I understand.

One need not know how a diamond became a diamond. Just enjoy it for what it is.

Dogster, too bad you travel solo. You could auction off a slot for a travelling companion and I know that you'd get lots of bidders.

You are an interesting enigma

I hope the Dog was wearing his blunstones at the time - bound to survive then.

Bless you Jaya - 'a diamond' indeed. Ahhh. 'An enigma' moremiles - even better.

Well, I think it's time to release poor Dog from his misery. We're on the home stretch now. Here's the continuation of the above.
I'll get the final part out later tonight.

And then it's all over, Red Rover.

‘Mm-m-m-m-m,’ thought the Dog. ‘What to do?

The roads were wet and slippery, the grey skies drizzling rain. Not a really riotous climate, he thought. The black umbrellas, damp red flags and sodden trudge of the marchers didn’t give him much reason for fear - but then he was an exceptionally stupid man. Clearly the entire of Kolkata’s police force felt differently.

What nice reflections in those plexi-glass shields, Dogster thought.

I ambled behind the police lines with that idiot tourist, ‘golly, gosh, what is all this about?’ look on my face, stood stupidly behind a tree for added protection, scoped out an escape route and waited. Nobody was bothering with me.

The marchers continued down Surendra Nath Banerjee Road towards the riot-police. The police continued to stand their ground. The marchers stopped and bunched together, their slogans gaining strength. The umbrellas were lowered. It was then I realised the multi-functionality of umbrellas. One man with a loudhailer shouted unintelligible Hindi, red flags waved defiantly; the police braced themselves, lowered the visors on their helmets and raised their truncheons. The shouting grew louder. Now the demonstrators were screeching. I looked behind me. There were two large men holding tear-gas rifles, aiming up and over my head. I took this as a sign to leave.

Too late.

You know those photographs you see of rioting youth? The ones where one young man is captured hurling a bottle, a brick; tear gas swirls behind him, a dozen other protestors are running wildly, jumping, waving – all trapped in a millisecond of action. It was like that. Suddenly, as if a fuse had been lit, something ignited the brushfire.

Wa-a-a-a-gh! The mob charged.

I just said one word, over and over again. Then I said it some more. You know the word.

Bam! Right by my ear. Tear-gas.

Bam! The other one.

I saw both canisters fly through the air. Then that smell. You know it? Can I describe it? Nah. You either know it – or you don’t. It’s like the smell of a cremation; once you’ve smelt it you never forget it. In a flash the riot policemen were braced. They knew their drill.

Blat! The demonstrators hit the barricades. Ooof! They stopped and milled around. Youths danced around, chanting. There was a moment’s hesitation. Who were the good guys? Who were the bad? I didn’t know. In my misspent youth the cops were always the bad guys. Right now, I wasn’t so sure. I was very happy to be on this side of the barricades, I discovered, very happy indeed.

That tear gas hit the spot. There was confusion in the red flag ranks. I heard shouting, words I didn’t understand. The riot-police were agitated, ready for a fight. Things fizzed and spat, hissed and curled – but they didn’t quite burst alight. I stood on the edge of the fry-pan, watching, kinda turned on.

If you haven’t been in a riot you won’t quite understand, but there’s a certain frisson; hearts are pumping faster, adrenaline is coursing; it’s a tang, a tickle, a faintly sexual thrill. The threat of imminent violence, the edge of darkness, the sense of mob control brings out the mongrel in all of us. This was a dog eat doggy day.

How long did we stay in that red-hot moment, sizzling there in the Kolkata rain? A second, an hour, a month, a year? I don’t know. I was here, there, everywhere, nowhere. Will I stay? Will I go? Will it blow up? Won’t it? Where to run? Where to hide?

Fle-e-a-h-h-h! The mob threw itself at the policemen. Whack! They beat them back.

You know those pictures? The ones where all the batons of all the cops are raised in a line, one in front of another, all on different angles? That one? The smoke from the flares thrown, the determined stance, the wall of steel?

‘Get back!’ a cop shouted.

Boom! Tear gas. Shouts and commands. Boom!

Oh, Lordy, Lordy, the Dog will die.

I turned around. Running towards me were the police reinforcements.

Boof! I was knocked over by a man with a plexi-glass shield.

Ooof! I hit the tree.

