Life146;s strays

Vulnerable, abandoned stray animals and birds are met by exclamations like 8216;How cute! Oh, the poor dear!8217; from urban Indians. Of course they8217;re sweet.

Vulnerable, abandoned stray animals and birds are met by exclamations like 8216;How cute! Oh, the poor dear!8217; from urban Indians. Of course they8217;re sweet. Growing up in small-town Baroda of the 1970s, with parents who in turn grew up in rural Kerala, animals were a part of our household. Stray dogs, cats, sparrows and squirrels were invariably fed. But it was in college that my eyes were opened to one more kind of strays 8212; stray humans. Not that I didn8217;t know they existed, but I slowly realised that they needed greater attention than stray animals.

Around that time, there lived a man under a huge banyan tree by the highway, outside my hostel fence. He was Ramchandra, a tall, dark and dirty man in his 40s, perhaps. With clothes and matted hair and beard, he was called a mad man. Perhaps he was mad, perhaps he wasn8217;t. But he was a harmless soul, who wandered aimlessly around the campus premises.

For a college that taught only two subjects, the campus was huge and the student/staff strength ridiculously low. It was like an isolated island between two suburbs. In the afternoons and nights, Ramchandra would always return to rest under the banyan tree. During the monsoons, he would crawl into the shed meant for the ladies8217; hostel watchman, who never existed. New students would initially be scared of him but would soon learnt the virtues of co-existence.

One morning Ramchandra, an early riser, lay motionless under the banyan tree. He was dead. No one bothered, about the body, neither the few local people nor the college authorities. It was vacation time, and there were even fewer students on campus. But some of us hostel inmates organised a farewell for him. We called up an institution run by the Sisters of Charity. A van arrived with a nun and two attendants. They lifted Ramchandra into the van. As we watched, the young nun told us that they would give Ramchandra a shave, a bath, dress him in fresh clothes and pray for him before sending his body for cremation.

A few days ago, as I helped shift a dead kitten from the parking lot of my office, I remembered Ramchandra. And the thousands of homeless, abandoned human strays, whose lives and deaths are perhaps no different from those of any stray animal. Unless, of course, we choose to make it so.