‘Yehi toh tha humara, phir se aa gaya’: Red Fort’s beloved stray dogs return home to loving arms

Within minutes, Tiger sniffs the gate, cars, people and rickshaws outside the Jain Mandir at Chandni Chowk and makes his way through the crowded lane towards his “home” — a few metres away, in a lane dotted by flower shops.

Sahu lifts Tiger and carries him, while vendors look on with excitement in their eyes. There was joy in the air as people treated Tiger’s arrival as the return of a family member. “Yehi toh tha humara, phir se aa gaya (He was our own, he’s back again),” one said. “Aa gaya yeh waapas. (He has returned),” another said. “Khoob masti kari hai tumne, dooble ho gaye ho. (You must have had fun. You have lost weight),” a third one said addressing Tiger.

Tiger, meanwhile, was busy greeting his human friends — Sahu and Pankaj Chaudhary, a flower vendor. “Eat first,” says Sahu, as he serves him some snacks on a newspaper. But Tiger just lends Sahu his front right leg, to greet him multiple times, expecting a pet.

Sahu and Pankaj, who have been waiting for the return of their canine companion, have tears in their eyes as they recall visiting the ABC centre thrice in 13 days where Tiger had been kept.

Sahu, who hails from Bihar, sleeps on the footpath with Tiger beside him, every night. “He has been with me since he was born. We have already got him vaccinated and neutered. Each day without him felt so heavy, I was not able to concentrate. He, on some days, just keeps on greeting me and does not leave my side. He eats, sleeps, wanders the whole night with me,” he says.

Contrary to his name, however, Tiger was timid, says Vikas Kumar (24) who works as a caregiver and a dog catcher at the Timarpur centre.
Around 8.30 am on Sunday, staffers at the centre were busy preparing for the release of the dogs. The kennels were washed, curd rice was served. While one caregiver prepared the list of the dogs, another tallied it with the numbers on the collars of the animals. Doctors also had to examine the dogs before they were released.

Inside a kennel with five more dogs, Tiger had been standing, pressing his face between the iron rods since morning — restless for his release, yet huddling with the pack as they barked occasionally.

“Once they return home, they will be happy and so will we,” says Ganesh Kumar (50), a caregiver and a van driver who has been working at the centre since 2015.

However, the release, initially scheduled for early morning, was delayed multiple times owing to bouts of rain. Later, around 12.30 pm, seven dogs were transferred into the van, which had a steel cage at the back.

Besides Tiger, a brown male dog, Bhuro, was waiting to see familiar faces again.

After the van reached Angoori Bagh Hanuman Mandir near Red Fort, volunteers clicked pictures of the animals and uploaded those and other details on an MCD app, Bhuro jumped around. His “companions” — four-five drivers of the ‘Channdi Chowk ki Sawari’ left their rickshaws stationed under the shade, to greet him. For Muhaamad Wahid (48) and his friends, Bhuro acts as a “shield”. “He barks and alerts, as soon as he finds something suspicious,” he says, adding that he was also wondering when the dog would return.

At the centre, Kaalu, who was also picked up from the Red Fort area, still waits for his turn to board that van home. At the gate, he scratches the floor trying to widen the gap, pushing his mouth close, but never managing to slip in through it.

Modifying its earlier order, a three-judge bench of the Supreme Court, in its interim order on Friday, said: “A blanket direction to pick up all the strays and place them in dog shelters/ pounds without evaluating the existing infrastructure may lead to a Catch-22 situation because such directions may be impossible to comply with”. It said “the directions” of the two-judge bench “to the extent that they prohibit the release of the picked up strays, shall be kept in abeyance for the time being”. “The dogs that are picked up shall be sterilised, dewormed, vaccinated, and released back to the same area from which they were picked up.” The court, however, indicated that a solution to the stray dog matter may still be far.

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