The pigeon's death at the doorsteps...Deja Vu

Today as I was leaving for office, mamma told me to be careful for there is a dead pigeon outside our house. Of all the things I could say, I asked 'where is it?' I was expecting one of the following replies: Right outside the door or in the drive way or outside the main gate?

Hoping that if she tells me exactly where, I would avoid looking at it.She didn't know where. She told me just to be careful. I did as I was told and fearing to see a dead body so early in the morning, I flinched and walked. I barely saw the body and ran outside the driveway. But something made me stop and look back.

Deja vu.

Right outside the door there are two steps. The beak of the pigeon was resting on one of these, quite like how people at temples touch their forehead to a stone platform nearest to the foot of the idol of God. Instantly, I recalled how a dog also died at the same spot some years ago. That time, I was deeply disturbed. I remember writing something about it. I looked for it and I found it under the heading 'a kid cried and a dog died'. This was in 2008. That time, I thought that it was nice that the dog found a resting place to spend his last moment. I am not sure I can say the same thing about the pigeon. For one, I don't know how did he die and land there. Did someone kill it or did it just stop flying and fell from the air. Was it another bird or was it some dog or other animal, who ended this life? Did the pigeon come looking for food? (Papa feeds birds and occasionally dogs everyday these days). I don't know. Unfortunately, I was not only bothered that the pigeon died, but scared for it is kind of eerie that two animals died exactly at the same spot, with the gap of six years!!! Maybe the doorstep of my house is a good place to die. This very sentence makes me scared of my thoughts occasionally. Interestingly, I really don't know what to make of it, if not this. Does it mean anything at all or should I just say its a coincidence. It would have been nice if I believed in coincidences. However, I don't believe there is any such thing - a coincidence. So I'd let you, whoever is reading, contemplate about it while I try to forget about it like so many other things.

This is what I had written in 2008, (on 13 October 2008 to be precise).....

Last Tuesday, when I went out for a movie, I saw a kid cry. Last Friday, when I came back from another movie, I saw a dog die. And both these unrelated incidents, possibly remotely connected by a fallacy of false cause, are not unusual events. As life would have it, kids cry and dogs do die! Suffering after all is inevitable. But what was unusual was the kid who cried, and the way the dog died.

The first incident took place outside Westside at 3Cs Lajpat Nagar where I got free parking, that superficiality made me very happy. This kid was a beggar, sitting on the concrete varanda with a child in his hand, probably a younger sibling. There was a packet of what looked like milk, and some food in a polythene bag. He must have said something earlier, but I didn’t notice him earlier. My friend did. She mentioned he was crying. I wanted to look away but when she mentioned it, the way she mentioned it, I didn’t. She asked me if I was keeping the Prasad kept in the car, if I plan to eat it. I understood immediately and went to get it. I gave it to the kid, asked him why he was crying, and told him not to cry and have something to eat. He pointed at his sibling and said that Ma wants Rs 30,she won’t come, my sister is sick. I didn’t understand what to do. I wanted to give him Rs 30 and probably also get a bottle of water besides the food. I just told him, not to cry and first have something to eat, Acha rona band karo, pehle kuch khalo. I wondered if the kid was faking to get attention or not. But he was not. These kids, my friend told me, are strong. They are tough. Something really bad has to happen for them to break down. The mother abandoned the child with the sibling. That made him cry! I didn’t debate with her, not only because she did an M. Sc in Child Development, but because I felt that she was right.

These kids who beg on streets and traffic light for money, have a tough life, they face the harsh realities, not with a constant pathos with the understanding that is part of their everyday life. It might seem sad to me or to you sitting in front of our pcs and laptops reading this email, but the truth is that life makes them tough, gives them an immunity to the kind of misery we might feel to ….walk in the sun, barefoot, in tattered pieces of cloth, not covering the body properly, knocking on a strangers’ window. I am not saying that is a good thing, that is the way they have molded themselves to adjust to their surroundings, but that is the silver lining in their lives, that is what makes them survive it.

