9 – Dog Personalities
An actress’ pet dog sank its teeth into Jagan’s hand once. It wasn’t the dog’s fault, though. It was Jagan’s, because he’d assumed it was a pedigreed dog. Pet dogs don’t tend to bite people, but this dog was a hardened stray that the actress had adopted recently.
Fear is encoded in the DNA of stray dogs. Biting is their only defense mechanism which is why I do not blame the stray for having bitten Jagan.
Let me educate you a little bit about the standard operating procedure to be adhered to when dealing with the species Canis familiaris. The canine has to be spoken to first if you intend to win its trust. Leave it up to the dog to decide if you’re friendly or hostile. Speak to the animal kindly and welcomingly and extend your wrist. If the dog sniffs at it, it is a signal that it’s willing to be touched. Your hand just might become a tasty chew-toy if you don’t adhere to the protocol.
10 – Whitey, a Street Dog, My Friend
I seem to get along very well with street dogs. I had a four-legged friend who lived in my lane. When I first saw him, every last square inch of his body was infested with sores. A few months later, as if by some miracle, he was healed. I could see shoots of white fur reappearing. I named him Whitey. Whenever I ventured out, he’d come sprinting to me like we’d been best friends for ages. When sore-stricken, he shied away from physical contact. Feeling the urge to reciprocate this dog’s affection, I began feeding him biscuits. I even offered him branded dog food, but he was partial to cashew cookies.
I used to walk the length of Beach Road every morning. When I set out for my walk at five in the morning, I would find Whitey sleeping under a car. He would usually accompany me to the mouth of the lane. Today he followed me further. The two of us, man and dog, prayed before the Santhome cathedral for five minutes before pacing up to the lighthouse.
Even at that early hour, traffic wasn’t sparse. Cars and bikes were zipping by like their riders were being pursued through one of hell’s circles by the devil himself. I feared that some rash rider might hit Whitey or run him over. I looked at him. He was standing right beside me, returning my gaze, wagging his tail. I decided against crossing the road and abandoned my morning walk altogether. Whitey serenely escorted me back home and curled up on my doorstep.
Whitey was ever on the alert and kept his vigilant eye trained on scavengers and North-Indian blanket sellers.
The influx of North Indians into Tamil Nadu would have been unimaginable forty years ago when the Dravidian parties first seized power, piggybacking on emotive slogans such as “The North waxes while the South wanes.” Today it is the North that seems to be waning. It is nearly impossible to find South Indians in labor-intensive jobs. There is a heavy demand and a voluntary supply of migrant labor from up north. The Dravidian parties overexerted themselves to uproot Hindi, but the northern language was already entrenched too deep. Most of the workers in the restaurants here are from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar – even in mofussil towns whose inhabitants would never have heard a word of Hindi. Today, a working knowledge of Hindi is essential if you wish to be attended to even in a place as hoary as Mylapore’s Rayar Café.
Perundevi was convinced that the blanket-sellers were doubling as the local thieves’ informants. Using trade as their cover, they made careful note of which houses were locked, how many members lived in a household, and their everyday schedules. If the thieves had a field day, the informants would have a wad shoved into the back pockets of their pants. Perundevi’s theory couldn’t be pooh-poohed entirely. Chennai did get rocked by a spate of robberies around that time and the culprits turned out to be slave-laborers from the stone quarries of Rajasthan.
It is not uncommon even for poor and lower middle-class families of Tamil Nadu to be in ownership of gold worth a hundred grand. Middle-class households could, at a conservative estimate, be in possession of 250 grams, five-hundred grand there. Most of it is found on a woman’s nose, dangling from her ears, round her neck and on both her arms (mostly from wrist to elbow). The rest of it is stashed in steel almirahs.
