The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime

When we come out of our main gate of our residential complex in Bengaluru, a short private road leads us to the main road, on the right side of which is an imposing office building. On the left, on the ground floor of a less imposing structure, is an arcade with eateries and other stores. We call the arcade Arcade.

 As lots of tech workers are employed in the office building, at any time of the day in the arcade, one gets to see a crowd of young men and women with ID cards hanging from their necks having tea, tiffin, or lunch, standing or sitting on the arcade veranda. The youngsters are always cheerful, always in a group, and always chatting. A little of their joie de vivre gets rubbed onto me whenever I pass them.

 It seems owners of the arcade aren’t too fond of them. There are notices limiting the areas where they can eat. There were two concrete benches in front of the eateries on which they used to sit and have food. A few months ago, the benches were removed overnight. Why? The benches troubled nobody. I think they were removed only because the owners of the Arcade wanted to exhibit their meanness and power.

While the tech employees are seen only during the day, there is another group that lives in the arcade: a community of stray dogs. Animal lovers of the area feed them regularly, and the dog-lovers among the knowledge employees overfeed them irregularly. Consequently, the dogs are overweight and mostly sleepy. Contented with their lives, they harm nobody. In fact, they hardly move. Their protectors among my neighbours also get them vaccinated from time to time and get them treated when the need arises.

When I think of these people who do so much for something that has nothing to do with their self-interest, I feel not everything has been lost in our wretched country where reading a newspaper is a fraught exercise.

But the Arcade owners, if they don’t like harmless young people, how can they not hate harmless dogs? There is a history of animosity towards the arcade dogs. The latest act is the case of Bruce, a handsome nine-year old black-and-white male dog who was the quietest of the lot. He hasn’t been seen since 16 August.

When people from our housing complex approached the Arcade management to see their CCTV footage, they were rudely rebuffed. But from our housing complex’s footage, it was seen that at 2:33 AM of 16 August, at least two dog-catchers were trying to lure and catch dogs while they were running away. Our camera had limited reach, but it would be reasonable to infer that the two men abducted Bruce, the quietest, while the rest managed to escape.

When a complaint was lodged, the police came to Arcade, but the arcade management shouted at the people who had complained, while the police stood silently, like the good boys they are. An Arcade manager even went on photographing the protesters in the presence of the police, despite being asked to stop. It was an act of wanton intrusion of privacy and an implicit threat: We have noted who you are.

On 22 August, when eight of our people, including a senior citizen, went to the local police station, they were told there was no space for them to sit. They were made to stand and wait outside for four hours while it rained from time to time.

Let me jot down the central points.

·         Someone—possibly the Arcade management—paid private dog catchers to remove the arcade dogs, but they managed to catch only one.

·         The Arcade management, who are part of a big property developer of Bengaluru, seems to have a good rapport with the local police. This of course is expected. A construction firm would have good rapport with the police by default.

·         Deep pockets usually defeat good sense.

How much hate one must have to pay dog catchers and organise a midnight raid to remove absolutely harmless dogs! Is this a tiny part of the rising wave of hatred in the country in general?

 

Bengaluru

25 August 2026

 

This is a developing story. Please watch this space.

Shonku

 

As I am on the wrong side of 75, information about a friend’s death comes to me almost regularly. A large part of our world is made of friends; with every passing, our personal world shrinks a little: the smile that I won’t see ever again, the phone call that will never come, the bottle of beer that will remain unshared.

My childhood friend Shankar Bose, fondly called Shonku by friends, passed away yesterday after a few days of final suffering.

The message took me back to 1959, when he and I entered the same classroom and would be classmates for many years to come. Shonku was among the most low-key students in our class. (How painful it is to write about a dear friend in the past tense!) He was shy, would talk in a small voice, and wouldn’t be seen in large groups. He would never shout, nor would he stand in front of the class to deliver a speech. But from close quarters, he was just charming. Close friends knew he was a simple soul with a fine sense of understated humour. As we grew up I came to understand that Shonku believed in the American adage “Don’t take life too seriously, you won’t come out of it alive.” He didn’t take life too seriously. I wouldn’t possibly be wrong if I said that Shonku went through the usual phases of life, college, employment, getting married, having a child, and getting old, almost absent-mindedly.

We lost touch after school as our lives moved along two non-intersecting trajectories. Much later, I met Shonku again at the wedding of a friend’s daughter. Finally, when I left my first job and began my second innings in Kolkata, I reconnected with Shonku properly. His naughty smile hadn’t changed in fifty odd years. His behaviour, the way he talked, hadn’t changed at all. I felt he was still the child that he had been in school. A better way of saying that would be, Shankar had managed to keep his childhood alive within himself, something that only a few can do.

When we met again, I came to know that Shonku and I both suffered from a particularly nasty kind of rheumatoid arthritis which begins in one’s early twenties and for which there was no treatment in India until maybe, 2015. Until then, that is, over forty years, one of the main missions of my life was bearing terrible pain and coping with the debilitating disease. The disease was possibly less virulent in my case. While I have been reasonably mobile despite it, Shonku used to suffer a lot. When we met again, he carried a walking stick, although he would laugh off his illness. I believe true to his carefree nature, he didn’t take his problem seriously and didn’t really take adequate care of himself.

But all that is irrelevant now. Everyone lives their own life and Shonku lived his. A simple soul who would never have had an enemy. Goodbye, dear friend.

Bengaluru / 16 August 2026