Cutting for Stone

Sister Mary Joseph Praise fed Koochooloo when the Persian dentist disappeared. After her death, Almaz took over.

Koochooloo's eyes were expressive dark pearls. They hinted at a playfulness, a mischievousness, that life's disappointments hadn't quite snuffed out. Dogs aren't supposed to have eyebrows, I know, but I swear she had folds that could move independently. They conveyed apprehension, amusement, and even a befuddled look that reminded me of Stan of Laurel and Hardy fame—we saw their films at Cinema Adowa. There was no question of Koochooloo coming into our house. Cows were sacred; dogs were not.

We didn't know Koochooloo was pregnant until the day after New Year's. We hadn't seen her for two days and then, just before we left for school, we found her behind the woodpile in a crawl space. Our flashlight revealed her utter exhaustion. She could barely lift her head. The fur balls wriggling at her belly explained everything.

We ran to Hema and Ghosh and then to Matron to tell them the exciting news. We thought up names. In retrospect, the adults’ lack of excitement should have warned us.

OUR TAXI DROPPED US at Missing's front gate after school. We had just crested the hill when we saw it, though at first we had no idea what we were seeing. The pups were in a large plastic bag whose mouth was tied with cord to the exhaust pipe of a taxi. We found out later that the driver had seen Gebrew making off with the litter, and he'd proposed a less messy means of getting rid of the pups than drowning them. Gebrew, always in awe of machinery, was too easily convinced.

Under our eyes the cabbie fired his engine, the bag ballooned out, and in a few seconds, the car stalled. Koochooloo, who that morning could hardly walk, tore around the wheels of the car, nipping at the smoke-filled bag. Inside it, her puppies, their snouts overblown when they pressed against the plastic, tumbled over one another looking for an exit. Koochooloo's expression was beyond grief. She was crazed and desperate. Patients and passersby found it entertaining. A small crowd had gathered.

I was numb, disbelieving. Was this some necessary ritual in the raising of puppies which I didn't know about? I took my cues from the adults standing around—that was a mistake. But inside, I felt just like Koochooloo.

Shiva took his cues from no one. He ran to the car and tried to untie the plastic bag from the exhaust pipe, burning his palms in the process. Then he was on his knees, ripping at the thick bag. Gebrew pulled him away, kicking and fighting. Only when Shiva saw that the puppies were quite still, a hillock of fur, only then did he stop.

I glanced at Genet and was shocked by her deadpan expression: it said she was well aware of the undercurrents of the world we lived in and had known well before us. Nothing surprised her.

How Koochooloo could forgive us and live on at Missing, I never understood. She knew nothing of Matron's quotas and edicts for Missing dogs. Just as we didn't know that several times in the past, Gebrew, under orders, had plucked Koochooloo's newborns from her teats and drowned them.

SHIVA HAD SCRAPED HIS KNEES and blistered his hands. Hema, Ghosh, and Matron rushed to meet us in Casualty.

Ghosh put Silvadene on Shiva's burns and dressed his knees. The grown-ups had nothing to say about the pups.

“Why did you let Gebrew do that?” I said. Ghosh didn't look up from the dressings. He was incapable of lying to us, but in this case he'd withheld knowledge of what would happen.

“Don't blame Gebrew,” Matron said. “They were my instructions. I'm sorry. We just can't have packs of dogs roaming around Missing.”

This didn't sound like an apology.

“Koochooloo will forget,” Hema said soothingly. “Animals don't have that kind of memory, my loves.”

“Willjyou forget if someone kills me or Marion?”

The adults looked at me. But I hadn't spoken. Moreover, I was a good eight feet away from where Shiva was getting bandaged. His irises had gone from brown to a steely blue, his pupils down to pinpoints, his chin thrust higher than ever, exposing his neck so that he was sighting down his nose at a world populated by people for whom he seemed to have the greatest disdain.

Will you forget if someone kills me or Marion?

Those words were formed in the voice box, shaped by the lips and tongue, of my heretofore silent brother. For his first spoken words in years, he'd crafted a sentence none of us would forget.

The adults looked at Shiva and then at me. I shook my head and pointed to Shiva.

Finally, Hema whispered, “Shiva … what did you say?”

“Will you forget about us tomorrow if someone kills us today?”

Hema reached for Shiva, wanting to hug him, tears of joy in her eyes. But Shiva drew back from her, drew back from all of them, as if they were murderers. He bent down, rolled down his sock, and snapped off the anklet, placing it on the table. That anklet had never come off except to be repaired, enlarged, and three or four times replaced by a new one. It was as if he'd cut off a finger and laid it on the table.

“Shiva,” Matron said at last, “if we let Koochooloo have her litters, we'd have about sixty dogs around Missing by now.”

“What happened to the other puppies?” Shiva asked, before I could.

Matron mumbled something about Gebrew having disposed of them humanely and that the car exhaust was ill-advised and not sanctioned, and Gebrew should have done it well before we came back from school. I was in step with him now.

Shiva touched my shoulder, and whispered in my ear.

“What did he say?” Hema asked.

“He said, when you all are so cruel, why should he speak? He says he doesn't think Sister Mary Joseph Praise or Thomas Stone would have done something like this. Maybe if they were here this would never have happened.”

Hema sighed, as if shed been waiting for one of us to bring their names up in just this way. “Darling,” she said, in a voice like gravel, “you have no idea what they might do.”

Shiva walked out. Ghosh and Matron had the stunned expression of people who had seen a ghost. Now they were the ones who were mute. How, I wondered, could these adults who cared so much whether my brother spoke or not, who cared for the poor, the sick, the motherless, who were as bothered as we were by the cruelty to the old woman outside the palace, be so indifferent to the cruelty we had witnessed?

I asked Matron later if she thought that the death of her pups left scars on Koochooloo's insides. Matron said she didn't know, but she did know that Missing couldn't afford to breed dogs, and three was the limit. And no, she didn't think there was a separate dog heaven, and frankly she did not know God's opinion on what was the right number of dogs for Missing, but He had given her some discretion on this matter and that was not something she wanted to debate with me.

AFTER THE KILLINGS, I saw in Koochooloo's eyes her disappointment in us as a race. She sought out places where she could curl up and not run into humans. We left food out for her, and if she ate, it was not when we were around.

For weeks, there was only one person for whom she would attempt to wag her tail, and that was Shiva.

When Shiva learned to dance Bharatnatyam (and became Hema's sishya and she was already talking about his arangetram—his debut), I first began to see him as separate from me. Now that he would talk and could express himself, ShivaMarion didn't always move or speak as one. In earlier years, our differences had complemented each other. But in the days after the death of the pups, I felt our identities slowly separating. My brother, my identical twin, was tuned to the distress of animals. As for the affairs of humans, for now at least, he was to leave that to me.

20. Blind Man's Buff