In one particularly gruesome, widely covered incident, a gang of Rajasthani blanket-sellers broke into a house they’d been sussing out for quite some time at around two in the morning. They attacked the family with crowbars, killing them all. A twelve-year-old was among the killed. She had been pinned to the wall and held in a chokehold until she died. Under the pressure of a public outcry, the police bucked up for once and swung into action. The gang was intercepted during their flight to Rajasthan. The jewelry was recovered but all its owners were dead.
Whitey’s eternal vigilance and ferocity deterred the blanket-sellers from entering our street, but not the scavengers. Local men knew the art of handling local dogs; they chased the dog away with sticks and stones. The scavengers presented a peculiar sight as they went about their business. Their filthy torsos were indistinguishable from the garbage dump. They usually came bare-bodied, with a high-density sack slung over one shoulder.
They had their eyes peeled primarily for milk sachets and plastic tumblers (that fetched them seventeen bucks per kg), beer and soda cans (a kilo of these sold for twenty-five), cardboard boxes (twenty-eight a kilo) and beer bottles (full, half-full, half-empty, or empty – it made no matter). And some of them were specialists in ferreting out ferrous scrap alone.
Perundevi was one among the few who practiced the segregation of wet and dry waste. The scavengers were attracted only to the dry half. They would tear open the wet bag to find nothing of even marginal commercial value. The contents of the bag they deemed useless would be scattered far and wide, creating an almighty mess. Appalled, Perundevi would curse them. The scavengers did not ruffle my feathers. I was no stranger to the circumstances of their lot because I was born in them. If I were a practitioner of my caste-ordained profession, I would have been no different than them. Perundevi would give a deaf ear to my take on the issue, and her vocal battles with the scavengers raged on.
“You will never understand how a woman feels about certain things, so, the best thing for you to do is to mind your own business,” she would admonish me.
She feared that the street, if abandoned in its garbage-ridden state, would attract undesirable nuisance-cases, and since my travels kept me away most of the time, she had to look out for herself. Like a hawk with an eye on its prey, she would keep an eye on the dustbins and holler at the scavengers and drive them away. They responded to her with obscenities.
The scavengers broke Whitey’s hind leg. It was their “how do you like that” to us. We took Whitey to the vet who had to surgically amputate his leg, but the dog did not lose its spirit. It continued to run like it had three legs more instead of one leg less.
Perundevi the zealot had an idea. Why not have the garbage bin removed from the vicinity? Using her influence, she made a few phone calls and – what do you know – the bin was removed. Once the bin was gone, the sanitation workers showed up at six every morning and at noon with their pushcarts to collect the garbage. When there was the bin, all the residents of our street had to do was hand the garbage to their maids who simply tossed it into the giant roadside bin. They exerted their collective influence and had the bin brought back. They were livid with Perundevi for causing them all this trouble, and the fact that she was a woman only angered them further. “How can a woman be so arrogant? Wait, we’ll teach her a lesson,” they said.
Not one to back away from a fight like a spineless coward, she opened another front. First, she brought the problem to the attention of the city’s mayor; second, she adopted a Gandhian strategy – she went from house to house like an evangelizer and explained the merits of not having a garbage bin in the neighborhood. When she told them how the garbage dump was responsible for their children’s illnesses, she managed to win them over. The bin was once again removed. We spent four thousand rupees a month for the maintenance of the premises. We had hired two people to ra
ke the leaves. They also swept the ground and watered it twice a day. Only after this was done, Perundevi would draw the kolam. We paid the sanitation workers 1500 rupees. Considering their measly monthly payment, this couldn’t be called a bribe. The remaining five hundred bucks was paid to incentivize the dude who supervised the workers.
While the entire country was turning into one giant garbage heap, one woman was fighting a dogged battle to keep one street clean. Three sanitation workers – Chandra, Devanai and Gajendran – collected the garbage from our street. They took it in turns to come. If one of them failed to turn up in the morning, Perundevi would phone the other two. On most days Gajendran wouldn’t answer her calls as he’d be nursing a hangover, and if Chandra too didn’t answer, she would call Durai, the supervisor, immediately. If none of them turned up, the place would stink to high heaven. Sometimes, it felt like Perundevi was running a mini-municipality by herself.
