Mound’s Third Occupier: The Old Black Dog

13

                 Mound’s Third Occupier: The Old Black Dog

Winter had done its canvassing in the countryside. This noontime one felt more uncomfortable due to the clouds playing hide and seek with the sun. Adding to the icy pinch, cold breeze sauntered down the plains from the heavily snowed Himalayas. Undaunted under the big burden of a heavy and ragged blanket, the pond’s upkeeper was directing netting operations in the murky waters of the pond’s southern end; a good half kilometre away from the road.

The cork trail of floaters was decreasing in a parabolic pattern. The same set of muscular Bengalese, hired from the fish market in Delhi, was pulling the heavy rope attached to the lower dragging end of the net. Today it was a lighter man who was almost comedically wrestling with the rope, just at the point it emerged from the water, to prevent it from rising high under the impact of hard pull which could provide an escaping route to the fish caught in the encirclement.

Anyone who may have earlier seen the anchor-man’s stooping frail figure and a face with a sickly look would have been hugely surprised to witness this energised piloting of the fish operation by him. It was a good catch. As the muddy heap was dragged onto the ground, the old supervisor’s eyes galored with a strange contendness. As they bared the aquatic crop lying in a slip-sloppy enmeshment, fish of six-seven varieties stridently flip-flopped. Two snakes and a tortoise promptly made their way out of the delicacies. Both of the reptiles were easily trampled down. Naturally the snake’s carcass was flung into the prickly branches, while the tortoise found a cozy safety in a labourer’s cloth bag, who grinned saying its delicacy would cure his perilously coughing and sneezing, asthmatic old mother at a slum in Delhi.

Eight or nine big plastic containers half filled with water were placed nearby for their respective varieties of fish.

“I’ve the cheap one at my stake. Just 45 rupees per kilo!” a funny faced worker with small mouth, deep dimples on both his cheeks, broad nose and a double chin gesticulated as he picked out a red faced arou from among the slippery heap.

Another one grimaced, as if his moustache had been violently hacked from his face visualising violence and action. “You too are a delicacy just for not so well off!” he rudely kissed a mrigal whose long body writhed loathfully in its whitish complexion.

Just out of water on a cloudy winter day, still in their wet shorts, there emerged a small fishy game which made them forget their shivering limbs.

Now it was the turn of a man with bulging eyes, wide mouth paneled with full lips, outstanding ears and lines in the corner of eyes. Holding his katla with a largish face, he sang (which seemed incredulous given his appearance, but then musicity is not bound by appearances):

“Oh my sweetie, thou fetch five rupees more for thy looks!” he kissed its panicked face and left it gently into his container.

A full head with wavy hair proudly raised itself after a hard concentration in the heap. Its thin long mouth opened with a mangur in hand. Holding its tail he flaunted an angry catfish over the singer’s head.

“This ugly monster of mine is double costly than your sweetie,” he croaked thickly, trying to match his possession’s angry looking face.

“Though my singee is a lot docile than yours. But when it comes to fetching a price, sinew by sinew it matches yours. A tautly clean, hundred rupees blue note!” the labourer with heavy definite lines on lower cheeks and a cleft chin prided in his fish.

“And what about my singar? Though its thorns are really dangerous, still people take risk for its tasty meat and high fat content,” the worker with prominent creases on the forehead and a strong jutting chin vaunted.

The watchman’s creakingly rickety voice sounded authoritative over their heads. “When I was of your age I used to catch chingda from rivers in Bihar. Presently, I think you won’t get it even for thousand rupees per kilo. Poor folks of our country can’t afford to enjoy it, so only its mouth is kept here for consumption while the rest is sold to other countries.”

“The fish are just soft meat delicacies dada. Can you tell any other use of them?” one of them seemed to test the old man’s grains in the trade.

“Yes, of course, there are so many!” watchman’s voice came wonderfully clear. “Take for example! The capsule which you swallow down when you’re ill, its shell is made from tula found beneath the windpipe of singada.”

“Dada, I’ve heard that dolphins are very playful and mix with us humans very well. Is it really so?” another got an opportunity to clear his doubts.

“They’re, they’re, indeed!” old man’s face came alive under the impact of sudden missives from the past.