I thought that maybe I should give him water. That is my initial reaction of ‘things to do’ when confronted by a social situation in which someone cries. That’s the there there, it will get better, I do. And in fact it does. When one cries, there is secretion of some amount of water from the body and so drinking water is advisable. Also if one splashes water on the face of someone who is upset or angry or crying, it does have a surprisingly calming effect, irrespective of the ‘slap in the face’ connotation of throwing a drink at someone’s face drama serials would have it.

In the movie incidentally that I watched which was filled with clichés and really badly written script and dialogues, the protagonist says that well ‘I have lived night mares you can’t even bear to hear about.’ But for some reason the way Imran Khan said it, and Manisha Lamba reacted to that, it was just funny and we laughed. But that was the truth, in the case of the kid I saw. It was a story of the revenge of a person who had spent his life in a juvenile delinquent center and incurred injuries. But that was reel life, this was real life. The kid outside the cinema was real, with a sibling to look after, when the mother had apparently scared him enough to break down a kid who was used to bear misery of the underprivileged in the daily course of life.

The movie was called Kidnap, as far as the kid is concerned, well I don’t even know his name, which is ironical considering that it was the kid that occupied my thoughts, for a longer period of duration than the temporary escapism the film provided me.

 I came back from a movie at 3.30 with mamma (we went for Hello at DT), didn’t latch the main gate, at around 4, the door bell rang and mamma opened the front door to see a dead dying dog at the doorstep. He just lay there, hurt and injured, covered in mud and dust. Mamma tells me what happens, and in my absent mindedness I wondered how did he ring the bell? That was my initial response, cold and calculated, just my initial neglected response to the cries of the kid until my friend had pointed it out to the human being within me. It was the second floor neighbor who rang the bell from the outside the main gate. I have recently moved in to a rental house at Gurgaon, where the structure is such that there is an L shape free space within the premises and outside the domains of the house. When one enters the main gate, towards the right side there is a varanda facing my room and the living room, and an aisle corridor straight ahead the main gate hitting a dead end, unless one takes a right turn and climbs two steps, where incidentally there was a dead dog lying at the doorstep this last Friday. And just as I was wondering, if the kid was faking tears or not, I was wondering if the dog had come there to seek help or to just die. I am not a dog person, otherwise I would probably know what to do to help the dog, would have perhaps called a vet maybe or bandaged him. But I didn’t. There was no use really, he was already dead. He was just a street dog who would enter the house occasionally and sit at the entrance or in the varanda outside my room....which is why we insisted that the door be latched each time anyone (including the neignbours on the first and second floor) entered the gate besides obvious safety issues. It doesn’t speak well of us as a society does it, wondering if a kid begging for food is really crying or if his monetary need is real or if he earns the food which we give him in our apparent act of charity and goodwill, when it is not, or when we latch gates to prevent stray animals and people, the homeless, just because we want to keep our veranda clean and not get disturbed. But that is again something like splashing water on a stranger if one did allow that to happen, that is, it is unacceptable in the social convention we live in, to fear trespassing. For what its worth, the dog that died, never really disturbed my studies when he was alive, nor did he make any sound before he passed away. What bothered me was the way he was found outside the doorstep, his Samadhi, if you will. Did he come to die in peace or in familiarity or did he really came for some help which he didn't get...in which case I should feel guilty...I shall rot in hell for not being a dog person and not being able to do anything to save the poor soul. My friend speculated that maybe the dog came there because he might be used to that house, because of the previous owners. That could not have been the case as no one lived where we moved in. Some talk about karmic connections and maybe it signifies a past relatives’ visit. But I don’t believe in that, in karmic connection, or past life etc, nor am I a dog person ( dog lover) to forge that bond. What intrigued or rather fascinated my thought was the way in which the street dog finally chose a place of comfort and peace when death was near. The poor thing still managed to get inside the gate, push it open a little enough to get inside and even climb up three marble steps to just lie at the door. He might have as well as knocked on the door I thought. It was a pretty sad and upsetting.

