Bella’s Quartet: A Story in Four Parts
Part One:I
Arrival
A tiny black creature wiggled its legs and inched towards me. I was returning home after weeks of being away on a long job that had made me travel relentlessly around the country from its northern tip to southern most end. The creature has glorious markings, I observed and as it came close and licked my toes, I noticed how long her nose, her ‘snout’, was. And yes, that it was a ‘she’. I was carrying my old China-made duffel that had grown quite heavy with unlaundered and dirty clothes. I put the thing down to pet this tiny, wriggling creature that was rolling all over my sandalled feet. It was summer of 2012 and I had been away from home- my father’s house- the previous year. The departure had been enforced as my father had died all of a sudden, of a heart attack. Coming a few months after the death of my mother, and a few months after her, my father, who had been frenetically renovating and rebuilding his house in the hope that I would get married `from there’. Little did he know then that the biggest event to ever take place in his beloved house would be his own funeral, his shraddh. After his death, I had been unable to stay in the house. A dear old colleague had called with a contact of an NGO who were looking for a producer to make their next set of public service campaigns and asked me if I was interested and I had immediately said yes. The project made me travel around Rajasthan and Andhra Pradesh in the peak summer heat in the month of May and June but kept me distracted. Bending down to examine the creature closely I decided to sit for a while and play with her. I didn’t want to go inside the house just yet. I wanted to remain outside, play the outsider, and just like the little pup playing with me, I wanted to feel welcomed and like the pup I had been to my parents as well. Beloved and protected. The creature was making number eight like formations crawling happily between my feet by now. After scratching its back I slowly picked it up and put it aside on the side of the downstairs, ground floor neighbour’s patch of garden, and shuffled up the set of stairs to my father’s first floor apartment.
Unlocking the outer grill door with heavy hands and the main front door I felt a sense of regret and emptiness entering the house. Though I had hired help to come and clean up every day, clearly they had given the place a miss and the plants on the balcony looked worn down, unwatered and dead. A patina of dust lay on the shelves and wooden surfaces and even on the furniture and cushions. The place looked like an abandoned station from an outpost on some far-flung satellite or Antarctic base. Unused, unopened and showing traces of the dust and dirt of neglect. As though the scientists who were meant to station themselves and study there had left and there were no other humans inhabiting the place to look after it and prepare it for the next set of inmates. I didn’t realise then that I too would become a sample for the same kind of thing a few years from then – worn down, like a neglected plant, unwatered and exhausted from running between the woods looking for trees but more on that later. Seeing my family home in that state made me angry. A surge of anger coursed through my body as I felt the heat of it rise up from my head and shoulders. Cursing to myself in cuss words I never often used, not in one endless string at least, like some sort of rap song, I started cleaning up the place.
In the week that I took to settle down I got the place dusted and cleaned, vacuumed the furnishing and tried to get a fresh set of saplings to replace the dead plants. I’d see the black and brown creature gambling and cavorting downstairs and go down in between spurts of housework to feed it milk and play with it. My daily routine was split between waking up early at the crack of dawn to do some writing work and sleep for a few hours to awake after ten in the morning when the help arrived to clean and declutter the place. None of the appliances worked so even water had to be bought from the store in the colony. My trips to run errands would mean stopping to play with the little black one enroute. I didn’t know where we stood in terms of our relations becoming permanent so I refrained from giving her a name out of fear that attachment would make my imminent departure from my father’s house even more painful. That’s how our nameless relationship evolved – with me feeding her milk and slowly, milk and bread on a twice a day basis and playing with her on and off on my way up and down out and into the house. As was expected, we became only too attached to each other, seeing each other out to the gate and greeting each other at the same gate whenever I left and arrived. During this time I was traveling in and out of Bombay on work while trying to live `at home’, in my father’s house. And this tiny little creature in markings of brown beige and white reminded me that being home meant being greeted with a flurry of rolls, crawls, licks and summersaults whenever I was visible around the house.
