“Why do you keep neri kutta? Why can’t you keep ‘good’ dogs?” screeched my next-door neighbour from his first-floor balcony above a tony café. Neri kutta is a pejorative term for street dogs in Bangla. And ‘good’ dog implies pedigree dogs, with certificate of purity and bought for obscene amounts of money.

He was angry because that morning there had been a rare dog fight. There had been a lot of barking and snarling. While I was trying to control the situation, he added to the noise by threatening a police case. His wife threatened to send Mafuza, my house keeper, to jail. Yet this gentleman, and his wife, are TOTALLY silent when ISKCON sings LOUDLY, and tunelessly, with drums, at ungodly hours in the lane between our two houses. Or, during the recently concluded Navratras, the Ved Bhawan across his house held all night loud singing sessions with instruments, on a mic, and periodically raised the battle cry of Jai Sri Ram. He neither snarled nor protested. In fact, the quietude of the bhadralok, middle class inhabitants, in the face of this massive noise, is loud indeed. Not a peep is heard in protest. By anyone. Including those who bark at my occasionally barking dogs.

The middle class also keep dogs. But these are pedigree dogs, paid for and bought from breeders. Recently there has been a lot of research on breeders who are accused of running puppy farms, getting the female impregnated very quickly after delivery – the heavy female dogs not yet recovered from whelping are practically raped, not allowing the puppies the full eight with the mothers and selling them too young. The females are of course kept in atrocious conditions. And eventually, they are thrown out in the street. The entire operation is based on greed. Because the good middle-class folks buy these pedigree puppies, the puppy farms thrive. Here’s a write up from PETA explaining why breeding dogs is unethical, cruel and harmful. https://www.peta.org/features/are-dog-breeders-bad/

Moreover, pedigree dogs suffer from various health issues because of inbreeding. They are not as sturdy as Indies with mixed gene pools. I am surrounded by a couple of Labradors, Golden Retriever, German Shepard Dogs, a Beagle and Pekinese. Any visit to the vets would reveal even huge breeds like St. Bernard and Great Danes, totally unsuited for Calcutta’s weather condition. Once at the vet’s I met the dog of a popular Bengali film Star, Parambrata Chatterjee. I was delighted to see his pet is an Indy.

Dog walkers walk these pet dogs mostly, though there are exception. Most dogs are muzzled to stop them from smelling or eating the garbage on the streets. A walk is 15-20 mins max and the walker is mostly involved with his phone or chatting with friends while the dog, muzzled, waits patiently. Naturally these dogs are overweight and look unhealthy. No one carries a poop scoop, which, in Delhi, is a law. In my initial days with my first dog, Star, I used to carry one but people laughed so much that I stopped. Therefore, these entitled pets of the entitled, take a dump anywhere, on the road, on the pavements, in front of doorways. The dog walker is not bothered. The poor pets don’t know any better. But the classist behaviour of the entitled middle class is adding filth to this already filthy city.

The street dogs, and my Indies, also poop and pee outside but you would find it hard to find any evidence. They go into bushes and shrubs to fertilise those. They are clean by nature as compared to the pedigrees. Also, they are not walked on leads with their snouts muzzled. The masters don’t know, or don’t care, how very cruel these practices are.

At the other end of the spectrum, Calcutta is extremely kind to street dogs. I have never met this level of care and compassion anywhere else. I feed the two street dogs outside my home every morning. Without fail Gurmeet Kaur arrives each night with a huge bucket of food – rice cooked with chicken – clutching a set of cut up newspaper to make temporary plates to feed the dogs. She feeds the two and goes around feeding the other 13-14 colony dogs. Her only anxiety is the monsoon. “What will I do when it rains?” she wails every day without fail. “How will I feed them?” A man comes occasionally in a jeep and feeds dogs and cats. I have heard of similar feeders elsewhere in Calcutta. Apparently, it is routine. My friend Pialy Karmakar, feeds over 80 dogs every night, all around Gariahat.  