“Once we were fishing in the Ganga. And there were these two dolphins elis or saukat...” he seemed in a doubt about the type of Gangetic dolphin. “Yes! Those were elis,” life hovered in his eyes. “And they played with our boat so naughtily that I’ve never seen even a child play like this!” he closed his eyes as if to recapture that moment of decades ago in its full vividness.

While they were talking, from behind a bush, a dog with soporific eyes was casting hungry, malleable looks at the fish heap. It’d have remained there and appease its appetite by just listening to the fish workers’ driveling and casting mildly greedy eyeshots at the fishy mass in commotion, hadn’t they put all of them in the containers and showed signs of departure.

So now when only one piece of fish load remained to be carried to the TATA four-wheeler waiting on the road for its impending journey to Delhi, it came out of its eeriness and from a few yards behind the watchman whined monosyllabically. The fishing stalwart looked back and found this poor beast growing old in its cumbersome saggy black coat over his big skeleton. Like the watchman burdened beneath a big blanket, the dog too in its hairy coat seemed to give credence to the cumbersome world’s weighty contrivance against the aged and the old.

In a heartbeat of empathy for the poor beast the watchman put his hand into the only remaining load item and took out a fish which struggled in his frail fist. He looked at the creature with a mystical affection-–a sentiment, an emotion beyond the classification of the prey and the hunter. His eyes showing as if he was holding a part of his own heart, and flew the daughter of his emotions in the direction of the dog; dutibound under the beautiful divine connivance ordained by the food chain linking millions of species alive and agog in the flora and fauna kingdoms. Every pore of his soul acquiesced under a mystical sensation born of a vague realisation of the purpose of creation, and just a mere link in that mysterious scheme of things, he nurtured the agile water dwellers for the nature. So, he watched the old dog eating the fish-–the very essence of his heart’s compassion-–without any negative emotion, without a pang arising out of discrimination between the eater and the food.

                                           *  *  *  *

Time was around five in the evening. The Shahi Imam of Jama Masjid had declared the visibility of moon’s first crescent on the previous evening. So, the holy month of Ramzan, the Islamic month of fasting and charity, had begun. It was during this month the holy Qu’ran was revealed to the Prophet. At this sun-down moment, the Ulema’s religious authority was symbolised by the moon’s crescent with a purplish gaseous line going with signature flow beneath it. It was the gas-trail ejected by a jet which was moving westwards into the dusky-azure sky. The sun low on the horizon reflected its rays on the smoky beam. Moon and the purple line beneath made it seem as if the Ulema had put his approving signature upon the moony semblance and flagged off the holy month of fasting.

Faith and fasting have a great complementary role for each other, because through fasting we negate the universal ‘eat-up’ spirit. While we are in the state of survival on the minimum, faith is the guiding light bestowing the divine instinct of ‘gobble-not’ instead of ‘eat-up’.

As for our Muslim watchman, he was perhaps wasn’t even aware of the festive month. Throughout all the twelve months he abided by the tenets of humanism, so without being condemned as a heretic he could take the liberty of going on the same little, solitary path which led him to his duty in the job. So, there he was serenely busy in his work; his soul in perpetual sabbatical fasting. On the other hand in the cities, especially in the political circles, ostentatious Iftar parties were being held in the evenings as the winter reached the cusp of its chilly filigree. Seeing them it was difficult to tell whether it was fasting or feasting.

Unfortunately, this month of pacification was turned bloodily volatile by fanatic Muslims shrouded in some dark yearning, who went out on a high-pitched assault on the Indian security forces in Kashmir. Much to the anger of whole countryside, a young soldier from a neighbouring village got bullet splinters on the right side of his lower belly. Whole rural district bashed Pakistan for the misdeed. The new MLA designate, Ram Ratan of the rightist-nationalist party, almost monoplosised the front pages of the local media with his lofty patriotic phrases. The tiny Muslim community at the district city remained indoors as he held a small rally to avenge the blood of the valiant soldier through his throat-bursting speech. Alas, much to his chagrin all it turned out to be a damp squib! No communal ramifications were felt. What an unpatriotic constituency on which this spangly scion of nationalism had been grafted!

