Pi-Dog

1 This is the time of day I like best, and this the hour when I can call this city my own; when I like nothing better than to lie down here, at the exact centre of this traffic island (or trisland as I call it for short, and also to suggest a triangular island with rounded corners) that doubles as a parking lot on working days, a corral for more than fifty cars, when it's deserted early in the morning, and I'm the only sign of intelligent life on the planet; the concrete surface hard, flat and cool against my belly, my lower jaw at rest on crossed forepaws; just about where the equestrian statue of what's-his-name must've stood once, or so I imagine. 2 I look a bit like a seventeenth-century map of Bombay with its seven islands not joined yet, shown in solid black on a body the colour of old parchment; with Old Woman's Island on my forehead, Mahim on my croup, and the others distributed casually among brisket, withers, saddle and loin - with a pirate's rather than a cartographer's regard for accuracy. 3 I like to trace my descent - no proof of course, just a strong family tradition - matrilineally, to the only bitch that proved tough enough to have survived, first, the long voyage, and then the wretched weather here - a combination that killed the rest of the pack of thirty foxhounds, imported all the way from England by Sir Bartle Frere in eighteen hundred and sixty-four, with the crazy idea of introducing fox-hunting to Bombay. Just the sort of thing he felt the city badly needed. 4 On my father's side the line goes back to the dog that followed Yudhishthira on his last journey, and stayed with him till the very end; long after all the others - Draupadi first, then Sahadeva, then Nakul, followed by Arjuna and, last of all, Bhima - had fallen by the wayside. Dog in tow, Yudhishthira alone plodded on. Until he too, frostbitten and blinded with snow, dizzy with hunger and gasping for air, was about to collapse in the icy wastes of the Himalayas; when help came in the shape of a flying chariot to airlift him to heaven. Yudhishthira, that noble prince, refused to get on board unless dogs were allowed. And my ancestor became the only dog to have made it to heaven in recorded history. 5 To find a more moving instance of man's devotion to dog, we have to leave the realm of history, skip a few thousand years and pick up a work of science fantasy - Harlan Ellison's A Boy and his Dog, a cultbook among pi-dogs everywhere - in which the ‘Boy' of the title sacrifices his love, and serves up his girlfriend as dogfood to save the life of his starving canine master. 6 I answer to the name of Ugh. No, not the exclamation of disgust; but the U pronounced as in Upanishad, and gh not silent, but as in ghost, ghoul or gherkin. It's short for Ughekalikadu, Siddharamayya's famous dog that I was named after, the guru of Kallidevayya's dog who could recite the four Vedas backwards. My own knowledge of the scriptures begins and ends, I'm afraid, with just one mantra, or verse; the tenth, from the sixty-second hymn in the third mandala of the Rig (and to think that the Rig alone contains ten thousand five hundred and fifty-two verses). It's composed in the Gayatri metre, and it goes: Om tat savitur varenyam bhargo devasya dhimahi dhiyo yonah prachodayat. Twenty-four syllables, exactly, if you count the initial Om. Please don't ask me what it means, though. All I know is that it's addressed to the sun-god - hence it's called Savitri - and it seems appropriate enough to recite it as I sit here waiting for the sun to rise. May the sun-god amplify the powers of my mind. 7 What I like about this time and place - as I lie here hugging the ground, my jaw at rest on crossed forepaws, my eyes level with the welltempered but gaptoothed keyboard of the black-and-white concrete blocks that form the border of this trisland and give me my primary horizon - is that I am left completely undisturbed to work in peace on my magnum opus: a triple sonata for a circumpiano based on three distinct themes - one suggested by a magpie robin, another by the wail of an ambulance, and the third by a rockdrill; a piebald pianist, caressing and tickling the concrete keys with his eyes, undeterred by digital deprivation. 8 As I play, the city slowly reconstructs itself, stone by numbered stone. Every stone seeks out his brothers and is joined by his neighbours. Every single crack returns to its flagstone and all is forgiven. Trees arrive at themselves, each one ready to give an account of its leaves. The mahogany drops a casket bursting with winged seeds by the wayside, like an inexperienced thief drops stolen jewels at the sight of a cop. St Andrew's church tiptoes back to its place, shoes in hand, like a husband after late-night revels. The university, you'll be glad to know, can never get lost because, although forgetful, it always carries its address in its pocket. 9 My nose quivers. A many-coloured smell of innocence and lavender, mildly acidic perspiration and nail polish, rosewood and rosin travels like a lighted fuse up my nose and explodes in my brain. It's not the leggy young girl taking a short cut through this island as usual, violin case in hand, and late again for her music class at the Max Mueller Bhavan, so much as a warning to me that my idyll will soon be over, that the time has come for me to surrender the city to its so-called masters.