ARVIND DADA AND THE STREET DOGS
My wife Sumita and
I were posted in Mumbai for about five years during one of our assignments with
a Bank.
One of the things that we observed about
Mumbai was the co-existence of humans and animals, particularly dogs and cats
in a city where time and tide waited for no one and where the weak and faint
hearted could not survive even for a single day.
For example, on
the streets of Mahim where we were staying, we used to go for after-dinner
walks and it was a strange sight for the pavements (like elsewhere in Mumbai)
to turn into “residential quarters”, where you could see a family of homeless cane
weavers co-existing with 4-5 dogs and cats. You could see some members of the
family engaged in cooking, while others would be weaving baskets etc. or a set of elderly men engaged in an
animated conversation seated on cane stools while a couple of teenagers would tend
to babies lying in make-shift cradles.
Elsewhere, near a
church, a small canvas canopy would come up for the night and a man (we never
knew if he had had a square meal that evening, for he looked like a poor beggar)
would be fast asleep curled up with two dogs and a cat who it would seem had
had an even nastier day by the way they would be fast asleep.
Then again, at
night, the vegetable vendors on the streets would have made bundles of their
vegetable baskets/remaining stock under canvas sheets tied with rope and
promptly at the appointed time, street dogs would appear from out of thin air,
perch themselves on one of these bundles and zealously guard the contents
underneath throughout the night, perhaps fed by the particular vegetable vendor
during the day. Mysteriously, these living rooms, bedrooms, dining rooms,
nurseries and animals would vanish at daylight and one wondered if it was all a
dream or a figment of one’s imagination.
If you went for a
morning walk, it was another common sight to see two-three senior citizens
sharing space on a park bench with a dog sitting on its haunches on the bench,
who at first sight would look very much a part of the morning walker’s group.
My wife and I used
to commute by the Bandra morning locals 9.10 a.m. or the 9.22 a.m. from Mahim
to Church-gate Railway station to get to our office on Madame Cama Road, a good
three-quarter km. away. In the busy morning rush to get to office, during one
of our initial trips to office, just opposite the Church-gate station exit, we
spotted a bunch of 5 dogs parked around a shoe shine box guarding it and trying
to sleep at the same time, perhaps exhausted with keeping guard around the
shoe-shine man all night.
Suddenly, a thin
lame man appeared who hobbled along to a neat looking seat and asked politely,
“Shine your shoes, Sir?”.
We were rather
intrigued with the dogs and what were they doing with a shoe shine man so I
nodded in affirmation. He seemed to be in no hurry to finish with the shoe
shine and seemed to go on for ever, quite a relief from the precision-timed
Mumbai life which we were slowly getting accustomed to. We asked him how he had
got the dogs.
Shyly, he narrated his story. He was from Calcutta, and from a
family of doctors and an avid football fan. There was some disagreement in the
family at about the age of fourteen and he had run away from home some thirty
five years ago. Since then he had lived in the streets of Mumbai and the dogs
were his best friends ever since. He had been chased by the Mumbai Municipal
Corporation several times, his little possessions confiscated; sometimes he had
to go without food but his tenacity had made him survive on the streets of
Mumbai. He had never thought of going back, because that would have been too demeaning
for him.
Now he lived with
his pet dogs about him, the waiters of the restaurants around would give him
food and he slept in their quarters. He was particularly fond of a dog called Jackie,
who was of a superior breed and who he had raised from a pup and he feared that
Jackie would run away one day because he did not have a dog chain. Our office colleagues
who were waiting impatiently for us to finish with the shoe-shine man were getting
late as were we, so I asked them to go on and my wife and I continued with the
discussion as we was very intrigued by this man’s story. All along several
other commuters who wanted their shoes polished, quietly slipped away as Arvind
Dada, for that was his name, would not stop shining my shoes. My wife, who is a
Bengali, spoke to him in Bengali, and he responded. I asked him whether because
of us he was losing his customers. He replied nonchalantly “I have already
earned today’s quota, Sir, so it is not a problem. At the rate of Rs. five per
shine I only earn Rs.forty every day and after that I stop. I spend Rs. twenty
on myself and the remaining money is spent on buying food for the dogs. There
are around forty street dogs in this area known to me and I do my rounds and
feed as many as I can till the food is exhausted, then I come back and share my
food with these five dogs.”
