Geetanjali Krishna: Learning to be a better human being

Author is talking about kids throwing pebbles and stones at a stray dog in the park

Last month when I was going to the park for my daily constitutional, something made my blood boil. A couple of kids, barely seven years old, were throwing pebbles and stones at a stray dog, which was cowering behind a bush. While I’m not exactly thrilled with the growing population of strays in Delhi, needless cruelty bothers me. So I stopped to scold the children. “It’s not letting us play cricket,” they cried. “It keeps running away with our ball.”  Maybe the dog wanted to play with them, I suggested. Like all bullies, they were scared at being accosted by an adult, even more so when I threatened to complain to the parents if I saw them torturing the dog again.

 
The next few days, I noticed that an unexpected friendship seemed to have developed between the dog and its erstwhile tormentors. Initially, the canine simply observed them from a distance. When it realised that the children were not tormenting him any more, it felt emboldened to help them field the ball when the batsman hit a boundary. Soon, the boys started feeding it leftovers from their tiffin boxes, and the dog became part of their gang.
 
Then, last week, I noticed the boys forlornly hunting through the bushes. Had they lost their ball, I asked. They hadn’t been able to find the dog for the last two days, they said. “We are worried about him,” one of them said. “Where could he be?” I noticed the boys were referring to the dog as “he” not “it”, but couldn’t resist saying that I thought they found the dog to be a nuisance. “Last time I saw, you were throwing stones at him,” I said. They shook their heard emphatically. “No, no! Things have changed now. He’s become our friend,” they said. “We named him Kalu because of the colour of his coat, and he liked his name so much that he’d wag his tail whenever we called him that.” The boys were embarrassed by their earlier behaviour, and felt the need to explain. They said that till they became friends with Kalu, they’d never interacted with dogs before. “Our parents always warned us that if we got bitten by a dog, we’d have to get many injections,” said one. “Perhaps, it was this fear that made us throw stones at Kalu initially. Now of course, we all know better.”

 

The little fellows forgot about playing cricket and spent every evening hunting for the dog, but to no avail. A week went by, and there was still no sign of Kalu anywhere. Then I noticed the boys had begun leaving leftover rotis for the other strays in the park. The strays in the park began acknowledging their generosity by following them around everywhere. The boys let the dogs be, but kept searching for Kalu. Finally, they had no option but to come to terms with the fact that their friend was gone — and that they’d never know what happened to him.

 
Last week, I found them playing cricket again. “We’ll never have a friend like Kalu again,” they told me, “but we now understand that dogs aren’t the problem — humans are. We’re mean to them, run over them with our cars, hit them if they come close to us — and then, when they bite us, we call them savage animals.” As I headed back after my walk, a strange thought struck me. Perhaps in the short time that I saw him, Kalu had accomplished something, which in present times sometimes feels like a tough feat to pull off: help make the little boys become better humans.