*
Part Two: II
Departure
I had just fed the dark one a big tumbler of milk and a few pieces of milk soaked bread when I got the call. A friend was taking up a project to make a series for a mainstream television channel, would I be able to move to Bombay and work on it for six to eight months? The project would entail being based in Bombay which for me was another home town as I had an apartment there and using the city as work base, travel to other parts of the country from there depending on the script and other requirements, to film there. As soon as I took the call and learnt about the show, a show on Indian men and Indian masculinity 2.0 and what it means in the new millennium, I knew the professional in me was dead keen to do it. After months of maintaining, sprucing up my family home, running it day in and out like the in-house professional in the house would, I was feeling emptied put and hollow. While it wasn’t untrue that the space and the things in it, like my father’s notebooks and his own brand of handwritten dictionary written in his neat scrawl on the unused sides of once used paper, or my mother’s collection of books -selected and curated especially by her, according to her taste in reading, from John Updike to Paul Theroux, Stephen King to Micheal Crichton. Then, there were things my eyes and hands had become accustomed to, like my grandmother’ s ‘khalat’ hanging in the back of the bathroom door, a Monet like print in bright leaf and emerald green with dabs of fuchsia and hot pink where the poppies in the print were seen. (In Russia, a ‘khalat’ is a house gown or a robe to be worn in the house over one’s nightdress.) My grandmother’s khalat had been brought by her when she arrived to stay with us in India in 1977. She must have had it from way before then, early seventies maybe. There was a small set of her personal effects too that I had kept on my study table for as long as I can remember – when I was a school going girl I suppose- for we had lived in this apartment in Delhi since 1987 and these items of my grandmother’s had found their way in there since then and remained after she died in the same apartment in 1987, strangely the same year that we had moved in to the place. It had been a brand new colony then, build with hope and strategy by the DDA (Delhi Development Authority ) to house what they expected would be Delhi ‘s new and upcoming middle class that would own more scooters than cars (how wrong they were about the upsurge of the post-liberalisation era, for the same scooter garages are shops and stores now as the roads brim over with cars -nearly 3 cars per flat! ) These were only few of the reasons why another departure, another well planned and strategised exit would be painful for me now. During the days that I planned my impending trip to Bombay, I fed the now growing and fat creature myself morning and night and missed her even when I was up in the house and she, crawling about and up to her antics, downstairs.
The creature’s mother was a white and beige -what the men workers in the neighbourhood called `Biscuity’ in colour. Like a Marie biscuit soaking and melting in thick creamy milk and how it would look. The mother was called just that by us all, Mummy, as she is to this day. She is short, squat and sprightly. She has a loving and kind demeanour towards us feeders in the neighbourhood though she is intolerant and brusque with her own progeny of whom I now have two more who now live in my house in may 2019. They are twins, two boys who go by the name, Boomer and Babugosha. But I won’t take away from Bella, their older sibling in this piece and give her her due. By this time, Bella was already climbing up the stairs to the apartment, like a toddler on all fours, to stake her claim on her stainless steel bowl overflowing with milk and bread and sometimes doing so twice a day or, staying on to hang around my front door as if to remind me that she was there – not to forget her and her love of milk and bread. Towards mid 2012 I left my home in Delhi again for Bombay . I knew that trips back would be few and only a weekend or a day here and there, schedule permitting as we would be traveling to several cities in the north and south to make this documentary series on Indian men that we were calling “Gentlemen’s Code’. The series was being sponsored by Chivas so the show would go on air on Star World as ‘Chivas Studio: Gentlemen’s Code’.
