My Appa and the dog.
We went to our village one weekend on a not so sunny July day. Nothing special about that day. Just an ordinary weekend in the middle of the month. We were to connect with our “roots”. My mother’s idea. Obsession with ethnic grandeur is a trait from her side of the family. I was mildly interested.
Let me paint a picture. Our village is a small one located about 10 kilometers from the nearest town of Kancheepuram. It lies on the other side of the river Palaru. There is nothing special about this village and so no one ever thought of building a bridge across the river to reach this village. It wasn’t a big deal since the river has remained stubbornly dry for all of eternity making it easier to just walk through the river bed. The river bed once was covered with silvery sands as white as the moon, but constant plundering of the sand for construction purposes has left nothing but raw areas occasionally creating whirlpools in times of flash floods. But that is a story for another time.
Summers are hot, monsoon is wet, and winter is just big stagnant mosquitoes. Not swarming , stagnant. It is not a typo. The mosquitos are so huge that they gave up on flying and decided to just suspend in air waiting for humans or unlucky cows to walk past them. If you are stupid enough to talk while driving your bike back home they will go into your open mouth. A sordid after dinner affair.
The mornings are busy, afternoon are a heavy interlude, evenings resonate free sprit and bad humor, occasional giggles from far away. Women gossiping and men drunk on cheap liquor and also gossiping. The air is almost always heavy with the smell of dried cow dung and rice husk.
And of course the no 1 in the village rule book — the ever persistent crickets.
We took our car, drove across the river bed bed flattened by frequent tractors passing everyday. My parents own ancestral lands on which they cultivate rice. My father comes here almost everyday from our home back in the city. There is a small godown for storing farm equipments and a makeshift table, where we unpack and have our lunch which our mother packed from home. The food made my eyelids heavy. I went out to lie down on the rope mattress on the porch. The porch had asbestos roofing. It kept the sun away and invited the cool breeze. My father was already lying on the hammock mattress. He had finished his morning rounds in the fields. A pariah dog was sleeping on the ground underneath the cot. It just finished its meal of leftovers my father had placed for it. I never knew my father had a dog. I was intrigued. I asked him about it. He said it was just a stray that stayed in the plot. After it devoured the food, the dog just got up and left, picking pace as it moved away. I asked him if he ever thought of naming it. My father was never a conversationalist and always left questions unanswered. I knew the uninterested face meant no or that he had exited the conversation a long time back. And your words have been floating the air unreceived.
Later that evening as we settled in the house, my mother made us some hot tea and some bajjies, as usual my father left some for the unnamed dog which came from its daily rounds and dutifully sat next to my father’s feet. My father never took notice of it. I couldn’t help wondering what an unusual pair they both made. He didn’t even bother to name the dog, but the nameless dog had a home in his unfathomed heart. And it knew he was a constant.
Something about the symbiosis between the dog and my father made me think of negligent love. Like that feeling you get when you meet an old friend whom you haven’t seen in many years but any encounter makes you feel like it was only yesterday you had a hearty conversation with her, the sense of lightness you get after only minutes into the conversation. There should be a word for that emotion in some language. A love affair that is not always caressing but always there, quietly persisting, unexpressed but understood. Not-much ado about everything.