At around ten one morning, Devanai was knocking at our gate. The garbage in the kitchen was spilling out of the trash bag. I asked her to wait while I took care of first things first. Just then, I heard Perundevi whisper something to Parvathy, our maid. Fearing that Devanai might leave without taking the garbage, I kept yelling for her to hold on. I saw Parvathy run to the gate and tell Devanai to come later in the afternoon as there was no garbage to be dumped now.
“The garbage bag is overflowing, Parvathy!” I shouted.
Perundevi came to me and whispered, “Gajendran is on leave today, Udhaya. If Devanai collects the garbage now, no one will come in the afternoon.”
“But it’s overflowing! Can’t you see? Why couldn’t we have just handed it to her now?”
“You don’t get it, Udhaya. If nobody comes in the afternoon, then all the garbage will pile up before our house and I will have to sweep it away.”
Something else happened that day. I don’t usually pay attention to Perundevi’s many telephone conversations as they mostly veer around all things spiritual. But this time, she spoke of something else altogether.
“Durai, I need some help. The house in front of ours is being renovated. I think the rubbish they dumped outside has found its way into the sewage pipe and blocked it. Could you come and take a look at it? If you can’t, just let me know so that I can call the mayor and ask him to do something about it. Oh, so you’re coming, are you? Are you sure? Well, that’s settled then.”
In a few minutes, a huge lorry arrived with the words “Chennai Corporation Solid Waste” emblazoned on it. The lorry was much larger than the garbage truck. While I was wondering how it managed to wend its way through all the narrow streets, a water lorry too arrived. Perundevi assumed the role of a traffic cop, standing in the middle of the road and issuing instructions to clear the way for the water lorry. After the workers who had come in the solid waste lorry had cleared the blockage in the underground sewage system (taking forty-five minutes), they came to Perundevi for their “incentives.” I was in my room when I heard Durai say, “What is the meaning of this, Madam? You have given us only four hundred rupees when there are five of us.”
She said, “Of course, you’ll probably hope for a biscuit of gold each when you next see me.”
One day, I noticed that Whitey was troubled by a flea-infestation. When I tried to medicate him, he scooted. Blackie would not allow Whitey into the house, so we did not encourage Whitey in either. Whitey would visit thrice a day, eat his cashew cookies and leave. He would stand guard at the gate and wait for me. Soon enough, Blackie and Baba were also flea-stricken. Madan said he would deposit Whitey with the Blue Cross, insisting that his own pets were more important than a street dog. Even though he did not put his threat into action, it surprised me all the same that he could differentiate between a dog with and a dog without a home.
Around that time, some new neighbors moved in. They had a Labrador called Buddy. The son, Raja, a college student, was an ardent devotee of Sai Baba. All day, I would hear bhajans being chanted or played in their house. Upon learning that I too was a Sai Baba devotee, Raja started coming over on Thursdays to give me the prasad. Perundevi remarked, mightily impressed, “I’ve never seen such a nice boy!”
I did have my doubts, but I never voiced them openly. How could a boy so young be so spiritually inclined?
When Buddy the Labrador caught the flea infestation, Raja realized that Whitey was responsible for it. He came to me and said that he was going to hand over the stray to the municipality. Stunned and saddened, I asked Perundevi, “Did you hear what the ‘nice boy’ said?”
“A person is made up of both good and bad traits,” she philosophized.
Do you know how street dogs are culled? Have you seen them being rounded up and caught by the municipality workers? Did you hear their pathetic howls when they are caught? As per the government’s orders, these dogs are to be killed with a lethal shot, but that doesn’t happen. The men, fearing that the dogs might bite them while they are being injected, kill them by bashing them on the head with an iron rod. This I have witnessed with my own eyes and this is just one of the reasons I detest man, the most vicious of all living creatures.