By the time I packed my bags for Bombay I had now arranged for proper household help, to clean and manage the apartment. One of the helpers who worked in a neighbour’s apartment nearby, I assigned the task of feeding the creature her milk and bread once a day. This helper who had been associated with my father’s house since I was a young out-of-college girl about to start by career in print and television news, and the other a new recruit engaged with the help of a dear friend from college days who was a journalist and working and living on her own in a apartment block close by for whom the help in question had been working for years now. This helper, of Nepali origin, was sharp and smart and capable of using the vacuum cleaner to clean the furnishings I thought, so I trained her to use it to keep the sofas and curtains and my mother’s collection of black and white cushions dust free and clean. Feeling somewhat confident that the house would be better kept and maintained now, I boarded my flight to Bombay in pieces as leaving my home alone, on my own, for me, an only and beloved child, was still a painful affair. I had always had my father come fetch me from the airport and my mother smiling from ear to ear, waiting at the same gate where I played with Bella now thoughI still hadn’t given the black and brown creature a name even then. So the prospect of leaving the same place, locking it up alone and with no one around to see me off or kiss me goodbye was something I hadn’t come to grips as yet even then. What made it somewhat better was the presence of the creature, curling and twirling and making eye contact with me as if to say ‘its alright, you can go, you haven’t given me a name but I’ll still be waiting here when you come back, whenever that maybe… until then…
**
Part Three: III
Skating on the thin ice of the new day
By August 2012 work on the documentary series began full swing and the content being novel and of interest made me lose track of my father’s house and the day to day goings on in Delhi at home. Little had been researched or written, leave alone filmed, of Indian men, so me and the producer of the series, had more than our fair share of material and questions to grapple with on our hands. We also had to rush and make a pilot episode to begin with and crewing up, scripting and preparations for the series were immersive to say the least and kept us preoccupied, late into the night and shooting most of the day all week during the day. My few and far between attempts to call home to make contact with the two helpers were unsuccessful. I would ask my best friend to check with the same helper who worked for her and get positive reports that all was well. The house was being dusted and cleaned by the organised and smart Nepali and the older one from the hood was cleaning outside the gate and feeding the dog, who herself was growing bigger by leaps and bounds. Sitting in Bombay I would wonder how big and how naughty, whether she was teething or just playing about endearing all and sundry to her molten brown, honey coloured eyes and if all the others, affected and endeared like me, were running out, milk bowl in hand, to feed her and cuddle her.
One evening I got a call on my father’s old mobile phone which I still used – a Delhi number- out of sentiment and nostalgia like I now seem to have for everything associated with him. On some days when I was low, I would dial his number from my own to just hear the phone ring away on the other side, my call going unanswered as if to let me know that where my father had gone and where I was were two worlds apart, his impenetrable and unreachable just as mine was futile yet accessible. A number I could dial at will but could never get through to the person I wanted to talk to. My father was becoming a memory, his phone just a number. And this was unacceptable to me in my grief. And the only way I knew how to keep this tenuous and near broken connection alive was by hanging on to his phone number with the address it was connected to, his address, his house, his belongings, his space. Just to see Baba’s name flash as I dialled his number would give me some relief as if to assure my upset self that I had a father once, at some point of time I did have a father who would answer that number, that line whenever I dialled it. After wearing out the ringing tone that went unanswered and got cut off on its own, I would send off a long monologue-like text message to his number from my own. The message would be short. I’d write: ‘Hi Baba, trying to get in touch with you. How are you? You didn’t take my call. When you get my message please read it carefully and let me know how you are. PS: Its four a.m. and I’m still awake, please wake me up at 7am when you go for your walk as you always do. I will try and come walking with you.’ Between 2011 and 2016 I would make many such blank calls and short text messages to my father. His phone would ring once in a while with a random caller anyhow. Someone trying to renew a policy or a caller trying to contact the ministry he was associated with. That evening my father’s phone rang and yet another unknown number flashed on the screen of his old phone. Not wanting to answer and deal with the fact that I would have to take calls he would have done had he been alive, I let the phone ring on. But just as it was about to run off, I picked up the instrument and answered the call. It was the old helper who used to work for my parents when their regular stay-in man-friday would go to his home on leave. She informed me that the creature ‘duggy’ as she called her, had become quite naughty and had started peeing and pooping at my front door regularly. She said, “potty kar ahi hai, har roj.” The neighbours were complaining and starting to add ore litter to my doorway out of spite because the dog had chosen my door to do her daily jobs in any case. The helper wanted to know, could she not feed her now that she seemed to be misbehaving this way? I asked if the ‘duggy’ was being fed by someone else and she confirmed that a few others were feeding her but she wasn’t sure who or which neighbours they were. Worried that this may not be a regular thing and the ‘duggy’ would go hungry, I asked the helper to feed the ‘duggy’ anyway and clean up after her if she did potty at my door, or peed. When I heard her hesitate on the other end of the line, I quickly added in that I would increase her salary by five hundred rupees immediately if she would take it upon herself to feed the now grown pup and also clean up around the stairs, not just my own but the area so it wouldn’t become a littering space for one and all. Reluctantly she agreed and I heaved a sigh of relief that I would have someone tending to the duggy in my absence just as I hoped that she would be around to greet me and lick my toes whenever I returned.
