet her short life had opened new doors of perception and feeling for me. Back in 2008, if asked, I would casually have called myself an animal lover; today I realise how misleading that would have been, and how much I still had to learn. Ever since childhood, with my mother's encouragement, I had a basic interest in other life forms, at least the ones that humans find it easy to relate to – asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, I would reply “a vet”. But the only animals I had been genuinely close to earlier had been cats, who are relatively distanced and independent, and perhaps this was a reflection of my own personality.

Fox was introverted too, by dog standards that is, but my years with her provided another dimension of experience. They taught me in the most immediate 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 is out of the equation. And there was a practical component to the relationship that made it especially deep. Working out of home, I was around her most of the time during the long months of her illness, 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 the intensity of this relationship was very much an individual thing: it hasn’t translated into comparably strong feelings for other dogs. More than a year after she went, the grieving process is still very much on. I still feel incomplete and numb, struck by panic each time I think of those last moments in the vet’s clinic; I have regular nightmares about being on a narrow ledge at a great height with her in my arms, being unsure I can 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, in the near future. But my time with her did, in a more abstract sense, heighten my sensitivity towards non-human life. The experience has been one of empathy-creation – the sort of feeling where I might see an emaciated dog with a scared, hunted look in its eyes scavenging for food on the streets and think to myself with a shudder, “That could so easily have been my Foxishka, if I had never seen that litter in the lane, or if we had been a little less concerned or more casual.” Such a notion is unthinkable, but I think it all the time.

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 was a race-horse when she galloped in circles around the park in those precious, much-too-brief early months. When I watched news coverage of the “psychic” octopus Paul, I could 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 that said, I don’t want to get over-sentimental about the idea of dogs as creatures whose inner lives are exactly comparable to ours. It’s natural enough for animal-lovers to project their own thoughts and emotions onto their pets, and in principle this can be a good thing: an extreme version of the empathy that allows us to relate to the experiences of a human being from another gender, class, religion or colour (and therefore linked to the concept of “speciesism” as 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 the animal purely in human terms, 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 another creature’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-loved come to 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 or have a stone thrown at him. And somewhere in between, in some ways worst of all, is the cagey expression of the pet who lives in a house where people give him food and water 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.

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In an essay about the self-absorption of human beings, our smug, anthropic inability to really “see” other creatures, the speculative-fiction writer Vandana Singh pointed out that urban development is geared to weeding out the natural world from human lives; it is 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 the determination with which some people cut themselves off from other life forms. There were fights with residents who don’t want to see dogs in the tiny excuse for a park we have downstairs. The small but devoted group of animal-lovers in our colony – people who have taken responsibility for vaccinations, sterilisations and food – constantly face the ire of the vast majority of households.

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? Do 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 human beings – the ones they don’t count among family and friends, or as “equals”, or the ones they don’t expect to benefit from. True compassion isn’t a quality that can neatly be rationed out by withholding it from one species (or social class, or religion, or caste – you pick the group).

And so, maybe I should end on a somewhat upbeat note 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 nearly three decades now, though earning a meager 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. Since then, she has been a constant reminder of what open-heartedness is, and what seeing and feeling can really mean.

[Related posts: Foxie, a remembrance; An old woman and her dogs; Temple Grandin's Animals in Translation]

Amma revisited / pup in plaster

An update on Pratima Devi/Amma, who looks after dogs near the PVR Saket complex. (I wrote about her in this post.) She was very unwell with high blood pressure and fever for a few days, but that hasn’t stopped her from keeping a close eye on her dozens of wards. Just as she was recovering and getting back on her feet, one of the pups got hit by a passing bike, resulting in foreleg fractures. With the help of an acquaintance (and characteristically neglecting her own health), Amma rushed him to Friendicoes for treatment; both legs are in plaster now and the poor chap is restless and depressed about not being able to play, but he will hopefully recover in two or three weeks.

Once again, please do spread the word about her to animal-lovers in Delhi. Also: she has a new litter of pups – eight of them – born to a dog who evaded the van when it came to pick up candidates for sterilisation. They are all adoption-worthy. Here are fuzzy photos of them sleeping in a cardboard box together (you might not be able to make each one out, but hopefully you'll get a general impression of cute multipupdomness).

An old woman and her dogs

Just to spread the word about one of the most amazing people I know: an old woman who lives in a small makeshift shanty next to the PVR Anupam complex in Saket (near the entrance leading to the main parking lot). Pratima Devi – called “Amma” by most of her acquaintances – has been looking after street dogs for years now, on her meagre earnings from collecting and selling reusable garbage. She feeds them, gets them sterilised through Friendicoes or other local organisations; dozens of them sleep huddled together in and around her little home – it’s a truly wondrous sight for anyone who knows how territorial street dogs are, and how aggressively they keep newcomers from encroaching on their spaces.

I’ve only actually known Pratima Devi for the past six months, though we have both been in Saket – living five minutes apart – since 1987. I was vaguely aware of her existence over the years: when passing her side of the PVR complex on winter nights, I would see a couple of charpoys with dogs on them, a bonfire burning nearby. Once or twice I saw her looking very dishevelled, yelling at someone in what seemed an ill-tempered way, and I may have formed the impression that she was a belligerent nutcase who communicated only with animals and didn’t like people.

There was a story with a very interior, contemplative tone that I read as a child in one of our Hindi textbooks – I forget the title, but the premise has stayed with me all these years, long after much of what I learnt in school has been forgotten. It was told in the voice of a privileged man who sees a poor person and wants to go across and talk – to try and understand something of this person’s life and circumstances – but finds an invisible force holding him back; some combination of self-consciousness, social conditioning and perhaps an internal prejudice that makes him believe meaningful communication with someone from such a different background is impossible.