To keep him constantly on the tenterhooks, the deadly rozdars were more and more vigorously feasting upon Indian blood. Their eyes, ears, tongues and minds hypnotized to be killed and kill during the holy month. The Qu’ranic version which prohibits the followers from succumbing to the ordinary and cheap tastes of human life had been strategically hijacked by the blood-mongers preaching in the hatred dens. So, instead of pious soul searching, the denizens of gun-totting country were targeting any Indian semblance in the paradisiacal vales. Ignorant of the Prophet’s voice urging His followers to love their neighbour during the holy month, they were-–in their full neurotic cockiness-–trying to finish off their neighbour.

Away from all such religious grails, faded feisty notes emanating from the twinkling wind chimes of Eid-ul-Fitr reached the watchman’s ears on this concluding day of the fasting month. And that too through the words of a Mohammedan labourer in the net-casting group which reached the pond on this day and dumped on ground big stashes of net in heaped jumblement. Some of them were seen untangling the nettings, while the rest got into an informative chat with the frail expert, who though couldn’t match their strenuous pulls at the net rope, but his mental dexterity and expertise made him the unparalled master of the trade.

Except one incidental fact, there was not much familiarity between the rejoicing Muslim world and this lone co-religioner. It was Prophet Mohammed who celebrated Eid on March 27, 624 A D after winning the battle of Jang-e-Badar against the primitive Arabs leading a sinful life. Like Him this old man was valiantly preparing for a battle-of-nets in the cold waters.

In an amazingly perfectionist way the watchman was untangling their fishing queries, as the cold breeze in its wintry certitude played with the water. His unresolving of doubts from their minds went in charming parallelism with his omniscient fingers which obviated a fatal knot in the dusty brown net which the casual fingers of the labourers had failed to untangle. Even after this victory the purgatory provost’s look was ensconced in its laid-back autumnal aura. It seemed to be looking out for the next purposeful step. And found one easily as it fell upon the helpless eyes of the shivering dog. A dried out fish dropped out of the unfolding nettings. The kind Mussalman doled it out to the dog as if it was a fitra, the charity, on the occasion of Eid. The vast pond with tranquil waters evinced the look of an eidgah, the plain ground for the prayers. Birds and the flirting fish seemed to say ‘Eid Mubarak!’

Two or three of them holding the net rope entered the cold water and went straight to the southern side, their trajectory being indicated by the floaters at the upper end of the nettings. One of them was unknotting the net inside water to make it a fence stretching from floaters to the bottom mud. Rest of them on the shore, somewhere in the middle along the pond’s eastern fringe, were untangling the heaped net. After going for about hundred metres the pullers turned shoreward.

Today it was a motley group of Bihari and Bengali labourers. Two of them were Muslims. Both of them had a vantage vision of the Islamic festivity today. Celebration-lorn they proposed a night stay at the watchman’s place, which was accepted with a voice vote. So, bidding adieu to the fish-laden vehicle they headed for the mound; while the misty parasols of this winter evening beauteously soaked up the last traces of hazy light.

Going by their moods-–aren’t there so few occasions in their hard lives?-–there was to be a kind of festive environment on the earth’s gobbet this night. The two huts had their own guests for their respective special occasions. The sky in foggy contrivance was diluvial dark as not a single star was visible. Only playmates to the perpetual dark were the vehicle headlights on the road which scattered themselves on fog particles thus sending a veily glow over the surroundings.

Three of them in boozed up sassy spirits got into the boat and set sail over the longish aisle of the pond. There they started singing folksongs in very genteel and eased tones. The rest of them were inside the watchman’s poorly laid out hut; they were in fact preparing for the supper.  Excited warmth of their words seemed to give strength to the disadvantaged hut of their host, whose inestimable and intractable sobriety was certainly abristle with some succinctly happy spirit today.

Chit-chatting in the innocence of their dialect they lit up the chulha and started to prepare the first and foremost delicacy of their culinary skills using fish, rice, onion, potato, tomato, mustard oil and green chilli. Warming his freezy-frail limbs by the fire, the watchman was happy for the happiness of these labourers. This delicacy sent down such sweetly pungent aroma into the subdued winter air that it went agog with hungry excitement. The aromatic fragrance sailed over the pond and reached the boat. They hailed the Goddess of food for such beautiful things.

