Brown Country

A game of cat and dog

This is about something curious I saw today morning. I was on my way to play shuttle badminton. We had converted a local market ground into a nice, tidy shuttle badminton court. In fact, it is the concrete-paved courtyard of a proposed rice and flour mill built by the panchayath, the local governing body in India. Like most government-sponsored initiatives, it has been closed even before it started functioning. An ugly-looking building was constructed and some machinery installed, enabling some local-body members to get bribes from contractors and vendors for the construction work and the machinery. The contractors built a building with half the cost of the original estimate and vendors managed to sell the machinery in double their actual prices. Well, as people familiar with Indian bureaucracy are well aware of, this is no big deal – that is for you and me. A local politician cum contractor named Gurudas had used this building as a store room for sometime. Then one fine morning a large graffiti appeared in the front wall of the building: “GURUDAS BHAVAN! (In Kerala, there is a tradition of naming one’s house with the person’s name followed by the word ‘bhavan’.) Anyway, that smart piece of satire did the thing: The corrupt contractor immediately took his tools and other things from the building.The curious thing I mentioned earlier has nothing to do with corruption or satire. It is something to praise the nature and God. I was walking towards the shuttle ground watching the green leaves waking up, shedding their last drops of sleep in the misty November morning. When I reached the ‘junction’ (the heart of the village where the important institutions, like teashops, barber shop and stationery shop, are situated), there were very few people – some yawning old men and a bored newspaper vendor. In front of the teashop a flock of pigeons were looking on the ground for something for their breakfast. Suddenly a cat emerged from the shadow and caught a little pigeon. The bird tried in vain to escape by fluttering its wings. But the cat held on and started to dash across the road to the other side where it must be having a safe place. Two seconds passed. The air was still filled with the anguish cries of the bird and the frantic flutter of its wings. Then out of nowhere a dog entered the scene and started chasing the cat. The dog quickly closed in on the cat. The cat was struggling to run at full throttle with the bird in his mouth. As the dog was about to catch the cat, the cat did the smart thing. It released the pigeon and ran away from the dog with all its might. Soon the dog too stopped the chase. All this happened within a matter of seconds. And then, from the radio in the tea shop I heard the majestic voice of K.J. Yesudas, which brought a wide grin on my face: the song was ‘Rassoole Ninkanivale …’ (which means Oh God, by Your mercy …).