Fiction: Kallu, a humble mongrel who roams the streets of Gorakhpur, has some stories to tell

You must have heard that old joke about the Chinese dog and the Indian dog – no, not me – that meet at the border. Everyone has. How the Chinese dog, in his fancy jacket and his collar studded with rhinestones, looks down at the Indian dog and demands the respectful tribute of a bone because of how rich and powerful he is. “You are but a stray, a fallen specimen of a once great – though not as great as ours – civilisation, merely a running dog of the capitalists,” the Chinese dog yaps. “Look at my imperious profile, my well-fed muscles, my glossy fur. After a Century of Humiliation, we are now on top, and teaching the world to kowtow again, as it should.”

“All that may be true,” the Indian dog asks, “but why are you on this side of the border?” The Chinese dog looks a bit ashamed, and then says quietly, “Well, it is nice to howl once in a while.” It is all a lie, of course. There is no border between India and China, only the detritus of the empire that the Lamas built and lost to Gulab Singh’s Dogra descendants, then to the British, and then to Mao. The only dogs that meet on the borders are Tibetan mastiffs and their counterparts from Himachal and the other hills, all full of fang and growl, with no jokes exchanged. But the deeper lie is that of the wealth of the Chinese, because everybody knows that Deng Xiaoping, who opened that door, was not Chinese, he was from Gorakhpur, which, if you insist, would make him an Indian.

Well, everybody who knows these things knows, and everybody else would too, if they paid any attention. But this generation, yours, is a new one, fascinated by news that lasts just a minute on your mobile phones, if that long. There was a time when people would tune into the radio, to medium-wave and shortwave, when they’d listen to runaways and travelling sadhus and monks and sellers of smuggled watches from the border, and while the smoke rested lazily over the fields at sunset, they had time to think, to talk. So it was a long time ago that Chintu figured out that Deng, the so-called Chinese leader, bore an uncanny resemblance to Prakash Mishra, whom some of them had studied with in school. In fact, Chintu had studied with him in at least three classes, although he didn’t recall whether they had overlapped because he failed his fourth grade or Prakash failed his fifth.

When the newspapers began to show grainy pictures of a man who had become the Paramount Leader of China, Chintu and friends sat around and discussed the similarities between this man called Deng Xiaoping and their former schoolmate. Arun, who still carried around an old photograph from the ‘40s, took it out, and comparing it, they were assured that this was the same fellow, especially when they saw that familiar daft grin. It was Prakash, all right, or Pintu, as they always called him.

Pintu’s story is an odd one. He wasn’t even from Gorakhpur, or at least not from Gorakhpur proper. None of his group were. They were village people, and came from the smattering of houses scattered around the main town to attend the government school near the road crossing at Jungle Sub’haan Ali. That’s how they knew each other. And they had a shared knowledge of the town, of their state and country and this world and the after-world, that they gathered from all the stories that would make their way around the evening fires where everybody gathered between dinner and slipping off to sleep.

Pintu’s family was already rather strange. His father had worked in the house of some old zamindar in the countryside some distance from Gorakhpur city, and had assiduously been stealing land for decades while mixing increasingly large quantities of opium in his master’s food, drink, and virtually everything else. It was only surprising that the zamindar didn’t dance around with a dog in his arms and a poppy tucked behind his ear. By the time that the zamindar died, his sons found that Pintu’s father had acquired almost as much land as they had, and what little they had was in debt. Too feeble and genteel to deal with the consequences, they retreated to the city, and Pintu’s family was suddenly very rich indeed.

You would have thought that this would make for a good and well-settled issue, but you see, all zamindars weren’t like the evil lecherous stereotypes in Bollywood movies, and this one, lost in a narcotic haze, was far from an exploitative tyrant. And everybody knew that Pintu’s father had managed to amass much money and a new position in society by thievery alone. Many people whispered about what had been done, and although nobody really loved the zamindars, they loved Pintu’s father even less, and as I’ve said, the zamindar he had looted was a mild fellow and people even felt sorry for him and his brood. Pintu’s family went into paroxysms defending themselves, and tried to conceal their ill-gotten wealth.

But not Pintu.

Excerpted with permission from Tall Tales By a Small Dog, Omair Ahmad, Speaking Tiger Books.