Not Every Dog Has His Way
While sipping coffee, seated on my first-floor balcony, I notice the pale, cold light of the early morning suffuse across the grey-white of the sky. For the past five years, ever since I started working in the local pharmaceutical firm, I have lost touch with the serenity of the luminous dawn. While in college, I participated in campus elections and got involved in politics—virtuous, full of principles and ideals.
I observe a stray, brown dog sleeping right in front of a shop, opposite our house, which is under renovation. I have seen him around the workers stationed in the building. His brown, jute leash is tied onto an electric pole, adjacent to the house. He sleeps undisturbed until another homeless, brown dog appears and barks something in a mellowed tone in his ears. He wakes up, stands on his four, yawns and stretches, and looks around with eyes half-veiled, undeterred. The other dog goes away.
A little while from now the day will unfold its miseries, specially in my office where a judgement will be given against a jovial, friendly, unmarried woman named Rita, in her early thirties, falsely accused of taking a commission from a client of ours. Everybody in my office has conspired against her, despising her affair with a family man—considered as a crime in our wretched, little town. Deep within, I feel Rita’s innocence and perceive that love is blind, but taking her side will attract disrespect from others, as they tell me condemning her act, “We’ll consider you to be a woman like her.”
A man walks out of the under-renovation shop, his eyes caressing the dog lovingly, tearing off a colorful packet and giving him some biscuits. The dog waves his tail fondly and eats them.
I have always defended free love in college. Being an accomplice of Rita isn’t something that I desire now, let alone inviting the dissatisfied, revengeful feelings of others. What should I choose? The comfort of righteousness. Or, the discontent of supporting the indifferent majority that feeds, clothes and defends prejudice.
A group of brown dogs howls from a distance. The dog here rises with a start, assuming an expression of rapt attention. His body trembles, slings forward; the leash loosens and snaps, breaking himself free—practical considerations overriding the tangled sentiment for the building workers. He rushes towards the dogs that have massed together. A verdict of acquittal seems distant amidst the rationale of violence and the power of the oppressors.
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