But much more than the middle-class feeders like my friends, it’s the working class who really take care of street dogs. Next to most pavement shops are dogs and cats, sheltered by the shop and the owners. They are fed and looked after. If the animals fall ill, the owners call the nearby feeder or vet. I’ve seen dogs being administered saline on the road. Jute bags appear at night for the animals, and dogs and cats, forgoing traditional animosity, share the meagre resources.  Only in Calcutta have I witnessed a friendship between street dogs and cats, by and large. They sleep and play together. Because the people on the streets not only feed street animals but also break up fights.

These animals are mostly gentle and don’t interfere with the human beings. My sister-in-law Urbi, has a phobia about dogs and consequently she can’t visit me. Once I was walking down a pavement with her and there were two sleeping dogs next a cobbler. I asked her if she was okay or if we should take another route. She said she is not scared of the street dogs of Calcutta. They are harmless.

The street dogs of Calcutta have also populated my home. My neighbour Soma gave me two, Pialy another, I adopted Star when I first came to the city. She’s a rescue from Bombay. And finally, Bagha was abandoned outside my home and I took him in. They are joyous and funny and very loving. They are respectful towards my two cats and allow the cats to bully them. The dogs are surprisingly obedient. Although I brought in a dog trainer, it was an expensive and useless exercise. I train them myself, following ‘The Hidden Life of Dogs’ by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas that opened up the mysteries of dog behaviour. I found this to be the most useful of the lot and her advice is to leave them alone. They will learn from each other. They do and did.

Occasionally though I am reminded that my dogs had another life before they came to me. I found some chocolate in the fridge left behind by Rakshi, my sister-in-law. Chocolates never come to my house and this was a tiny portion. I pulled it out thinking I would give it to Mafuza to finish. As I unpeeled the chocolate, Laali, a large, ungainly dog came running to me. None of the others were interested. In fact, none of my dogs beg for food. They are fed twice and they are happy. Laali though was delirious with desire, pleading, with her eyes, with soft whimpers, her legs pawing me. As I gave her a tiny square of chocolate, I suddenly has a mental vision of Laali tied under the Gariahat bridge – she and her sister Tara had spent 18 months since birth, tied up there before they came to me. She used to be tied outside, towards the road as she’s big. With my mental eye I could see a small, school going child stopping by her, petting her and giving her a small square of chocolate. An occasional treat from which the child must have saved a piece for her friend, the huge red dog.  

This Calcutta is my Calcutta, a city of joy, populated with kindness and love of the very poor.

The other city too exists. Two doors down is a spa for dogs. Pedigrees are brought in very expensive cars to be bathed, shampooed and groomed. Mostly, chauffers accompany the dogs and wait for the exercise to be over. Smartly dressed and engrossed in their mobiles, the drivers reek of deo. I once asked the owner if Saheli, one of the street dogs outside her clinic, could be bathed. The owner was rather offended. “She’s a street dog. I can’t allow her in.” And yet the owner is kind to both the street dogs. She allows them to live outside her clinic and in peak summer, when they dig up the flower bed to find a cool spot to sleep, she doesn’t mind.

Large cities contain several cities within themselves, often distinct from each other, with well-defined boundaries and cultures, at times language too. Calcutta too has several such pockets in its very tightly bound areas. It is a city with very little land as compared to say Delhi, and with a very large population that defies imagination. The fault lines that carve out the city are not visible easily unless you know what and where to look. And the prism to view might not be the city at all. I found a prism in dogs of the city.

The faultline dividing the two Calcutta is that of class. It segregates dogs, and naturally people too. It is a divide that is difficult to cross. And if like me, you too keep Indy dogs, and are not the film star Parambrata Chatterjee, you will be vilified, insulted and treated as insane. Moreover, if you are a middle-aged woman, living alone, you are certainly going to hear whispered comments that someone will bring to your notice. But this disdain and insult from the middle classes while being alien – no one really interfered in my life or taste before I came to Calcutta – is quite welcome really. Who wants approbation from people whose silence on injustice is loud indeed and their snarling over my personal taste is so wearisome and frankly, boring?

Meanwhile, Laali ate her chocolate savouring every bit. She didn’t gulp it down like dogs do. She licked it slowly, patiently, with tiny swipes of her huge tongue. She had once square and didn’t ask for more. She had it meditatively, joyously, eyes closed in memory of love and kindness. The memory that sustains all of us, memories of love and kindness.

This is Laali after her chocolate.