‘Fa-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-aaark,’ I said as I slid slowly into the mud.

That plexi-glass didn’t look so pretty any more.

Now, with a taste of tear gas, the demonstrators were like crazy men, leaping, waving their flags, a flood of danger, looking for a release. Without warning the mob moved off sideways down Hogg Street, down towards the markets, shouting their slogans, wild.

Nobody noticed Mr. Dogster lying dazed in a doorway. Was he dead? Apparently not. Was he hurt? Nah, not really - just pushed off balance, wrong place, wrong time – he’d survive. But now his heart was really pumping. The battle had touched him. He was a participant. The vital Dog juice was coursing through his veins. He was a warrior, a tiger, he was – over-excited. Dogster picked himself up, dusted himself off and followed at a trot - anxious to see where they led.

The demonstrators raced wildly through the markets, down Chicken Row, past Fish Street and the public pissoir, screaming slogans, heading for the Meat; a hall of butcher’s shops and sharpened blades, of chopping blocks and the smell of dead flesh. A few men sat in their empty shops. There was clearly no business going on; not a cut of meat dangled in the air, not a drop of blood lay spilt on the floor. The meat men stood impassively as the screeching vigilantes ran around in circles, unable to find anything to object to.

Frustrated, the mob demanded that the light bulb be turned off. There was a lot of shouting and waving of arms, the usual Indian kerfuffle. That this vast fuss was about a light bulb appeared not to confuse the vigilantes. They were crazed, tear-gassed; they had no one to take it out on. All their rage coalesced in a single point of energy - the light bulb in the office of Abdul’s Goat Futter Shop in New Market.

Click. The light was extinguished. The shouting stopped. Abdul rolled his eyes. The mob scattered empty handed. Having found nobody to maraud here - in the face of total conformity - they could do nothing but maraud somewhere else. They charged off down the street, looking for more electric light bulbs to turn off, more shop-keepers to menace, more curfew to enforce – the meat men turned away. With a distant shout, the last of the marchers turned a corner, the slogans dissolved into space and calm returned to Hogg Street.

The lights in the market clicked back on.

‘Hello,’ she said and gave me a big hug.

She was eight years old with a shabby blue frock and dense curly black hair – as bright as an Oberoi button. We’d met before.

‘Good morning little sausage. How are you today?

‘Everything happy today,’ she chirped, ‘everything quiet.’

She’d crept out from under a ledge. The streets were quiet again. This little urchin wasn’t going do much business in the midst of a general strike.

‘Where is mummy?’ I asked.

She pointed down Bertram Street to the market.

‘Let’s go see Mummy.’

She grabbed my hand and led me across to the side of New Market. Mummy stood in an alley, chewing the fat with a couple of other women dripping children. On the ground was an infant, laying on a piece of cardboard, gurgling and cooing, kicking two chubby legs in the air. A steel bed frame lay on its side against the wall, covered by a roll of bedding. A small Primus burner and a pot, a mug or two scattered round. That was where they lived.

Other kids gathered around. My little beggar girl shooed them off angrily. ‘He’s mine!’ she was saying. Mummy looked up with a bright smile on her face.

‘Is this your baby?’ I said. What else could I say? Shame on you woman for turning your children into beggars? Why don’t you send your children off to school? Why don’t you go out to work and let your children be children? All of that fell away.

Mummy smiled. ‘My baba,’ she said proudly.

‘Mummy no English,’ said the little girl, squeezing my hand.

‘But you have good English, little sausage,’ I said seriously. ‘You should go to school.’

‘Mama!’ she said, and rattled off a speech in Hindi. Mama smiled broadly.

‘Mama,’ I said, reaching swiftly into my pocket. It was my last day. ‘Take.’

She gasped. She took, bending over to touch her forehead on my hands. She had tears in her eyes. I was embarrassed. I turned away to leave. The little girl ran to my side and grabbed my hand.

‘Mummy is cooking tonight!’ she said excitedly.

I was dying.

‘Mummy is cooking tonight.’

In the doorway of Mr. Kumar’s ration ship in Mirza Galib Street, an old man died a lonely death while he slept. The doorway was only four feet wide and just one foot deep - but this was his home in Kolkata. He had perfected the art of sleeping on his back on bare concrete, both arms folded lightly over his chest, legs splayed out – he filled every inch of that doorway. It was his doorway – not that of the good Mr. Kumar and, just as all the doorways and sheltered space in Mirza Galib Street were reserved for somebody, this doorway was reserved exclusively for him. Well, not any more.