What hit me in these two incidences was the way to deal with the apparent suffering which is among the daily chores of these ‘less human’ creatures, the way we see it, be it the underprivileged child or the street dog. They are both abandoned, homeless, knocking on a strangers’ door. There is a dread to be them. This is probably what Historical Buddha Prince Siddhartha must have felt too when he encountered suffering. But the way I see it, what is suffering for us, is what is ‘life’ for them, real enough, that they live and they breath, it makes them resistant to feel the pain in it, unless something ‘really bad’ happens, and the definition of which is subjective. A life which is so harsh, that it has made them tough. Perfection after all lies in repetition. One is so accustomed to a certain things and activities and people, that after a point of time, these things and activities and people, they just become one with us, and one accommodates to mould oneself accordingly. One may thing that the pain may lesson each time one gets hurt. But the truth is that each time when one gets hurt, the pain remains, which indicates that got hurt in the first place, but one is so used to bear the pain, and to get hurt, that it becomes somewhat easier to live with the pain, instead of protesting and fighting and struggling to be happy. Men and Women go through so much, abusive relationships, corruption, disease and natural disasters, the city goes through bomb blasts and useless industrialization, the traffic, the workload, the competition, the grown up adult world. After a point of time, one is just too tired to be happy, or to seek happiness. Going through life over and over again, day after day, with the same intricacies, issues, problems in relationships, people, work, one just gets so tired and exhausted. It is just so exhausting at times, that one just doesn’t want to fight back. People look for happiness but Greys’ Anatomy Writers told me this week that it is also futile. Meredith, the protagonist decides that since she was happy and had a breakthrough in her relationship, she did not want therapy anymore. But then she asks her doctor on an elevator, ‘What is the point?’ ‘All those hours and all that money….what is the point? The world is a horrible place, young people die of diseases, (or in our city, more likely in a blast while returning that does not belong to them to the rightful owner…while doing a good thing) it makes absolutely no sense to try to be happy in a world that is such a horrible place.’ And she gets the reply, ‘Yes. Horrible things do happen. Happiness in the face of all that, is not the goal. Feeling the horrible and knowing that you are not going to die from those feelings, that’s the point.’ While one might agree there, but one can’t blame anyone to try to find some solace, some happiness, some comfort, when in the face of all that, is about to come to an end.

I think at the end of the day, one would be lucky to die like that dog at the doorstep who decided instead of compromising in his life and die in the street, exerted himself despite the pain and the injury, to find a safe comfortable place to find peace. Maybe the first noble truth is not suffering? What is suffering? It is something which makes us tough, which makes us tough out our daily existences. Maybe it is just apparent. Maybe it becomes apparent when we considers those factors as a fact one has to live with, so there is no point fighting. But even then maybe we do strive like that dog for some comfort, some peace, some sort of nirvana or moksha, moments before we are dying. Maybe that feeling of nothing to lose but something to gain makes us take that step towards a strangers’ doorstep, in a bloody injured condition. We are striving for happiness, for comfort, for peace, a way out of the exhaustion, not an end to suffering, for suffering becomes apparent when one stops fighting, but a way to just be happy without trying to be worthy of that happiness, without fighting to deserve it, because that too is exhausting and adds to the apparent suffering.

Basically in life, whether I get to watch two movies in a week or if I am like that kid with the responsibility of a sibling on me, the everyday chores, and dynamics of life, there will be something repetitive and with patterns, which I might get used to, or I might already get used to, which toughens me up enough to think that I do not feel the pain. But I would be lucky if I get to die like that dog, in peace and comfort and not fight for it anymore because that is just exhausting or accommodate and not becoming accustomed to the environment of survival, but if I can exert enough before life or rather its meaning comes to an end or a hold or a standstill, give it one good last shot in an attempt to climb that three steps and knock on a strangers’ door to find peace or at least ring that doorbell as a sign of victory to have achieved it, crossed the finishing line.

A kid cried today, and a dog died!  .....

....and now the pigeon died too.