Lounge Fiction Special 2025: Woman and Dog by Shanta Gokhale

Dog, you must keep walking ahead. It helps me lift one foot, then the other. I was never heavy-footed. Mother would always ask, what’s the hurry? Why run? And I would say I am not running. And run. 

The hurry was to get to school. I loved teaching the girls. Loved their morning faces, bright-eyed and eager. They loved the stories I told them, from places and times so remote they seemed mythical. I was going off-course, breaking rules.

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Nobody noticed. The girls knew how to keep their heads down, look meek and stay mum about the things they were learning. I told them about the Kon-Tiki expedition. I told them about Don Quixote. One sad day I told them about the Polish Jewish doctor who ran a children’s orphanage in the Warsaw ghetto and travelled with them on a crammed train to the killing centre in Treblinka, telling them stories all the way. The girls had to know there was good and there was evil in the world and sometimes those who had suffered cruelly, turned cruel themselves. 

Did you know Dog, that in some jungles, there are plants that trap, eat and digest insects? The girls said that was bad. I said it was not. They only ate what they needed. It is bad only when you kill on a full stomach, out of greed for power, for land. How much land does a man need? I told the girls Tolstoy’s story. And the girls grew pensive.

But I am rambling. The sun is muddling my brain. They say too much sun does that. Too much sun makes you see things that are not there. You know Dog, as I was growing to middle-age, I began praying to God never to let me suffer from a disease that took my mind away. The mind is life. If the mind is lost, life is lost.  It never occurred to me then to pray for a sky that would never rain bombs, taking mind and body away at one stroke.

The constant fear, the pathetic helplessness, the wanting to live… I couldn’t bear it, Dog. The gathering stench of dead flesh, the bodies of children, their mothers wailing, remembering every little detail of their short lives, mothers who had lost faith in God for letting this happen yet praying to the same God to avenge the killings. The day I saw a little girl sprawled in the rubble, one eye hanging out, I began to walk, driven by her mother’s scream which I could not shake out of my ears. One foot before the other. No thought in my head. Dead inside. Only my feet alive, walking me away. Yet the scream stayed in my ears. It is there even now.

I didn’t notice you Dog, till we had left our devastated city and begun treading sand. I knew then that I had walked south. What were you thinking when you began following me, Dog? What has kept you walking alongside me for so long? I am walking to reach that tree. And you? I suppose you can’t do without humans.

Everything is so upside down. You were once wild. You didn’t wag your tail and crouch before humans. You were wolves. How did you become dogs? Some thought humans tamed you, when they became pastoralists, to guard their homesteads, herd their sheep and keep them company. But it was the other way around. Your ancestors adopted humans. Living in the wild, forever on guard, fearful of attacks was no life. They realised that humans with their killing instruments might offer them a better alternative. So they made themselves less ferocious, learned to wag their tails and became man’s best friends.

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It all happened millions of years ago. You can’t encompass that scale of time, can you Dog? Neither can I. No human can. Our brains are bigger than yours but not big enough to accommodate so much time. Our hearts too are not big enough to accommodate so much space, nor the cornucopia of life—humans, animals, birds, plants, insects, worms. We can only accommodate us and ours. They and theirs are another species. An enemy species. Strong men recognise enemies at sight. Strong men destroy enemies at sight. Strong men have strong sinews, strong muscles, strong wills. Look at the way they walk. Like conquerors. Every step says we are the chosen people, we are the leaders of the world, the strong men. 

She stops, one foot raised. Two deep lines have furrowed upwards from aquiline nose to widow’s peak. 

I thought I had left all that anger behind. I had told myself it wasn’t just our Olives that had been charred. The Chinars and Pines and Oaks and Chestnuts of the world had also been killed at one point or the other in this endless flow of time. It is the way of the world, a world made by man in his own image. Let us laugh, Dog. That’s what we must do. Laugh loud and long like the three Buddhist monks. What a riot they were, standing in the centre of every town laughing till the townsmen could not help but join in. Like Toni Morrison’s family which laughed uproariously when their landlord burned their house down because they could not afford to pay rent. What a thing to do. It was his house he burned. She laughed, loud and long. Her laughter rolled over the dunes and down, returning to her on the wind and fading away. Exhausted, she sat down. The dog sat beside her and put his head on his paws.

