Stroke the dog

I had forgotten what it was like to have a dog fill your home.

I had forgotten what it was like to have a dog fill your home. To have the turn of your key greeted by completely irrational, unreasonable yelps of joy. To have a bundle of happy hair and fur leap all over you for no gain or reason, even as you try to sit, pawing at your jeans, slurping at your face, wiggling beneath your still sitting butt.

Why is he happy to see me? Because I throw my sock at him for a rationed minute of silly play? Because he knows I run the economic strings of his world? Because occasionally, I toss him a bit of what I eat, nachni chips, low fat yogurt and jeera goli, for heavens sake?

He isn8217;t even actually my dog. Atom8217;s little heart quite clearly belongs to my daughter. At best he is my 8220;grand-dog8221; if you like. But now in terrible, angry, brutal times I come home and sit beside him on the sofa and stroke his little fragile head, his thin, trusting skull, his soft hair. And slowly the rage of my day disappears.

Stroke the dog, I hear the psychiatrists say. Hug your child. Make more love. Say the things you8217;ve left unsaid.

Squeeze a stranger8217;s hand, don8217;t just shake it. Let him or her feel your warmth, that you share a planet. Talk to your neighbour, don8217;t just grimace with tight upturned mouth-corners in the lift. Leave every door smiling, with happy friends behind you rather than scowling faces, leftovers from some petty fight. And when you come back home, return with gratitude, show your love, stroke the dog.

But psychiatrists are like diet doctors and not everything they say I can follow. I don8217;t know why, but I snap at the contact-lens salesman, the rickshaw in my face, the traffic light in my way, the grinning pothole, the ever-snarling traffic. I don8217;t feel love. Only gnawing irritation, uneasiness, edginess.

At? Everyone because everyone is responsible, all of us, because we are like this only. Everyone. Yet no one with a face or a name. The pizza delivery boy who delivers late. The three-and-a-half people working leisurely at digging the road outside my house8212;a job that is guaranteed them for another three-and-a-half years. The guy at my corner shop who smilingly tells me that he hasn8217;t got any flavoured, low-fat yogurt, the kind I like, again. Myself for losing my temper at my client, my maid, my car washing guy, again.

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We allow, tolerate things that go wrong even when they go wrong again and again. And leave a hole the size of Outer Mongolia for any terrorist to drive his truck/ row his boat through. I want to shout and scream and shake someone, anyone, everyone: 8220;The hole is me, us, you! The chain of little wrong things we build to make our large wrong system!8221;

8220;Don8217;t you know what8217;s happened?8221; 8220;Don8217;t you know that everything8217;s changed?8221; Stroke the dog instead.

The newspaper man at the door still bills me for papers I never read. The internet never works when I need it. The kids in my building use my car as their wicket or their goal depending which sport is in fashion. Is this all a part of some brave new world that I want no part of? But a world I cannot change? Cannot? Will not?

Am I bound by genuine helplessness or stilled by inertia? Stroke the dog.

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Will I confront the kids and say: 8220;See! See how you will grow up. Uncaring for a fellow man8217;s property. Uncaring that you destroy, dent, damage rather than build.8221;

No. I will stay silent. I will feel my rage fall away, hug my near, my dear, draw my cocoon warmly around me, close my eyes, protect my own.

And stroke the dog.

Contact the columnist at adipochasyahoo.com