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THE DOG

 

 

He was called Dhool. It meant Powder. It suited him.

Powdery dust covered him like something

Left undisturbed in a corner.

 

His front teeth were broken.

We chased him through the village sometimes,

And he pretended to snatch us up.

 

But he wasn’t to touch us, we were told.

He did odd jobs for my uncle.

Odd man for odd jobs.

 

He didn’t jabber to himself like the village loon,

Or remain soiling in one place,

As if in a prison of his own skin.

 

But there was about him the whiff

Of something wrong.

It sat in the folds of his filthy clothes,

 

Climbed up the gods of his operatic hair,

Sat sifting, waiting - like the dust

Or the participle of dust that tagged him.

 

When they found a rabid dog in the village –

Foaming in circles and mewling in the shadows,

Her hide hard-bitten, fur rotten,

 

The wounds on her flesh flowering dark purple

And weeping – Dhool was employed to kill her.

We followed him in excited hush,

 

Our sandals trucking behind his bare, callused feet

As he traipsed the village,

Picked out a length of wood, hummed,

 

Affecting to ignore us.

He tempted the dog into a fallow field

With a piece of rubber piping.

 

I remained at watch,

At the field’s edge,

Long after all my friends went home.

 

The dog, lying on the coarse grass,

The rubber locked in her jaws,

Strained from Dhool,

 

Who scarred my vision like a picture

Scribbled on the retina in hellish ink.

He set to beating the dog to death.

 

With each strike of the log,

At the moment of connect,

A needling sound emerged.

 

A yalp of a yelp, a parody of a bark, stretched.

A howl through a tunnel, a spiralling wail.

The loon-at-the-moon scratching his face

 

With bloodied fingernails.

How could the dog make such a sound,

With both her jaws clamped so to the pipe

 

Who was in there,

Squeezing out anguish

Through the domed cage of her ribs,

 

Her hollow throat?

She clung to life,

As her teeth clung to the rubber pipe.

 

I stood and stood, waiting for silence.

Dhool left after his evening’s work.

I thought the night would do the job.

 

When morning came, we trailed Dhool

To the field where the dog lay.

The pipe had slipped from her jaws.

 

But she was breathing.

With a grin at us,

Dhool picked up the log

 

And went back to work.

My uncle came along.

He said, ‘Still going? Useless dog.’

 

He meant Dhool, but the dog was also useless.

To anyone. Even herself.

By the end of the day, flies covered her mouth,

 

Her staring eyes, her sores, and she was dead.

It was a week before the body was removed,

Perhaps by a Harijan in the night.