Kanchii

Kanchii is making a gradual recovery. She is our dog. Every morning we take her out to take a dump. One morning, as we brought her back, a nasty black dog, which had sneaked into our compound through the open gate, lunged at her and sunk its sharp terrifying teeth. We did not realize the magnitude of the trauma until Kanchii's belly ballooned up on one side few days later. She gave up eating and camped in her box of carton where she normally sleeps. When she gave us no hope of spontaneous recovery, we called a vet. An enterprising stocky man, he came with his assistant. They grabbed Kanchii, shaved her side, made an incision in the skin which let out a gush of blood-mixed pus. She screamed through her strapped mouth all along. As I stroked her trying to comfort her, I found myself wondering if she knows we were hurting her to make her better. Does she know that? Or, maybe she is just profoundly aggrieved that their masters are inflicting pain on her. There is no way to know. But she has gotten back to wagging her tail and jumping at me as I come home now.

Why did that black dog enter our compound to bite Kanchii? Did he/she have grievances. Who knows what kind of rivalries run among these dogs? But how did she develop these grievances, if any? Kanchii lives in a closed compound. Her only exposure to the outside world is from the morning excursions where she empties her bowel and bladder. Was this black dog offended by Kanchii's morning rituals that she wanted to disembowel her? We know Kanchii as a meek animal. She functions as a door bell, barking primarily when there are people knocking at the gate. She keeps quiet as that person enters inside. How did she offend this black dog? It is hard to find answers. It just makes no sense. 

The world is witness to such black dog behavior in human society time and again. James Orbinski, a physician, who worked through Médecins Sans Frontières in Rwanda during the human carnage from Tutsi, Hutu conflict, writes in his book An Imperfect Offering: 

At one point, as I was driving through the city, a wild dog lunged at my open window. I hadn't seen it approaching as we slowed at a roundabout, and now I saw a pack of wild dogs tearing at a corpse (a dead human) in the grass by the roadside. They looked up at us as we drove by. The dogs were fat, bold and vicious. They were not moving from their mound of flesh. The dog that had lunged at our four-by-four returned to its pack, growling, baring its white teeth, and held me in its stare. 

It is a scene of evil hidden in human run amok. Orbinski who has witnessed it first hand tells us, he has seen humans even worse than the black dog. He writes in the same book: 

....She said that she had escaped being killed by the interahamwe. "My mother hid me in the latrine. I saw through the hole. I watched them hit her with machetes. The men were angry and strong. I watched my mother's arm fall into my father's blood on the floor and I cried without noise in the toilet." I listened to her and watched her lips quiver as her words came at a slow, staccato tempo. I watched her brown eyes look away as tears dropped to her cheeks and I could not stop my own. 

At that moment, I felt both despair and rage. Despair that she knew intimately our capacity for the most extreme rational cruelty; that she was alone. Animals could never do this. Animals can be brutal, but only humans can be rationally cruel. We can choose anything, we can be anything, we can get used to anything, I thought. Only humans can be evil. Only humans can make this choice. I felt my heart pounding and I wanted a gun. I wanted to kill the men who had done this to her. I wanted to pull the trigger again and again and again. My heart was racing; I was fighting my tears, gasping for air, for freshness, for something other than this. Then Eli clasped my arm with his strong hands. I felt an overpowering despair for the little girl, for myself, for all of us-- that we can be alone, trapped in our passions, in our reasons, in our minds, in our politics, that I and those men could be so angry and strong. 

Be it in an African nation, far away from where we live, it incites an indescribable torment. But we have our own share of such images and such despair. I am haunted by an image of charred body, supine in the ground with burnt arms flexed and skull bare. A result of inferno borne of rage from ethnic hatred in Tarai. This was an image I saw on TV, during the Madhesh unrest. An anguish looped incessantly in my heart, "How can a human do this to another?" Recently, I searched for that image on the Internet; maybe I could come to terms with it, seeing it again, I wanted to find a closing. But I could not find that image. Did I imagine it? Or have we forgotten? I do not know. 

But the violence we have gone through in Nepal has left its legacy. In our daily interactions, I find the remnants of that cruelty and violence it a little subtle ways: in our recklessness, greed, indifference and lies. It is disquieting.