Nevertheless, I
thought that as he had missed his customers because of me, I gave him a twenty
rupee note which he accepted gratefully. We hunted for a dog-chain through all
the shops in Mahim but could not find one.
The next morning
when we passed the spot where he used to sit, he was distraught. Apparently,
Jackie had run away at night despite Arvind Dada calling out for him and he
could not catch up with the dog with his bad leg and his single crutch. He did
not shine any shoes for the next two days, but survived on the food given to
him by the waiters and hotel staff. On the third day, we spotted him briskly
shining shoes and gave me an out-of-turn shoe shine angering a couple of
customers who quietly slipped away because he was very eager to talk to us. He
shared that as in the case of many bad experiences in his life, he was making a
valiant effort to recover from the loss of his favourite dog, but he had a duty
to keep to all the remaining 40 odd dogs around Church Gate Area and was quite
perturbed that he had not fed them for two days and that they would have missed
him and gone hungry.
Then our
“friendship” grew with Arvind Dada. Every day, I would stop to get my shoes
shined and he would go on shining them for a good half-hour or so, while I
would get a daily update of his previous day’s activities. So as not to get
late for office, we used to catch an earlier commuter train from Mahim. Apart
from the dogs, we learnt that he was very fond of watching Football matches and
the waiters would contribute for his Taxi fare to the Football stadium as he
could not climb into a commuter train because of his bad leg. He owned a little
transistor and was fond of listening to F.M. radio stations. Like most cricket
lovers, he was very fond of Saurav Ganguly, the Captain of the Indian cricket
team. Also, that several newspaper
reporters and T.V. crew wanted to do a human interest story on him and his
concern for the street dogs, but he had refused them as he did not want his
personal life story to become public.
One day he had a
bandage around his left hand. He shared that a jilted man had repeatedly
stabbed a young woman several times the day before, and he had saved her from
that man and got the injury in the process. He laughed as he recalled the whole
incident. “Imagine, a lame man coming to the woman’s rescue and none of the
other people passing by came to help her! Sir, this is Mumbai for you!!”. This
incident was covered in several news channels and the T.V. crew finally had a
field day interviewing Arvind Dada over the next two days.
During the
monsoons, Mumbai is lashed by torrential rains interspersed by intermittent
rains and he would sit crouched in a corner and his shoe-shine business would
suffer immensely. More than his plight, he would worry more about the dogs he
could not feed because he could not earn any money on such days to buy food for
them.
The years passed
and stopping at Arvind Dada’s shoeshine stand became a regular feature of our
morning routine. Then, one day we told him that we were leaving Mumbai on a
transfer to Hyderabad. He was very distraught and said that like several other
persons whom he had met on the streets of Mumbai, we would forget him and never
come to see him again. As a parting gift, I gave him 300 rupees, which I said
should feed the dogs for the next few days, so that he could go easy on his
shoe-shine work during this time. He gave me a one-rupee coin to keep as a
memento.
The last time I
saw him was on the day we were relieved from office for our next assignments. I
saw him from a distance while on my way to Churchgate Railway station, busy
shining shoes. He seemed to be caught in a time-warp, surrounded by his five
pet dogs already a distant memory.
He felt a kinship with the dogs because he had
lived with them on the streets of Mumbai all his life. As for the rest of us
whom he had met, we were just brief acquaintances!
(The above short story has been written by Rajeev Prasad)
Links to some other short stories on this Blog by Rajeev Prasad:
1) A short story: Friends at the Cross-Roads
2) A short story: Arvind Dada and the street-dogs
3) An Otherworldly Encounter: A personal experience
4) A short story: A tour of Pune's Blind School (or as I prefer to call it the "School for visually challenged students")
5) Remembering Uncle Paul Haegar: The German Army Officer during World War II who became an exemplary Horticulturist and who gave the Aligarh Muslim University beautiful landscaped gardens as his legacy
6) Connecting through several life-times: The story of the "Panditji" (priest) of the Hanuman Temple at the CSA University, Kanpur
1 comment:
Nice reminiscences.
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