Photographs of Indian Street Dogs
(For Bobby)
Backlit by noodle-shop neon, their lustrous coats are a Teitelbaum fur slung across the bare shoulders of Rita Hayworth.
How do these angel guttersnipes keep themselves so fragrant amid the diesel and the detritus, the dumped cooking oil and the fading plastic trash?
Do they meet at dust-puddles to bathe, in the same manner as the flickering powows of sparrows under the blackberry bushes of our Dorset chalk-path?
Do they get a hosepipe drenching from squealing and shoeless neighbourhood kids?
This one. I love this one. A long-legged. box headed hound. He is bat-skin black, legs planted firmly in the Yul Brynner power pose. He's hyper vigilant, an exiled emperor manifesting the restoration of his fractured empire.
These Disney gangs of mismatched dogs hang around the food spots like the finger-popping, pocket-picking doowop boys of another century and another city.
They have mapped the tides of the markets and the cook-stalls, the frying times, the rotas, the timbre of the friendliest feeder's voice and the putter of his scuffed moped. They know these things as well as our lurcher knows the sound of my sandals on the front step and the cushioned click of the fridge door.
Sad eyes? Yes, of course. I don't want to talk about it.
Once, in Crete, we came across a hunter's enclosure on an old hill road. Behind high wire fences, kicking up yellow dust, were 20 galgos in all my favourite colours. These neat bodied, pointy nosed dogs of my dreams were the country cousins of our own holy duo of sofa-lounging whippets. But these eyes, flinty and unyielding, made me think of child soldiers, spent matches and broken dolls. Unsettled, I kneeled at their fence for ten minutes with my dog-lover's baby talk but they had no use for it and they wandered away to keep company with the flies. Afraid to reach through the diamonds of the wire to touch the two stragglers, I left. The shame followed me all the way home.
All photographs by Bobby DeVito.
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