It was a year by the time I returned home. A brief visit in the middle of the night in autumn the same year wouldn’t count as I couldn’t spot the pup who would be a grown dog in the dark of the night. But when I returned to my father’s house after the gap of a year in broad daylight with bags packed so that I could stay home for a few months, of not a year, I couldn’t spot her anywhere. As I paid off the Megacab and struggled to get the heavy suitcase off the back, most of which was occupied by a long, suspicious looking LPG cylinder, I looked around hurriedly to see if a tiny black thing would come ambling to me. Nothing came. I kept my bags in the shade under my neighbour’s trees and walked around whistling and calling out at random. No movement or activity. On my way up and into my house I noticed that the neighbours had put up a small wrought iron gate in between the downstairs staircase entry point and their flat. This could only mean that she had been peeing and pooping on the stairs as much forcing them to keep her out. When asked, none of the neighbours acknowledged or fielded any questions, only repeating the fact that they had seen that she was messing up the place pretty much every night until the gate came up. The question remained, who had made the gate and what was their motive? And were they the same people who had perhaps beaten her or frightened her so she would crawl beneath cars and be petrified of the stairs themselves and even our block by and large.
It took me a day or two to find her this time. A few trips downstairs with milk filled bowls with bread broken into pieces in it. On the second day, after other strays appeared to eat her food, I saw a slender, dark and lean, almost emaciated figure shimmy out from under a parked car. She seemed to be limping and looked scared. When I put the bowl down, it took her a while to trust the bowl and its owner, feeder. She lapped up the milk the way she used to when she was a pup but looked up in alarm when a cyclist passed by or someone walked across the road. There was fear in her demeanour, her gait and eyes. Alarmed, I took her up to my balcony and gave her a nice long bath. The very instant I carried her up the stairs, she cried out and shrunk back into my arms. The bath calmed her down a lot but I could sense that being in my home and being indoors itself scared her. She was shaking and trembling like a leaf. After drying her with my mother’s old unused towel which was now beginning to tear from one side, I carried her down and placed her near the back of a parked Maruti car. She scrambled inside at speed, her thin wiry frame wriggling away out of sight and right below the centre of the car as if to suggest that even being near the side of the car would be unsafe for her.
The following morning when the helpers arrived, I quizzed them on her whereabouts. The instant I brought up the word duggy’ there was a frosty silence and dead pan expression on their faces collectively. Her emaciated state told me that she hadn’t been fed much, only scraps and bits that she got from here and there or things she might have foraged out of dustbins and rubbish bags. The local presswallah upon much interrogation confirmed that she wasn’t being fed by either of my helpers who barely showed up at my place. He said they had been spotted cleaning the house a few days before got back. I had noticed how neglected my father’s house looked -even more so now- when I reentered this time. Despite engaging the two helpers and giving one the key, the plants looked barely alive and the place looked cleaned in a hurried and slapdash manner. In corners and crevices lay thick layers of dirt, unseen and uncleaned by the eye of those who didn’t want to acknowledge nor clean the place properly. I decided to stay on as long as I possibly could on that trip so I could fatten up the ‘duggy’ good and proper and keep an eye on her. I had become attached to her even though our time together had been short. It shocked and worried me that a carefree and happy pup like her was growing into a fearful and petrified dog that failed to be what dogs in the neighbourhood usually are: possessive, territorial, fearless and well fed. This seemed to be the handiwork of humans and not other territorial dogs in the hood of which her own mother, Mummy, was one. All the other pups, her siblings from the same litter were gone. I was told by another neighbour that they got run over, came under cars whose careless drivers didn’t bother to look or check if there were pups underneath his car!
