The art of making friendship with a street dog!

Street dogs jealously guard their supremacy over the area of their jurisdiction and will never allow any stranger to trespass in their territory without their permission. They think they are unappointed traffic constables of the road especially in the deserted early morning. You must acknowledge this universal truth if you want to venture out of your house early in the morning. Unless you are on good terms with them, safe passage to your home back will be very difficult.

My family doctor congratulated me on reading my lab report that indicated that I had joined the legion of the diabetic world. He doled out a heavy dose of some colorful pills and said that the first duty of a diabetic is to get up early in the morning, wear a designer short and should walk for an hour, rain or cold. My panicked wife spared a few hundred rupees to get me a fine pair of shorts with lot of pockets and drove me out early in the morning. I had hardly turned the corner of my lane to arrive at the main road when some phantom jumped before me all on a sudden and tried to pull my shorts down. A spot of adrenelin surged through my veins in terror.

I stood standstill losing all my wits in the face of the worst ever crisis in my uneventful life. I tried a few lines of ‘Skanda Shasti Kavasam’ but could not get a single line properly apparently because of the panic at that moment. A stream of visions popped up in my mind like the flashbacks in the ladies’ special serials - I am quarantined in a government hospital suspecting rabies infection; my wife throws in a plate of food down the rails in the caged room (although personally it makes no difference from the present treatment and the imagined one); an epitaph on my tomb with the words “Here lies the immortal blogger who never received any comment for any of his blog” and so on. I was trembling in fear.

Suddenly an oft quoted advice from the self improvement books flashed through my mind.

“If you want to make friendship with a stranger, you must flatter him, even in truth there is a vast discrepancy as between a moon and the Sun”. I decided to give it a try.

“It is time we make friends, Trisha!” I spoke slowly. I decided to call her Trisha because of the common identity of the sharp nose of your celebrity and my celebrity.
Trisha was apparently flattered. I could find it out from the wagging tail which was an obvious symbol of friendship.

I patted softly on her back and said “We have of lot of things common to us. You must be as wise as me or I should be as foolish as you are. Either way we have strong reasons to make friends.”

That sealed our friendship. She escorted me till the border of her area of jurisdiction and whispered to the one at the other end that I was her man and should not be troubled at any cost.

The next day I tried a novel idea. I bought an expensive belt with the name Trisha engraved on it and proudly tied it around her neck and we went along as happy as a newly married couple. We used to rest our feet near a parked Mercedes car and almost everyone who was not known to us before thought that she was a millionaire’s pet. When we went back I would take back my belt and said “Good bye” after which we would walk to our homes separately.

Our friendship lasted for more than a year till she met her fiancé and started a wild affair. She never turned her back to me and like the "Solitary Reaper" of Wordsworth I continued my melancholy walk.