Friday, December 5

Last night, sometime after 7pm some local dogs started barking, howling and running around the neighbourhood. Rosie immediately sat up to listen. The front door lay open and she pushed through the mosquito nets into the garden and walked up and down listening with great attention. She came back in, looked at me, and went out again.

Guessing what she wanted, I followed her out, and unlocked the garden gate. She trotted out, turned round to look at me, turned round again, and then hurried down the alley and disappeared.

I decided to wait and see if she came back: I didn’t want to lock her out. I switched the outdoor light on, left the gate open, sat indoors by the front door, and watched and waited.

After 45 minutes I decided that, like a cat, she has a night life of her own that she wants / needs to participate in. I went back out, looked carefully around, then came back, locked the gate, closed the door, and switched the light off.

I went to bed thinking that she will find me again tomorrow when I go for a walk in the morning.

Wrong!

This morning did not go as I expected. The local elections take place next Tuesday and trucks began to come up and down the road, again and again, with the volume on their very large speakers turned all the way up.

Any self-respecting dog or person would have found somewhere to hide. I pause to photograph the BJP truck on its third time round (followed by the CPI(M) truck and another one, probably Congress or a local affiliate). I then head as fast as I can for the beach.

I will sit in Leo restaurant drinking lassi for several hours and reading, while my head hurts from the fact that someone obviously hit my neck repeatedly with a baseball bat while I slept. I will blame the recently extracted sausage for this.

I will return home in mid-afternoon with no sign of a dog and no diminishing in the neck pain. The trucks will continue circling with the volume of a Notting Hill carnival sound system and a mixture of music and polemic.

I will continue to read the original The Invisible Man book by HG Wells.

At about 17:30 Rosie the dog will turn up and act as though she hasn’t seen me for 3 weeks, and hasn’t eaten since she last saw me. She will eat dog food and I won’t.