This time, I stayed the whole summer through, feeding and fattening the baby up even though I couldn’t decide on a name for her! She had gotten into the habit of coming up to my front door, bypassing the latched gate somehow, and peeing and pooping on my doorstep as if to tell me in her own way that she was still directly connected to me and not my neighbours. I would wake up in the morning to find that there was a trail of pee around the door making its way into the living room. Or, a big upchuck of vomit from what she had eaten at a nearby garbage bag. Or, on some other days, a healthy and long, sausage-like piece of turd positioned like a comma or an apostrophe, to tell me how her health was. Though I didn’t take these personally or take affront and cleaned up after her immediately on my own, or via my helper if I was in a rush to leave the house on work, I could tell how disapproving the neighbours, and even the snotty presswalla was. It was as though my accepting her regular deposits of bodily emissions were offensive to them, even those who had pets of their own.
But by the time I had to leave for Bombay again on another series of projects for a colleague who had set up his own company and needed a producer to run his first series of commercials with a popular Bollywood film star, she was a bit on the fat side, her black and brown coat glistening and shining and her thin, fearful demeanour less so and instead she was more open and calm. This time, I left no stone unturned and sat the help down and told them they would be out of work if she was found weak and neglected again once I returned from the next trip. On my way out of the house, I searched for her to see if she would come to say goodbye. As I had become used to, I saw the tip of her tail twitching from the back of a parked car next to my ground floor neighbour’s flat and the thumping sound her tail made hitting the lower insides of the car – the silencer- told me that like my cat, she had no intention of showing me how upset that I was leaving again and chose to show me that by just wagging her tail from under the car. Making loud affectionate noises to assure her that I’d be back soon, I boarded the cab that would take me away to the airport and finally to Bombay, far away from her. Leaving her behind was becoming more painful with each trip now. As was leaving my home behind, a symbol of my having had parents and a family at some point of time, even that was a few years behind me now.
***
Part Four: IV
Bella
My exit from Delhi this time around was way longer than even I had expected. It was 2014 and after completing a series of local Delhi projects, I was asked to manage a new company that would require my presence around the clock. Unsure about leaving my home yet again and for such a long time, I decided to push myself to exit and put my place on rent so I wouldn’t worry about coming back. On one condition though -that the person renting my place, who was a friend and colleague, also continue to retain my two helpers who would feed my full grown pup and now a dog, as they had been trained and had watched me do all along. When I look back I can never understand why I was so hesitant to let go of the helpers who let me down each time and refused to really care for her. They would complain, make excuses and do anything to avoid cleaning up after a dog or a staircase that they considered outside property – area outside the purview of my actual apartment and therefore not to be touched or cleaned. This, I noticed and realised, was the attitude of the other helpers and staff in the area too. There was a clear dividing line drawn between cleaning the houses and homes -flats, apartments from the inside once their feet fell in the interior- and the common area like the staircases, lobby below which were regarded as no man’s land. If a stray performed its ablutions there, let it be there until it would be impossible to clean up and remove they seemed to say. Common spaces aren’t ours and nor should they be cleaned or looked after. This made me wonder what they thought of a random stray animal that may be grazing or gathering in such common areas? Were they aliens trespassing on extra terrestrial soil then, on Mars perhaps ? Like on a distant unknown planet where humans that belonged to this neighbourhood felt they neither owned nor belonged.
