Jwagal Puppies: part two

I cursed the two pups--one all brown coat, the other with white spots, perhaps three months old at most--that ran across the alley which forks towards Bagmati from Jwagal Chowk. I was waiting for a plate of momo to be re-heated. Cart by the street. Would you care about tapeworm when you haven't eaten anything since 10, and it is already 6 in the evening, and there is no money in your wallet?

And just then, a man screamed, stopped a car twenty feet away from him with the sheer urgency of gesticulating palms. I didn't know why the man had screamed. I thought he was picking a fight with the driver of the blue car.

When I saw why, I screamed and thrust my palms out, fingers splayed to maximize the non-pigmented surface: among evolution's earliest contributions to primate/hominid communication, as some evolutionary biologists say.

The pup with white and brown spots had run under the car.

No, the car hadn't yet run it over. The pup wasn't tall enough to be grazed by the bottom of the car, but it was so scared to have run under the still humming machine that it was trying to run towards the front- left wheel.

Stop! Don't move! Of course, there isn't a satisfactory way of communicating with a three-months old pup, even with the evolutionary advantage of non-pigmented palms. The petrified driver, on the other hand, didn't want to be a baby-killer quite yet, I am sure.

I got down on my knees, and then my hands, to talk to the frightened pup. But I only succeeded in scaring it away--towards the other front wheel. Instinctively, I reached with my hand, thinking I could grab the pups nape and pull it out to safety. It got even more scared. The driver rolled his window down. What was I going to say to the pup?

This would easily have been the third instance of canine infantile death in as many days at the same spot. But, the pup got scared of me and kept backing up, until it backed right out from under the car.

It was still trembling, surrounded by well-meaning aliens who spoke gibberish and kept flashing their palms at it. It was an animal of the sort that makes women coo. I wish a certain woman had been at hand to witness my heroics, for that would have won me her heart over a hundred times. Instead, I had sawdust on my cheeks from pressing against the road.

The pup ran to its companion, who, oblivious of the grand drama right behind him, was raising one leg to mark a gate as his dominion. The relieved pup ran to its companion and immediately started sniffing at the urine sprinkled over cement and grass, added a bit of its own, and proceeded to sniff the other one's butt.

That must have felt like home to that little bastard. In that instance, I actually envied it the simple pleasures of its life. So little it took to bring normalcy to its life. Sniff a familiar butt.

I guess, we are all trying to do the same, in ways that vary in their degrees of complexity.

Sniff a familiar butt.