The Dogs Kept Barking in the Dark
Daughter
A young woman living with her parents was quite fond of dogs. She had seven. One night, they began barking in a thunderous clamour. The young woman looked out of the window to see what was happening.
She heard her aged father opening the window to the courtyard and scolding the dogs for the noise. She could still hear the song her mother was listening to on her smartphone. It was a birthday gift that Mother got on her 70th birthday.
"How long will I have the company of my ageing parents?", she wondered. God forbid, if they die soon, she would leave the house, she thought; then altogether regretting that thought, she tried to forget the sensation of loneliness that the thought evoked.
The dogs were barking, all seven of them. The three puppies were mildly bored and lowered the pandemonium a little. She knew them distinctly from their barks.
The older bitch, the leader of the pack, had a fierce bark that resonated across the courtyard and ended with a long pitchy moan. The youngest bitch had an abrupt and throaty bark, almost like a single cough that humans make sometimes. The young male dog, the only male among the adult trio, is still trapped in his puppyhood and howls and yawns all the time believing he is barking.
Poor things, she thought.
Are they afraid of a movement in the dark? Or are they looking out for me and my family, and warning me about an imminent danger? Are they aware of something strange that I am not sensing? Are they barking at the occasional porcupine that crosses the courtyard at night? Once the young woman herself spotted the porcupine. That night she heard strange sounds and switched on the light to the porch. The startled porcupine stood up on its hind legs. He folded his forelegs as if he were praying, blinded by the light, looking like a huge black pumpkin with thorns. Poor thing, she thought then, and hastily switched the lights off.
Father
After scolding the dogs, Father shut the window and went back to sleep. He keeps sleeping in the front room despite his wife asking him to move to a room inside the house. The wet towel he spreads on the sofa after taking a bath, and the empty strips and bottles of medicines he throws around, make his wife embarrassed and angry. What if a guest comes unannounced and sees all this?
He is obstinate about sleeping in the front room.
“I will not move to an inner room of the house and be forgotten by all,” he told himself whenever the matter came up for discussion. He was the master of that house after all. He is not dead yet. Lying down on his bed and staring at the wooden ceiling of the house, he thought about how weak his assertions of power were getting, as the days passed. He nipped such arguments in their buds with a sharp look or an assertive nod, in better times. “I will not give up on my right as master of the house,” he promised himself.
He thought about his unmarried daughter who lived upstairs. He felt a mix of melancholy and spite for her lonely fate but the thought did not linger. His memory is all foggy except for his self-assertions. Nothing in this house will leave my notice though I am old, he boasted to himself. I am still the boss here until I die.
Dogs
It is fearful yet exciting every night, the dogs thought. There are seven of us and the night outside is full. The old man in the front room is such a gnawer. He often bangs open the door and shouts at us in an unintelligible language. The young woman upstairs is sad and her sadness touches us too. Why does the old woman’s mobile phone keep howling all night?
The moon comes out behind the bamboo branches and we sing along with the jackals hiding in the thickets behind the cow shed. The house cat curiously looks at us from a window and winks as if he is in a good mood today. The night is still exciting. A wild boar lives near the border fence, inside a pit, where the overgrowth arches like the old man’s yawn. Porcupines, as they pass by, stand on two hind legs, upright and blind when suddenly the light in the porch is switched on.
We bark at him though it is just a usual hello. We mean no harm to him. Three big frogs live beneath a rock at the end of the courtyard and are stinky, and loud; better keep away from them.
We love the night.
Mother
The barking dogs disturbed the strands of sleep that the melody was weaving around the mother. Every day, she goes to sleep, cradled by the soft lull of those strands. She is frail, with chronic asthma kept at bay only by inhalers and medicines; migraines often deprive her of a good sleep. Her smartphone would sing for her till the morning or until the battery lasts. This way, I do not have to listen to his rants, thought the mother. She remembered how age-ridden he looked in the morning when he came out of the bathroom without wearing a shirt. She felt pity for him but remembering how he dominated her all her life dampened and diluted her pity immediately. She stirred and changed her position in the bed.
A shaft of light from the courtyard fell across the otherwise dark room through a slit in the ancient and thick wooden window. The dogs kept barking in the dark. Mother was especially fond of the young male dog, at his howling best that night. "When you look into his eyes, your heart melts at his innocence," she thought.
Did I forget to feed them today, suddenly a doubt crossed her mind. No, I fed them in the evening, after we had tea, she remembered. Of late, the thought often occurred to her that her memory was failing her.
Getting old is no light matter, she sighed.
Comments
Post a Comment