Chapter 5: The Missing Dog

Bruno went missing on a Saturday. Bruno was not my dog — Bruno was Hogwada's dog, the way certain dogs in Indian towns belong to everyone and no one, the communal animal that sleeps outside the temple and eats from every household and whose loyalty is distributed across an entire postal code. Bruno was a brown mutt with one ear that stood up and one that flopped and a tail that wagged with the indiscriminate enthusiasm of a creature that had never been betrayed by the species that fed it.

He disappeared from his usual spot outside the Hanuman temple at some point between Friday night and Saturday morning. Mrs. Joshi noticed first — Mrs. Joshi who fed Bruno rice and dal every evening at six-thirty and who had, over three years, developed a relationship with the dog that was more reliable than most human marriages in Hogwada.

"Tara, Bruno is gone," she said, arriving at the chai shop at eight AM with the specific urgency of a woman for whom a missing dog was a civic emergency. "He's not at the temple. He's not at the bus stop. He's not at Sharma's store. I've checked everywhere."

"He's a street dog, Mrs. Joshi. He wanders."

"Bruno does not wander. Bruno has a territory. Temple to bus stop to Sharma's to my house. That's his route. He has not deviated from that route in three years. Something is wrong."

She was right. Bruno did not wander. Indian street dogs were territorial with a precision that would embarrass GPS systems — their routes were fixed, their schedules reliable, their presence in specific locations at specific times as predictable as the bus schedule and considerably more punctual.

I told Vikrant at seven-fifteen on Monday. He listened with the seriousness that he brought to everything — the seriousness that made two kadak chai and a missing dog and a woman's ex-boyfriend all receive the same quality of attention, because Vikrant Patil did not rank problems by importance. He addressed them by order of arrival.

"A missing dog."

"A missing community dog. Bruno. Brown. One ear up, one down."

"I know Bruno. He sleeps outside the station on Wednesdays."

"He has a schedule?"

"Every dog has a schedule. People think street dogs are random. They're not. They're the most organised residents of any Indian town. They know which house puts out food at what time. They know which route has shade at noon. They know which shopkeeper throws stones and which one throws rotis."

"You're very knowledgeable about street dogs."

"I'm a sub-inspector in a town with four hundred street dogs and twelve thousand humans. The dogs are easier to understand."

We looked for Bruno. Vikrant in his jeep — the police Bolero with the siren that he never used because Hogwada's traffic consisted of three autorickshaws, two tractors, and Mrs. Kulkarni's Activa, and a siren would constitute noise pollution rather than law enforcement. I sat in the passenger seat. The Bolero smelled of diesel and old paper and the specific, institutional scent of a government vehicle that had been used by seven sub-inspectors before Vikrant and that carried the accumulated bureaucratic residue of a decade of parking challans and complaint registers.

We drove the perimeter of Hogwada — which took eleven minutes, because Hogwada's perimeter was small and the Bolero was fast and the town ended abruptly at the sugarcane fields that surrounded it like a green wall, the boundary between civilisation and agriculture that was, in Hogwada, not a boundary at all but a spectrum.

"There." Vikrant stopped the Bolero. At the edge of the sugarcane field on the Kolhapur road. Bruno was there — alive, unhurt, but not alone. Beside him, in the shade of a neem tree, were four puppies. Brown. Small. One ear up, one down.

"Bruno is a mother," I said.

"Bruno is a mother," Vikrant confirmed.

"We've been calling him Bruno for three years."

"The dog doesn't care what we call her. She cares that the puppies are fed."

We sat in the Bolero and watched Bruno nurse her puppies under the neem tree. The scene was — I don't have a word for what it was. Ordinary. Extraordinary. A brown dog with four brown puppies under a neem tree at the edge of a sugarcane field in a town that nobody had heard of. The kind of scene that existed in a thousand Indian towns and that nobody photographed because it was too common to be beautiful and too beautiful to be common.

"Vikrant?"

"Yes?"

"Thank you. For looking."

"It's my job."

"You keep saying that."

"Because it keeps being true. And because the other reasons are still there but I'm not ready to say them in a Bolero at the edge of a sugarcane field while a dog is nursing."

"When will you be ready?"

"When the moment is better than this one. And this one is pretty good."