Whatever the case, though I was intrigued by the “kutton waali amma” who was often spoken of in our colony, I didn’t make an effort to come close or get to know her. That changed last June, after Foxie went. Driven by an urge that overrode all our hesitations and procrastinations, we went across and said namaste to Pratima Devi, and were relieved to find that she was extremely warm and friendly, and most happy to talk – not just about the dogs but about her life, and ours.

As we spoke to her over the next few days, many little details emerged. She left her village in West Bengal’s Nandigram in the early 1980s, she told us, mainly to get away from her husband, a lout and wastrel. She once worked as an ayah for the family of the actor-model Rahul Dev (and is still in occasional touch with them). A tea-stall she ran in the spot where she currently lives was shut down by the MCD; later she set up a little temple against the wall near her shack – it has, in a way, legitimised her presence, made it more acceptable to the people around (including the many youngsters who park their bikes nearby and are unnerved by the dogs). One of her sons lives in Sangam Vihar, working as a mistri – she has the option of staying with him (I’ve met him, he seems a kindly, concerned chap), but she can’t leave her dogs, and besides one senses that self-sufficiency is important to her. She was awarded a Godfrey Phillips prize for “social courage” a few years ago and proudly shows photos from the ceremony to anyone who visits her. She has applied for an Aadhaar card but is puzzled by the complications of the procedure; a card was once despatched but never made it to her because she has no fixed address. (I’ve seen the application form – it simply says “Near Saket Shauchalay, PVR Complex”.) Many of the dogs have film-star names - Raj Kumar, Dharmendra - which they live up to with their strutting and preening.

Every week or so I go across and check on Pratima Devi, take some food, but hardly ever has she given the impression of being in need. When I show up and ask if I can get some bread and milk for the dogs from the nearby Mother Dairy, she nods with an indulgent little smile, as if she is doing me a favour (and of course, in a post-Foxie world, she is). Or if the evening’s ration has already arrived, she asks me to come after a day or two, or to call her beforehand to check. On one occasion my mother, cradling one of the new pups, remarked aloud that she felt like adopting this one. You’d think that Pratima Devi, given her hand-to-mouth situation, would be only too glad for people to take dogs off her hand, but she practically jumped up and said “Nahin nahin! Abhi yeh bahut chhoti hai – isse mere paas kuch din aur rehna do.” (“No, she’s too little now – let me look after her for a few more days.”)

But it isn’t my intention to paint a rosy picture of her life. One often hears clichés about the “warm smiles” of the poor – clichés built on the sentimentalising of poverty, on the self-serving myopia of the well-off person who chances to see poor people in their moments of relative comfort and tells himself “They have nothing, but look how happy they are.” I have felt strongly about such hypocrisy for a long time, so it came as a jolt to me one day when I realised I may have been adopting a similar attitude to Pratima Devi; taking for granted her apparently infinite capacity for cheerfulness and optimism.

It happened on a day I went to see her after more than a week. She was with a couple of her associates – a parking attendant and another garbage-collector – and looking more depressed and agitated than I had ever seen her. The previous few days had been particularly hard: she had been laid up with a bad fever and cold, had been unable to work or to go to INA market to buy meat for the dogs, and it happened to be one of those phases when hardly anyone had come across to see her or offer help - her son wasn’t in town either.

Moaning through a backache, describing how one of her pups (a tiny Dalmatian, abandoned by some heartless sub-human) had a festering wound and was being treated by a local doctor for an exorbitant Rs 100 a day, gentle Pratima Devi muttered and fumed, half to herself, half to us: she used maa-behen gaalis as she spoke of a man who had promised to help her secure an electricity connection through the MCD, but who had then made off with more than a thousand rupees. “Gareebon ka sab phaaydaa uthaate hain,” she wailed, her face showing no trace of its characteristic warmth and openness. She wondered aloud what would happen to her dogs after she passed on. (It’s a thought that worries everyone who knows her; though these are street dogs, they are more pampered and loved than many house pets. When she’s away even for an hour or two, they get restless and start chasing after passing autorickshaws to see if she has returned.)

This encounter was a bucket of cold water in my face. I have seen her many times since that day, and she has mostly been back to her upbeat self – but that one day, when the mask slipped, is not something to forget.

I didn’t intend this post as a call for aid, but Pratima Devi has had more bad days than good ones recently (being old and living on the street as the Delhi winter gets worse will do that), and she could always do with some help, even if she doesn’t ask for it. So do go across and see her if you are in Saket sometime, and if you like dogs. (I wouldn’t normally put in that second proviso – Pratima Devi is well worth meeting even if you aren’t an animal-lover – but one must be practical and spell out these things; if you get within 10 feet of her you’ll have to contend with a few dogs first growling softly and then, when they know you mean no harm, sniffing or nuzzling you.) Or if you’re interested in meeting her but would prefer a sort of “introduction”, send me an email and I’ll take you across.

P.S. must say this, though I wish I didn’t have to. It infuriates me that people sometimes come by in their cars and leave their animals with this poor old woman, treating her like a fully funded animal shelter – which she emphatically is not. (Not that registered animal shelters have it easy either.) Her heart is big enough for all these dogs (her son tells me she holds the compassionate but highly impractical view that she should get bitches spayed only after they have had one litter of pups), but it increases her burden enormously, as well as adding to her worries about the future. So please, DO NOT use her as a dumping ground for unwanted pets.

P.P.S. Here's a photo of Pratima Devi with two of her friends at an event held to mark Anti-Rabies Day; Abhilasha went with her.