Om Prakash has been with us for over eight years. I still remember the day we moved into a larger university house and found him near the gate. We chased him out as we did not want a stray dog around. He never barked. Each day as we returned from work, Om Prakash would see the approaching car, scale the wall, and run away before we could gather ammunition to be rid of him. He had an active mind, I thought, to be able to understand our hostility. With time, he left our compound but we would occasionally see him pass by.That Christmas, I noticed he had become so frail that he could hardly rouse himself from the road across our house. His fur had fallen off, exposing his pink underskin. I felt sorry for the poor creature and gave him some milk. By evening, I had called up a vet, who suggested I send him to a stray dog shelter.And thus began another chase. The wardens of the shelter were trying to catch him with a sort of lasso, we were endeavouring to put a chain around his neck and he was evading us all by running about. Eventually, he became breathless, and bleeding from the mouth, was dragged into the van. By now, I was terribly upset. The warden asked me to fill a form: would I like to have him back after treatment or was he to be abandoned away from our locality? I couldn’t bear to not know how he was faring. I ticked the former.Two weeks later, he was back with us. We built him a makeshift home beneath our neem tree. In a mood of comic humour, my husband christened him Om Prakash. With a good diet, his bark returned. Today, Omy is a seventy-pound black and white dog, resembling a cross between a Dalmatian and a Rhodesian ridgeback, who turns up his nose at all vegetarian meals. When we return from our holidays, he wails achingly. Every time we go out, he follows our car to the university gate, afraid we will not return. When we do, he greets us with a warm wag and a sniff — more fondly than any human being we know.
