On, by and of the streets
Nothing is anymore. Everything appears so and so. Something i observed in Ranga and his relationship with fellow street dogs of late. To the uninitiated, Ranga is an ex-stray who stays with us. He showed up at our doorstep last July and has been with us since. There are many ways to describe him but if he were to be encapsulated inside one word, then that term would be peculiar. Immensely awkward with humans, he shows obvious signs of abuse in the past—which street dog won’t? — and acts exceedingly mature at times and dumb at others. In simple words, it’s difficult to predict how he’s going to behave with you. Left to his own device, he’ll carry out his everyday routine; walk aimlessly on the terrace, scare away the birds (pigeons and bulbuls are his personal favourite; he’s crap scared of peacock and his harem of peahens hence admires them from a safe distance), jump from one parapet to another (he has zero vertigo), sleep a bit, sleep a lot, eat when offered, avoid water at all cost unless milk is added, enter the house whenever he feels like, leave the house whenever he feels like (his visits are generally 15–20 minutes long), rearrange his ‘bed’ outside however his mood dictates, the usual works. Neither interested in barking nor barking, he whiles his time away in his own fashion. Going by his philosophical-cum-nihilistic approach, he seems to fully understand that he’s not a puppy anymore. Something members of our species fail to learn at the appropriate age.
To narrow it down further, he’s not your advertised pet dog. We can’t teach this old dog new tricks either. He has taken abode with us for over a year now purely because of territorial issues. The younger street dogs don’t like him at all and would chase him away if they could. So, yes, he got lucky with us and we got lucky with him.
Now, coming to the crux of this post, we noticed that he’s been hiding food for quite some time. You’d find huge pieces of bread, chewie, bones, etc. under his makeshift mattress. At first we thought he must be saving them for midnight snacks. To our surprise, it turns out he has been smuggling food out of our building and conducting offline food delivery to a street dog who is stationed close by. Interestingly, this newfound stray is a male too and a perfect loner. We don’t know what’s going on here but this recent discovery of a new layer to his personality fills us with warmth. His being nice to somebody who must have gone through the same fate as him sheds some light on what empathy means in the world of dogs. Street dogs, to be explicit.
