Dogs, II

Appie gets pregnant every now and then, and has babies. Floppy (I don’t name the dogs) was one of the last batch that stayed here.

Mother and son.

Floppy and his sister.

Playing with Jinny.

Floppy helping with the laundry clip.

Floppy sick; his final night.

The day he died, I wrote a few notes:

The puppy died today. “The puppy’s gone,” W tells me as I return from the market in the morning. He pulls back the metal barrier to the dog house to reveal the puppy, stiff, with eyes open, as though looking beyond the wooden box. I find this death both predictable and hard to believe and accept at the same time. The other night the puppy lay still in the dirt, and I had taken him for dead at that moment. Or at least that he was on that path, and he himself realized this impending fate. Yet I think that I held out some faith for his recovery despite his wretched appearance and demeanour this week, since we had taken him to the vet twice for IV and various medicines. Just yesterday the doctor had said the survival rate for dogs with this viral infection is 50/50, and this time I really wanted to see the glass half-full. But this morning, the dog is dead from Parvos Virus, at the age of 6 months. It is a jarring sight, to see him still and immobile, this young animal of so much life and vitality, this dog that had jumped off the roof so he could play with the other dogs. To see the spark of life so quickly extinguished, so suddenly absent from this environment, is sad, and quiet.

Everyone is dying. As D and I pass Bethel Hospital, a woman on the balcony cries out in anguish at the death of a loved one. We can hear it pierce through all the chaos of the traffic jam. Driving around the city, I come across homes that have erected makeshift bamboo structures for funeral services and death anniversaries. Plastic chairs fill opened rooms, from which can be heard the pastor’s somber voice through the crackling speaker system. After the service people gradually filter into another room where food has been set up. People sit, people talk, people eat just like any other day; in fact they’ve probably just seen one another at a similar event not too long ago.

 

music: john martyn – sunshine’s better

Supermoon

The eve of the Supermoon was also the night before Holi, the Hindu spring festival celebrating the end of winter on the full moon, well known for its colors. When I went outside to stare at the glow of the moon, I noticed flashes in the sky. I called H outside to check out the fireworks; he said there weren’t any fireworks. I went to the rooftop and realized that they were extended flashes of lightning. And so I spent my night stationed on the roof with the five puppies and their despondent mother, watching the moon gradually move from one side of the sky to the next, and the lightning illuminating the city and billowing clouds to the sound of thunder, a gusty wind, and pre-Holi tunes.

Edifices

It is raining heavily again outside; I hear the excess waters overflow from the rooftop and splatter on the concrete below. It’s late, and the crazy roosters should be crowing around now. Perhaps they’ve taken shelter further into the garden, considering the downpour.

Someone asked me to intersperse my writings with lighter posts. And while this past week has been particularly somber, moments of happiness do interrupt my days. I celebrate every little victory that comes. So, stayed tuned for LOL CATZ posts in the near future.

Kyoto, Japan

I keep telling myself that spring is coming, that spring is here, even though today gusty winds brought a chill to the city.

Thursday

Osaka, Japan

As I’m squished in the back seat of the taxi, one hand gripping the headrest of the driver’s seat, cursing the awkward width of my childbearing hips while the man nods off against the back of my head almost to the beat of a metronome set on largo, I begin to narrate the day to myself:

I wake up this morning like any other morning for the past week now, quick to listen to BBC World and its affiliates for the latest developments in Japan and elsewhere. During a breakfast of chai and porridge, I read about the rape of an 11-year-old girl, which can be added to the long list of atrocities committed against young women all over India, most recently the widely-publicized murder of a Delhi student. I take my bath and wash up in haste, and soon make my way down the hill to the taxi stand. The shared cabs are located at the meat stalls, where one finds chickens,

pigs, and goats hanging from metal hooks from morning until night; I shoo away the flies from the interior of the vehicle. I am the first one in, and so I wait for 5 more occupants, who are typically comprised at least one freshly-shampooed female student, one or two plains men, a Khasi boy, and one or two tribal girls. They arrive, and we leave.

After class, I have tea and a nondescript muffin with a few classmates before going to the library. For a break, I turn to the National Geographic collection, and pick up a volume from my birth year. I come across an article by William Graves, with photography by (one of my favourites) David Alan Harvey: Tokyo: A Portrait of Success. The piece eerily begins: “It was the earthquake’s second shock that caught me by surprise. When the first tremor struck, I did all the right things: shouted ‘Jinshin!’ (Earthquake!) to the two children, snapped off the apartment’s gas main, pushed the youngsters under the kitchen table, and joined them there as the room rocked violently around us.” Graves continues to narrate the profile of a truly remarkable cityscape, touching on the notion of the Japanese spirit, yamato damashii, that “succeeds when all else fails.” He closes with reference to Kiyoshi Muto, the man who developed the architectural principle of jukozo, derived from the theory of flexible structure behind Japan’s old pagodas. In response to an inquiry about the predicted “big one” in Tokyo, Muto responds, “as for skyscrapers, they would stand. They would sway like the hula dancers in your Hawaii Islands, they would bend and ripple, but they would not break and they would not fall. They are designed to stand the very worst.” Graves concludes: “Far from abandoning the past, it is actually building on it for the future. There is no better foundation in the world.”

I leave the library after everyone else, when the cold comes with the quiet. How quickly the tall, noble pines basking in the afternoon sun turn into ghostly, towering figures against the gray firmament, stuck in between the fall of dusk and the onset of night. The air smells of smoke.