7/ 100 Kalu
Kalu. The dog that made it.
Not all the dogs in India are roaming wild on the streets in their little packs. We saw plenty of people with fancy pedigree breeds, and the pet shops that sold them. I personally find pet shops heartbreaking places, but then I don’t even like the idea of keeping a bird in a cage so puppies in crates are definitely a step too far.
When we arrived at our B&B in Jaipur very late in the evening we were welcomed by the same cheery doorman we first met way back in 2018 on our first visit. Om Prakash is such a happy and helpful soul and we had spoken to him about his life and family so many times over our three visits that I feel like we have come to know him pretty well. This time, though, he seemed slightly more worried about any of us making noise as we crept into the lobby of the large house we were staying in.
The ornately furnished room looked exactly the same as it did on our last visit 6 years previously. The overly chunky furniture. The huge oil painting of a man in armour cradling his dying horse. The mat and blanket that Om Prakash slept on by the door. But tucked away next to his temporary bed, there was another bed. A dog bed. And from under a heap of blankets in that bed was one solitary beady eye, peering out. At the other end of the blanket was the tip of a slender black tail, gently twitching.
The hidden creature in the bed was, according to Om Prakash, fast asleep so we didn’t have to worry. I knew that it most definitely wasn’t asleep as every time I glanced over to the bed that little bit of tail would wag faster and faster as the unstoppable urge to jump up and say hello was becoming more uncontrollable. You could sense an increasing buildup of energy emanating from within the blankets even as we stood there.
I asked Om Prakash if he now had a dog – he said yes. I asked the dog’s name – he leaned over and whispered ‘Kalu’, not quite quietly enough for a dog’s ears. Hearing a mere utterance of his name was the signal Kalu had been waiting for since we arrived and this gangly young chaotic black dog burst out from under his blanket pile.
It was almost impossible to imagine how he fitted into such a small space but perhaps he wasn’t actually all that big, it was simply that he was running around us so fast in the dim light it was hard to get a proper view. One thing was for sure – once that tightly wound spring had been released it was a mighty effort to regain even a tiny bit of control of this very happy creature.
The next morning, after breakfast, we bumped into Om Prakash as he was sitting, wrapped in blankets to guard against the cold, reading the day’s newspaper in front of a blow heater that was far too small. The dog bed, again, looked deceptively empty except for a pile of black blankets, but then that little shining eye peeped out to see what was going on.
Realising that it took Om Prakash a considerable amount of time to calm Kalu down each time he escaped we made a point of ignoring him in the hope that he could contain himself just long enough for our little chat. Asking about Kalu, Om Prakash told us he was one of a number of young dogs that lived in the street outside. Then, one day, he simply followed him indoors, and stayed.
Om Prakash and the owner of the house, Amita, didn’t get a dog. Kalu got them.