My home remained on rent for almost a year. As I had feared, when I returned, there was no sign of the dog in the hood. In despair , after weeks of search, I still couldn’t locate her or spot that familiar slender frame of hers, tall and gangly legs that trotted up as shimmied about trying to move between cars. Out of sheer disappointment I found what looked like a distant sibling of hers, an equally slender and long legged creature with honey coloured coat and almond shaped eyes- she looked like a deer and walked with a limp in one hind leg. On closer examination the leg seemed bent – probably an old fracture that had healed on its own with the bone mending itself bent out of shape. She must have been hit or run over by a car . This one too remained unnamed though I took to calling her Honey when her mother, the same biscuit coloured Mummy who would come around to lick up the vestiges of Honey’s milk and bread meal, or drink from her bowl of water. A few months into this routine with Honey and Mummy I had to leave yet again on a foreign film project. Having helped my friend set up the company making commercials and ads, I had decided to take a break from local advertising by now. I planned that I would stay at home in Delhi, picking up assignments as a freelance producer as and when some interesting projects came up, especially foreign films. A UK based producer called me one day with an interesting project for a new brand that made power sources and self charging batteries for students and users of laptops and such devices who didn’t have access to 24/7 power. The director was based in LA and wanted to shoot the film in Dharavi, Mumbai engaging young artistes and talent from the area who probably relied on random and available power sources to charge their devices like boom box, phones, iPods, laptop and players, if they had their own or access to them at all. Though it was a shorter project, the film would take me away from home for a few months – two months at least. I decided to take on a three month photography course along with the project so that I could come back home at the end of the film with a camera and photograph Honey and Mummy and any fresh brood she had produced in my absence. I also wanted to photograph my home, the forest it overlooked and my father’s morning pals in the hood whom I occasionally went walking in the forest with, who still love me dearly and I hang out with most evenings and mornings when in Delhi. The film was for a brand called Romeo Power and the director was a maverick, a well established publisher of niche and mainstream magazines in the entertainment space in Hollywood called Nylon. Our commercial filmed entirely in Dharavi, Mumbai, ended up being four commercials and a short film on the young local talent of the slum kids of the area. The team we worked with were called Slum Gods, their name gave away the scale of their talent and ambition, that they danced like gods or near gods, the dance of the just and the underdog, that their dance and sound had attitude which was raw and came from what the colour of their lives really were – dark and black and white.
A few months later, I was back at home in Delhi. This time, I had picked up a camera and returned with a plan to photograph the four leggeds like the unnamed one and Honey and Mummy and another one I have written a separate piece about called, Schumi, or short for Schumacher- as she used to bolt at F1 speeds when she was young and in her prime. I wanted to record these stray moments of pure belonging and happiness I would feel when I was with my dogs, stray or not, and keep them on a hard drive or print them so I could look at them closer when I was forced to travel away and stay away from home. As it is, keeping a tab on their whereabouts and health was becoming more and more difficult by the year. When I returned, I made a few customary sounds as if calling the black and brown unnamed `duggy’ in the hope that she would run towards my cab. But when I got my luggage out of the cab, neither ‘duggy’ nor Honey or Mummy were to be seen. I continued to make sounds and call out, “Duuuuggggyyy”, and heard a familiar rustle from under a car. But when I looked, there was no dog there. Disheartened, I started walking towards the steep staircase with its black iron gate to cart up my suitcases and China made duffel and now my camera bag. Behind me I heard some kind of sound of trotting and a muddled sound of steps as though the walker has long talons instead of paws. When I turned I saw a spindly, emaciated creature shaking from head to toe, filthy and covered in mud and grime. It didn’t take me long to figure it was her. Her deep brown eyes and that long nose told me so right away. Almost in tears I raw towards her as she ran towards me. But as soon as I knelt down to hug her, she withdrew, as if to say she didn’t fully trust me for leaving her for so long.
