I discover a new route for my morning walk in the shady lanes of Electronics City in Bengaluru. I’m the only one walking at 7 a.m., a quiet and cool hour, well before the thundering herds of the IT workforce stampede past one’s eardrums.
I pass by a business school campus in the 15th minute of my walk. At this point, I’m warmed up and I start jogging. Wrong move. A pack of three or four dogs led by an aged, limping and shaggy biscuit-coloured mongrel (who I shall call Biscuit) begin barking at my sudden shift in pace, and come circling around me. I must have triggered some dog instinct in them.
So I slow down and (remembering the advice dispensed by Animal Planet and Reader’s Digest) avoid eye contact with the excited lot, and make it through the next 100 yards without incident. The dogs see me off with some desultory barking.
This happens again on random days whenever I pass by the B-school. The pack of dogs is always around this area. Biscuit always leads the barking routine, tirelessly, though he has to limp a lot while coming around. The B-school guards by now begin to enjoy this familiar drama and begin to appreciate Biscuit’s dedication.
A couple of weeks later, I find Biscuit stationed alone in front of the B-school gate. His gang seems to have wandered off elsewhere at the present time. Biscuit doesn’t have the back-up force to harass me. He sits on his haunches and pretends not to recognise me. He’s quite the diplomat, now.
So I deliberately walk close past his nose so he can get my scent and get used to it. I see that he wags his tail a bit. Oh, great, I think. We are friends now.
Eventually I find that the security guards at the B-school gate seem to have adopted Biscuit, outsourcing him as a live alarm system, and have started feeding him. He’s now a dog with a job. So all through the months that follow, Biscuit parks himself right in front of the gate, like an old sentry, watchful, though I see that he is looking out only for other visiting dogs intruding on his turf. He lets off a sporadic bark now and then to let everyone know he is on the job.
As the days pass, I understand first-hand the concept of “dog years”. It’s almost two years now since Biscuit had found his calling as a gatekeeper, but it seems he is slacking off a little day by day. He doesn’t squat on his haunches in the alert position like the Syndicate Bank mascot. Whenever I go past the area on some other errand, I find Biscuit curled up on his side, sleeping. He is ageing in scary multiples of seven dog-years to my single year. His vision is failing, and so is his sense of smell.
Going downhill
One day I find he is having a senior moment when he doesn’t recognise me, and barks confusedly at me. I know he is going downhill rapidly.
I had to be out of town for a month. When I get back on my morning walk, I find Biscuit is absent at his post, and I ask the B-school guard about it.
He sighs and makes a sign of something gone forever, as though a dog’s death were nothing more than the dry wind that stirs the leaves. He is appreciative, too, that Biscuit has someone asking after him. Biscuit is gone, just like that, and I’m sure he didn’t brood about the end, being the practical animal that a dog is. No long-drawn goodbye, no heart-rending sayonara or khuda hafiz. Altogether different from us, wannabe immortals.
One cannot but resist the dog-man comparison. Unlike Biscuit, we, at the apex of animal kingdom, don’t like to sign off without fanfare. The old-timers among us, corporate warriors at heart, chronic overachievers, anxious to leave behind lasting legacies, cannot let go and serenely walk into the sunset. We fret against the dying of our light. The ache for glory never lets go of us. In this, we find fulfilment. In this, we suffer anguish, too. The two go hand in hand.
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