“Should we come back?” one of them shouted sottishly.

“No… No! It’d take another half-an-hour,” the cooks bade orders from the mound.

However, this fragrance was not able to make an entry into the neighbour’s hut because the entrance flap had been dropped down and inside the incantation laden air was whetting its own conjuration in response to the nefarious sorcery fumes smoking up from the anchorite’s fireplace. Three or four solace seekers were sitting bewitched; their hearts praying to get rid of the problems sprangled by some unknown causes. This awful eerie was broken by some occasional chants and devotional exclamations accompanied by egomaniacal blowing of the conch-shell.

And there inside the watchman’s hut where the diners were furtively jostling with the food, the dog peeped like an imp. Its two innocently mazy, round eyes glinted as the lantern’s wick groped for its tiny replica in those natural lenses. Rest of its black furred body seemed to be lost in the cold darkness outside.

“This dog is following you master,” one of them who’d taken wine informed softly.

“He looks just like me,” the watchman said it with rarest of a smile, and gently threw a big piece of the fish-delicacy which the visitors had forcefully put in his plate despite his protestations that he needed just a quarter of it. The offering landed near the poor beast’s mouth. With an obliging whine it picked up its naturally claimed portion of the festivity.

                                           *  *  *  *

Historically, dogs have been the faithful companions of mankind from the early settlement period. Spread out over all cultural realms across the world they show one inviolably invariable character: Faithfulness.

Vishnu Sharma in the Panchatantra versified friendship and loyalty thus:

          Friends might look like foes,

          And foes sometimes appear as friends,

          All but, try to fulfill their narrow ends,

          Few people are there

          Who can lay the difference bare.

          It’s better to accompany a snake;

          Or give shelter to foes and people fake,

          Than putting your faith in rogue pals:

          Bumpkin, irresolute and false.

Had there been dogs all around, the great fabler need not have put the above advice; for, at a given time a dog appears only in one form: either a foe or a friend.

Our small hillocky mound which was witnessing profusely yawning tension between its occupiers---though initiated by one, but embroiling both of them---if had a dog in between, then the situation at least had some probability of being different; at least Milan Kundera believed so:

“Dogs are our link to paradise. They don’t know evil or jealousy or discontent. To sit with a dog on a hillside on a glorious afternoon is to be back in Eden, where doing nothing wasn’t boring.”

Also, a silent dog near the silent waters of a pond would add something to bewareness, as the Latin proverb advises: “Beware of a silent dog and still water.”

Adored with such inductile propriety and unmalleable virtues, dogs are found practically everywhere man has found a foothold: from highest reaches in the mountains to the most leveled up plains.

There’re plenty of native Indian breeds, the so called desi dogs like Bhutia, Rampur hound, Gaddi and other local wild and stray dogs ubiquitously found in Indian villages. Their dogged existence has been generalised in terms of their indistinct characteristics like smelling power, barking, ears erect or dropping, docked tail carried high or hanging, colour of their coats and many other doggy decadent things which condemn their noun as a copious obscenity ‘dog’ or ‘bitch’ to provide wording to our dark yearnings for our fellow human male or female.

Right from the birth of the village-–local chronicles say it was in early thirteenth century after the defeat of Prithvi Raj Chauhan at the hands of Mohammed Gauri in 1192 which resulted in the exodus of many subjects of the valiant Rajput ruler, some of whom laid the foundation of this settlement-–up to five or seven years ago (and some stray cases even till the time of our tale) there was a particular category of dogs, the eremite or stoic dogs which led a solitary life in the fields outside the village.

In those unmechanised agricultural times, farmers used to plough the fields throughout the day. This in addition to other manual agricultural work meant farmers were villagers only during nights. Armed with copious perseverance a farmer would toil in the fields right from the onset of dawn. His wife then arrived at the lunchtime with food brimming with caloric prodigality embaled in big lumps of butter, a clod-like piece of jaggery, few litres of sour milk and a chapatti-stack having considerable height. And when the imprudishly hardworking peasant spread out his lunch under the shade of a tree, the stoic dog would sense the floral and leafy smell tom-tomming over the lugubrious air.

