Dead Dog Polaroids

 I left work humming the Weeknd & Lana Del Rey’s ‘Prisoner’ today, a song I find absolutely calming and beautifully serene, not forgetting to mention how much I love to sing it. I’d barely moved a few metres when I saw a puppy lying in the middle of the road with two dogs just hanging out beside the puppy. On reaching closer, I realised the puppy was lying in a pool of blood and was dead for at least a few hours. The stench, although slight, was unmistakably lingering in the crisp winter air. 

Psychology says that you feel sad when something makes you uncomfortable and you cannot eliminate it. You feel pity for the beggar on the road because they remind you of human misery and you give them money so they’ll leave you alone, not because you feel sorry for them. 

I’m used to death. I think. But the dead puppy didn’t make me cry. It was the dogs sitting beside it. They were quiet, they were unresponsive, but they were there. It was as if one of them said to the other, “so this is what happened today” and the other said, “I see. I don’t know what to do but I’ll hang with you here until the humans take the little one away”

My mom had a fascinating dead dogs story. Her dad (my grandpa) was in the police and they lived in the police colony. A dog gave birth to a litter one winter but most of them were trampled to death by a Royal Enfield, save for one little puppy who grew up around my mom and other kids. They named him ‘Laalia’, who got famous for lethally barking after, mauling and chasing every Royal Enfield that passed through. 

Terrific story, mom. But I also know this to be a fact that dogs have short attention spans, so the story stands disputed. 

When our own nine-year-old cross-bred German Shepherd Jasper passed away, my parents buried him in our backyard. Eight months later, a giant tree sprouts from the ground Jasper was buried in. I knew he’s not gone. I knew he’ll continue to stay in the universe, and he did. 

I wonder how dogs grieve. How do they honour the ones they lose? Do their short memory spans allow them to forget their fallen comrades? Do they then proceed to eat them? I don’t know. 

Today’s dead dog polaroid forced me to question a lot of things. Lately, I’ve gotten too comfortable in my life. Comfortable, as in, lazy. I’ve kept myself occupied, still doing things I absolutely love doing, and enjoying them, but still not doing enough. I haven’t written any letters in more than ten months, I feel too exhausted on the weekends to create my own artsy shit, I sometimes feel too tired to even think. The last book I finished was The Hunger Games, and that was a month ago. I’ve been stuck reading The Diary of a Young Girl for more than a month and I’m still on page 88. I tried to switch to another book, but Richard Dawkins is, what Mr B would call “over my paygrade”, and everything that old bat says in the book makes me feel like there are at least two research papers I need to read before moving forward.

What do I learn from this? Am I going to continue playing a corpse for the rest of my life?

Stay tuned, betches.