Over the next few weeks I prized the real story out of my help, the presswala and a few neighbours from another block, not ours. The dogs constant peeing and shitting on the stairs and my door has peeved not just my immediate neighbours, but the entire crew of people who live in the block. Fed up of seeing her peeing and shitting antics -without ever bothering to clean up after her- the lot has appointed one of them to beat her up in a way that she ‘shouldn’t be able to climb the stairs ever’. The local vet tells me that she may have eaten something poisonous that affected her nervous system and her spine, but the poison only explains the rheumy and watery white look of her eyes. How it gave her a broken spine and severe shakes could not be established. It took two long years to heal her scars. Not just her fear and her superficial wounds and deep injuries but her ability to trust me to give her food and for her to eat that food again. Bit by bit, ever so slowly, she began to wriggle out of parked cars and find her way to the bowl of milk and bread and later chicken and rice with haldi , garlic and vegetables in it. Little by little she trusted me enough to take her to the vet in my car, only if I drove. It was only after she healed considerably and started feeling confident to roam around the block more freely that I attempted to take her upstairs to my apartment. But entering the portal of my flat, fear crept into her eyes and she wore an expression of deep panic as if to tell me that she couldnt bring herself to trust being on a floor higher than the ground again. I took her down and made her a bed below the metre box where a cushion and a rug were her bed and comfort with a bowl of water by her side. Once fed, she would trot around on block on tippy toes, quickly and swiftly, like quicksilver, wriggling ahead and escaping the clutches of anyone who might try to catch her. She started to look like an elegant ballerina – a cross between a tall flamingo like ballerina and a fashion models strutting on high heels , her long nails making a clacking sound every time she stepped on the cemented network on roads below my house. Once I got her nails clipped but she didn’t like being soundless at all, as if to say she wanted to be heard, not just seen so that she could save herself and protect herself. She started to get fat again and her coat began to shine once more. Taking her upstairs to bathe her became difficult once she out on weight as the steps to my apartment are steep and her weight has reached above 20 kilos to 25 kilos now.
Last year, after she had healed completely and nothing remained to reveal the violence and poisonings she had endured, I found a large, scraggly male dog – a Yorkshire look alike with a big boned body, not a small trim one, positioned behind her as she trembled and hid below the car she adopted to stay under in peak summer having moved out from the metre box room where it had become too hot. We now kept a bowl of water on a slab of cement next to the parked cars where she ate her meals and drank her water, the bowls were kept on old newspapers. In the winter, she now has a dog bed in red and brown which is kept in front of a garage of a neighbour who has grown to ‘not mind’ her. There she sits in her bed which is placed on a mattress to keep it warm with a blanket covering her, her bowl of water positioned next to the garage door, her paws dangling out of the side of the dog bed and her head resting on them… but in the summer the scraggly male dog reappeared. He would stick close and refuse to budge no matter how many dogs came to displace him. I was told that she needed to be neutered and clearly was on heat, attracting not just the scraggly one, but a whole trail of colony males some of whom she had had litters from including a few that were her own pups. Off we went to Friendicoes. It took a week to get her ready for the neutering and the operation went smoothly. During post op, she co-operated and came up to stay with me and my cats -agreeing to only stay in the balcony and not come indoors. When she wasn’t sure, she refused to pee or poop for a few days and finally when she couldnt contain herself anymore, she looked me in the eye as if to say, ‘you know what, I can’t wait any more and I know you can’t carry me down right now’ and came and performed the cleanest poop operation on my mother’s prize rug. it took me all of two minutes to clean up and not a spot was visible after she’d done the job. The following day I took out my Nikon and took some photographs of her as she lay healing on my balcony. Before then she has shimmied away, and refused to allow me to take any pictures of her. That day, it could have been that she was immobile after her surgery, or just that she was too weak to shimmy away and out of reach. But she didn’t even move and made eye contact with the camera in her own way so that I could save a few images to look at now and then when I miss looking into her eyes or watch her crazy-flamingo like ballerina dance.
A few days after post-op care, when she was ready, she went and sat near the front door. I carried her down just like id carried her from the car to the Friendcoes clinic under the Defence Colony flyover. She was heavier now but also felt lighter – like she was smiling on the inside and wore a lighter heart and not a heavy one. When she jumped out of my arms and trotted to her dog bed, lapped up her water and milk and bread and settled in for a long snooze, I followed her and whispered ‘Bella” into her ear. She opened those watery, honey brown eyes with white rheumy spots on them, wagged her tail and gave me a few conciliatory licks on the face as if to say, ‘we’re good, we’re okay together.’
Ever since, the help have been instructed to call the ‘kaali-waaali’ which is what they had called her before, Bella from now on. And so here she is Bella, in the stark, vivid, painful and beautiful third act of our tryst with each other as friends, soulmates, strange bed fellows, neighbours – just being Bella.