11 – A Close Shave with Death
Devika asked me whether I’d be interested in watching Chanakya at the Music Academy. She was a dear friend to Perundevi and a top cop, the head of the anti-corruption wing.
We lived on the ground floor of an apartment complex in Chinmaya Nagar. On the floor above was a family that had moved in recently. Quite often, their refuse would rain down onto our laundry on the line and soil it completely.
After a drink, they would simply toss the bottles off the balcony. Even their dog took after them, taking a dump at everybody else’s door. Following a series of complaints from Perundevi and the other residents, our shoes started vanishing from outside our houses.
I never butt into these affairs. If you want to throw dishwater down my shirt or even piss on my head, go right ahead. I was young when I realized the futility of getting into a tangle with numpties and knaves.
My father used to grow tomatoes on a small patch of land. While he was waiting for them to ripen, the neighbor’s goat made an unwelcome visit and polished them all off.
“It’s okay, don’t worry about it,” I’d often have to tell him.
The grueling work involved explained the film of tears that would come over his reddening eyes. The heated exchange between him and the neighbor degenerated into a fisting match once. Had I not come to his rescue equipped with an arivaal, they would have strangled him to death. This vicious cycle of revenge continued. I once banded together a group of friends and gave my neighbors a sound thrashing. They returned the favor with a near fatal attack on me. I miraculously managed to escape.
After my near meet-and-greet with death, I stepped out of that notorious world. I immersed myself in books and music. But the literary world too is peopled with its strongmen, its henchmen, its thugs and its hired snipers. Not a day went by that I didn’t receive abusive mail. Most of what I received was very articulate and colorful, and very generous in the outpouring of filth. The correspondents were mostly from the US of A, Europe and India. They all seemed to have a personal problem with me. Perundevi was the subject of several of these letters. One moralizing correspondent had the audacity to ask me if I wasn’t ashamed of living with a second-hand wife.
Soon after we married, I asked Perundevi why she preferred to keep her hair short after the fashion of Lady Diana. She told me that after her husband from her previous marriage had died, ultra-orthodox Brahmin custom dictated that she keep her head shorn. Once it grew back, she decided to sport a bob cut. It would have been a surprise to not receive those obscene e-mails considering the society I live in.
Our plan to watch Chanakya unfortunately coincided with the Residents’ Association meeting of our apartment. I was usually a no-show, but this time, we had all reason to attend. While several residents had ha
d their footwear pinched, my son Madan was robbed of his bicycle. In addition to all of that, there were plenty of other niggles wanting resolution. As is usually the case with such meetings, this one ended in pandemonium without us getting even remotely close to solving our problems. Perundevi returned exhausted and exasperated.
After that mayhem, Perundevi had a duplicate key made for the main gate. This she gave to the folks who lived above us who invariably came home at midnight. Despite this, they continued to knock on our window to be let in. They would say that the key had been misplaced and cheekily ask Perundevi to have another made for them. Although this was not Perundevi’s responsibility in the slightest, she acceded to their demand. After all, she was a social worker. Like a woman losing her bobby-pins, these bothers kept losing their key and continued to disturb us by knocking on the window at ungodly hours.
This is an essential strategy for problem-free living and survival in India which I discovered when I was working in the postal department. Whenever the Postmaster General – the PMG – and I were happened to be in the same lift, I would ignore him, but the other employees would bow and scrape before him. I did not wish to make an exhibition of my boldness or my indifference to authority, but if I greeted him, he would realize that I was a postal employee. His next question would invariably be: “Which section?” and if I were to reply, “Stenos’ Pool,” I would return to a table with a mountain of documents to be typed before I even reached it. A rider saying that I had to finish them all within the hour would accompany them. I had been in one of these situations before and it was then that I’d stumbled on this practical philosophy of remaining hidden from or invisible to others. If I lay low, the PMG would assume I was a member of the public and leave me alone. Okay, that was quite a digression. Let’s return to the point.
Marginal Man Page 4