Undogly ungreedy in the sense that these poor beasts survived just on a few crumbs thrown to them by the farmer or a chapatti or two and some buttermilk fixed as their share of the lunch by his wife. With a solitary fulfillment these stoic animals would then either watch the farmer sculpting furrows on the earth’s breast or roam around in the wilderness for mice and some other little prey. Very rarely they felt the compunction to visit the villages. Their cool temperaments and unbickering gait made them a class apart from the snootily driveling canine conscience found in the settlement dogs.

Even now in their old eeriness, peasants of yesteryears could recall many such canine ascetics who in solitary solitude shared those moments of burden, boredom and hardships.

However, as the farming process gradually jumped onto the mechanised bandwagon, the peasants’ stay in the fields began to decline. The farmer whose father used to toil for days on a piece of land with his bullocks and plough, now had the facility of a tractor to get the job done in just a couple of hours. There were thus less and less lunches under the shades of trees in the fields far away from the village. The lonely dogs, thus, at a far place from the village found themselves deprived of a great past.

Still there were some mnemonists who’d take something for the skinny stoic dog roaming dejectedly in their part of the fields, pokering its nose into an odd chance of getting some prey which most often wasn’t there because the chemical inputs extricated even small insects, so where was the scope for rodents and the allied nuisances.

And if for days at a stretch no charity arrived from the village, the stoic had to break its vow and arrive at the village like a sinner or thief. Its tail dogged down, afraid of the serrated barks at each step in the streets, it then stood at the door of the forgetful patron. It would walk back to the fields happily after eating a chapatti piece of the size of its ear. Its face so contended as if just now it’d gulped down heaviest of a feast; in diametrically complete contrast to the greedy street dogs who barked and quarreled to land one another in perdition for almost nothing, and went on staring at the diner even after greedily gobbling down more than the human himself.

Apart from the sabotaging hawks wandering with jostling jeers in the village streets, these stoic dogs had to come over another obstacle during their occasional forays into the village. It was the district road looping around the village (at least solitary dwellers of the north and north-west countryside were saved of this vehicular fencing). Not able to gauge the intrinsically soaring norms of a speeding vehicle on a metalled road-–doesn’t matter how pot-holed it was-–these sage animals most often found their uncontriving and conscientious selves under an apoplectic seizure at the sight of rattling metal and consequently were played footsie by an accident. So, a few of them died of such nanosecond’s ineptness; their carcasses run over to a gory mass. What a tragic end after spending a wonderful life in petalous solitude and soporific loneliness amid bark-free countryside still nostalgically harking back to those exemplary days!

Now, the old black dog which’d got festival gifts from the watchman belonged to the same class as discussed above. Far away from the nibbling hacks in the village streets, it’d spent all its life in idyllic farms. In its youth it must have been very strongly and big built, because its shrunken old age silhouette still gave an inkling of once panoramic past. Its old saggy black coat antiquely ornated its crackling skeleton.  The tail hung low, as if under the weight of age and long hair. Its broad skull indicating that it was heavy boned. The dark eyes, well apart, gave it a kind expression, almost diametrically opposite to the azure airiness of a dog of its size and girth. When it moved its maned muscles around the neck, still strong hind-quarters and ribs jerked as if they’d suddenly loosened up. The bark was well spaced and broadsidely heavy; so when it barked (which it did on rarest of occasions, and for the rest of the time it remained silent as if pondering over some mysterious attitude’s anatomy of his) with effort and shake of its coat, it seemed as if it was growling inside a fully baked pitcher. Lacking sudden swipes, it had gentle movements led by those cathartically dreamy old eyes.

Changing patterns of agriculture with its productive vision into the future forced the old stoic to break away from its isolation. Thus, it could be seen sometimes silently entering the village when for days it didn’t come across a crumb for survival in the cultivated fields. It was a similar situation which made it stand by the pond on that day of netting when the watchman offered it a fish.

To some villagers it was known as the dog which was seen carrying chapattis in its mouth from the village for some small puppies back in the fields. Maybe these were fathered by him of some bitch of his own type. What a parenting it was! But as fate would’ve it, all those small ones died unnatural deaths in their efforts to cross the road with their father. Isn’t it a fact that hardly anyone from these poor stray dogs dies a natural death? It is for this reason we damn a dogly death to our foes.

