Adam died in a manner befitting an honourable stray dog. He was run over by a vehicle on the highway about five kilometres to the east. Heavy vehicles rode over his carcass until he disintegrated into nothingness like a clod of mud in rain.

Kuruppu’s son, Akhilesh, had gone to England for higher studies and then worked in Delhi for a few years. After his father’s death, he resigned from his job and came back home. He lived in that empty house like a malevolent spirit, spending his considerable ancestral wealth in the pursuit of drunken parties. He brought home a stray puppy, and gave him the name ‘Adam’. Even after six–seven generations, the puppy retained the mahogany colour and the black face mask of his ancestors.

‘If you live like this, there will be nothing left of your wealth,’ a relative admonished Akhilesh.

‘I want to live like a stray at least for a day before I die,’ Akhilesh said. He took a sip from the cocktail of black tea and rum, and stroked the new Adam on his back.

Adam ran to the front yard and fetched the newspaper. ‘A Belgian Malinois dog, Cairo, joins American marines in the quest to assassinate Bin Laden,’ the relative read the headline aloud.

Akhilesh smiled. ‘He’s a relative of Adam,’ he said, thinking of his father, Kuruppu, an Anglo-Indian woman named Polly Mathew, and the litter of puppies she had considered in the Philippines, wondering which one to choose.

Adam ran out through a gap in the dilapidated boundary wall. The gang of puppies waiting for him outside howled in chorus as he joined them, and they ran around chasing and nipping each other playfully.

death notice

The pregnant cow—a hybrid variety—that lived in our old barn began to have contractions by 8 p.m. that night. A few hours before that, a mongrel bitch had given birth in the screw pine thicket behind our compound, her ear-splitting screams announcing the searing pain of her body opening up to the whole world. She was paying the price for months of canoodling, at the exact same place, with all kinds of dogs in the neighbourhood.

Within a short while, as directed by my mother, I stood in the pouring rain and dug a hole in the mud. I picked up the puppies one by one—seven of them in rainbow hues—and put them in the hole. With eyes that would never open to see the world, they grubbed around, searching for their mother’s teats. Rainwater splashed as I filled the hole with mud.

‘What sort of a mother are you?’ I asked Amma after washing the soil off the spade.

Amma gave me a glass of tea, and took a plate of day-old rice and fish curry over to the heartbroken, moaning bitch that had followed me.

The cow’s fate was entirely different. As soon as the labour pains started, Amma lit a kerosene lamp and sat beside her, scratching her jowls and stroking her head. She bore her pain proudly, with not even a whimper. Unfortunately, the calf came out feet first, and my worried mother promised an offering of a ghee-filled coconut to the god in Sabarimala if all went well.