Is the tree real, I wonder. Are we nearer to it than we were? I wish you could talk, Dog. How many days have we been walking? And how many days since we have not eaten? No garbage dumps here for you to eat off. Or for me. I have heard that in really poor countries humans forage for food on garbage dumps. Garbage yields good food too, food of which the rich have had enough. I wonder how many days humans can go without food. They say an Indian yogi spent 76 years without eating or drinking. If he could do it, why can’t I? Stupid question, simple answer. Because I am not a yogi. Perhaps you are, Dog. You have patient eyes. 

But we’ll soon get used to hunger and starvation. God knows we have had enough time and practice. Back when we still had a roof over our heads, where was the food? Where was the water? Stopped at the border. That was perfectly logical. What’s the point of allowing people to eat and drink when you want them dead? But I am not going to die, see? I shall walk to the tree. 

Her tongue is dry as sand. Her throat too. When she speaks, her voice rasps like sandpaper on wood. There’s sand in her hair. Sand on her eyelashes. Sand between her toes. And now the sun is going down. 

She smiles. Her cracked lips hurt. The drama will soon begin. A show at the end of each day. Her stomach contracts. Her hunger pangs are permanent. Sitting down is agony. Getting up is agony. She lowers herself unsteadily into the fastcooling sand, sits in silence. She remembers the silence in the big auditorium before a play began. What use were those protest plays? What good did they do? A momentary uplifting of the spirits and then another bomb. People maimed. People screaming.

The dog digs himself a shallow pit and curls up in it, every rib etched in the light of the setting sun. 

Gradually, the sky brightens along the horizon from cerulean to fiery gold. Banks of orange and red thrust out of the clouds, reaching up into the violet and indigo depths above. The colours fill her eyes, fully saturated by the clear prism of the air. And then, as gradually as the colours appeared, they die away. There is no hurry, no haste to bring the curtain down on the day. And now the stars come out. Little spikes and shards of brilliance on a bed of inky blue velvet. What a roof to sleep under!

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Perhaps I will not wake up tomorrow, Dog. And I shall not be sorry. But I do so want to reach the tree. I am closing my eyes. When I wake up, I will shake the sand out of my hair and we will walk again. If I don’t wake up and nor do you, the suns of the future will dehydrate us, mummify us. The sands of the desert will blow over us, bury us deep. If men still exist a hundred, a thousand, a million years from now, if they have not killed one another off and laid waste the earth, if they still possess the spirit of inquiry and the urge to explore, if the thought comes to them that the desert is not just an expanse of arid land, but a place of mystery with hidden secrets… She stops, laughs, shakes her head in disbelief.

Do you know where that ramble was taking me, Dog? It was taking me to an explorer of the future. He was going to dig us up and, stroking his chin, mutter, “Aha! Twenty-four ribs. That was once a human. And what do we have here? Twenty-six ribs? That must have been her dog. How strange. This has been a desert for millions of years. No human habitation for miles. What were these two doing here?"

The explorer would then write us down in his diary and publish us in a book, with pictures. And he would give us names as explorers are wont to do. Perhaps I would be named Desert Rose. And you, Sandy. 

That’s where my ramble was taking me. I wanted to be in history—I, an ordinary school teacher who did not have the stomach to face fear; who was too weak to endure the daily killings of humans by humans; who vomited at the sight of gushing blood; who saw a man running down the street cradling his own severed arm and fainted; who saw a girl sprawled in the rubble with one eye…

Even here, even as I walk away from all that, as my muscles grow weak, my tissues waste away, my organs are ready to give up the fight, even here and now, one thing remains intact. My ego. Imagine! I wanted to be in history. I wanted to be in history, next to the man who ordered the bombs. 

She laughs out loud; then holds her stomach. A pain has shot through it with every peal of laughter. She feels good though. Laughter exorcises the ego. 

Sleep now, Dog. We are not destined to be an explorer’s discovery. We will get up in the morning and walk.

 Shanta Gokhale is a bilingual writer, translator, theatre critic and playwright based in Mumbai.

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