The old black dog’s visits to the village for survival were becoming more and more frequent, which in turn made it an itching enigma in the eyes of street dogs; so, almost all of them attacked the trespasser simultaneously. Bite marks could be seen on its skin through the rough and gruff of the old saggy black coat; though it was capable of condemning the same fate to them if challenged in a one to one fight (heavily built as it was). Hence, in order to avoid their canine backlash inside the village, the poor outsider started looking for something to eat right from the village surroundings.

Unharming and sympathetic look of the watchman had emboldened some little, hesitating movements by its long bushy tail dejectedly hanging down; still, somehow, maintaining its fold of pride at the lower end. It definitely smacked of a feeling of belonging.

As Bonnie Wilcox said in ‘Old dogs, old friends’: “Old dogs like old shoes are comfortable. They might be a bit out of shape and a little worn around the edges, but they fit well.”

In a nutshell, this was the only qualification of the dog, if somebody cared to pet it. But, only puppies are made pets for the sake of their naughty childhood; who, alas, later grow to be unfortunately lethargic grown-ups and acquire other qualities in order to maintain human mastership over their heads. So, who cares to pet or own a grown-up dog? This one was not only grown up, but old too.

This dog, however, seemed to have a clear vision of its future survival in order to die a natural death---if possible. Its old nostrils had smelt the habitation cropping up on the mound; where at least a dog could hope to survive-–survival in the company of humans as well as retaining its own ways of passing the old days lazily sleeping all the day. Two huts just outside the village; and no dog rivaling its right: all in all situation wasn’t that bleak as envisaged by those starvation fears back in the fields. So, after the Eid-time benevolence shown by the old Muslim; its strong muzzle seeked and sensed survival at the watchman’s behest. Hence, it could be seen wandering around the mound more frequently, which certainly didn’t fall in the category of chance comings of the wild wandering dogs.

It was on a soberly cold day, counting the fruition of its survival jujubes, the dog decided to leave the fields forever and reached the human settlement newly emerged on the mound. Its dog sense might’ve convinced it that the weak figure was the real master for him, but when it remained there for two, three days, it became quite clear to the old sensible dog with ears drooping in a self-abiding indolence that survival upon the elevation meant and required an equidistance from both huts, which can be explained fully only by a kynologist or researcher on dogs. Retaining its battle loyale dormant, it kept its options open for whomever of the two mound inhabitants decided to throw anything eatable before its old self betraying twists and turns of fate. So, for a start it could be seen sitting before one or the other hut, while they took their meals. The difference however was azure clear to see. The religioner’s corpulence took a long-long time in fully satisfying its voracity, in comparison to the frail watchman’s quickly nibbled down frugal morsels. But despite such disparity in the amount of time spent before the huts, it was the hut on the eastern side from where majority of the survival crumbs fell before the dog as the watchman pleasantly doled out one piece after almost each and every mouthful of his. It was in spleeny contrast to the other hut from where so few of them saw the ground beneath the dog’s mouth, as the dweller greedily mulched down the food ferried with a flawless punctuality by the servile devotee.

But this dog was far away from the vitiating venality of gauging the mastership and loyalty from the number of crumbs thrown before it. So, with a stoic unmindfulness it retained its nonpartisan presence on the mound. And one day, when both of them were taking meals at the same time, it decided to leave it to fate and heaped down at a place in between the huts. It was the place where a thickety big tuft of bunchgrass had been left out just on the upper margin of the slope. It was discernable as a tiny third shelter on the cleared-up top of the little hilly gobbet whose slopes were lined with bunchgrass, bushes and thickets. Perhaps, intending not to hurt any pride regarding its ownership the dog dug up a hole among these stumps and stalks of long, thick grass and started to sleep there at equidistance from the huts. In sanctimonious proportionality to the number of morsels he proffered to the dog, the watchman put a saggy rag of cloth over the thicket, thus turning it into a kennel for their new neighbour.

Both the human occupiers of the mound were happy to share it with the dog for their own reasons. Perhaps they knew it that a human settlement is never complete without a dog.