He slipped over to Shiva in the early hours of August 20th, the day of the General Strike, went to his maker with scarcely a sigh; lay covered in a blue and white blanket, legs bunched up against the side of the wall, exactly as he had settled down for the night. His face stared upward, eyes closed, fast asleep, a long white beard flowed onto his chest – the old man looked completely relaxed and perfectly comfortable – but then, he was dead.

A dead man in the streets of Kolkata is not as easy to spot as you might think. People sleep anywhere and everywhere, anytime. The only clue to this dead man was that he was very, very still – and in the daily chaos that is Kolkata, anything not in motion attracts attention. At eight forty-three a.m. he was discovered, lying too still for too long.

I didn’t know it but I was taking pictures of the moment. Buried deep in the grainy background of some snaps of the deserted streets of Kolkata a man in a pink shirt stands looking intently into the doorway. I can just make out one knee sticking out of the alcove.

I was diverted by a pile of rubbish, a woman in a turquoise sari and a great many crows. The sudden monsoonal rains earlier had left the streets shiny and wet, the turquoise of her sari stood out against the grey as she picked her way slowly through the pile. A hundred crows swooped around her, anxious to grab their share. I joined them, taking pictures; they pecked at the rubbish pile and I pecked at them, all looking for scraps.

By eight forty-seven a small crowd had gathered along the street, pulled in by the arrival of a large blue police van. Twenty or so people stood silently in the distance. I abandoned the rubbish tip, the crows and arty pictures and walked along the street, stopping just by the rear of the van. I still had no idea what was going on.

I could see the people standing around, the whispered conversations, the sideways glances but I couldn’t for the life of me work out what the cause of the attention was. With a wiggle of my head and a furrow of the brow I asked the obvious question.

‘Gone...’ was the reply. My informant jerked his head.

There was the dead man, lying peacefully asleep. There was nothing particularly dead about him, nothing juicy to see; no blood, no guts, no theatre – just a dead man looking exactly like every other sleeping street person in Kolkata. Nobody touched him, nor even particularly looked at him but they all had that same expression on their faces. I’d seen that look before – on the faces of the crowds watching cremations at Pashupatinath in Kathmandu, in Varanasi, Jangipur; lost for a long still moment in the contemplation of death; sorrowful, solemn, still. But nobody actually cared; it was death itself they were contemplating, not this particular death.

A policeman asked disinterested questions. The man in the pink shirt gave enthusiastic replies. In his mind he was the man of the moment, not the corpse.

‘He has nobody, no mother, no father, no wife, no son...’ said an onlooker. His voice trailed off.

At precisely eight fifty his body was lifted up by two men and carried, half-dragged to the street. The transition was quite shocking; from the rest and calm of his body lying dead in the doorway to the dangling incompetence of his removal. Arms and legs waved wildly, dragged across the sidewalk. They dumped him on the ground in front of my feet. One arm flew sideways, his head fell back, mouth pulled open wide. He looked like an El Greco Christ, just recent from the Cross. The body-snatchers changed their grip, nodded then threw him unceremoniously into the back of the van. I couldn’t bear to look inside. The policeman slammed the back door. They drove away.

By eight fifty-one it was as if nothing had happened. The crowd drifted apart, the doorway of R. Kumar’s ration shop stood empty, battered brown doors still fastened shut, two locks hanging forlornly against the peeling paint, stripped bare of any trace of death. Before the afternoon was out the dead man would be grey smoke on the Kolkata skyline, his body turned to ash. By evening his doorway would be tenanted with another sleeping creature of the night, his blanket wrapped tight round someone new. By tomorrow he’d be forgotten - like me.

It was my last day in Kolkata. I was sad. All around the streets were weeping, shining a grey, mournful reflection of grey, mournful skies. The monsoon was about to hit. It was time to go. I turned my face to the Oberoi and bumbled away, down empty streets, past empty shops, through the ghosts of the city of joy.

You’re a bitch, Kolkata, a carnival whore. I loathe you. I love you. I can’t wait to leave. I’ll be back as soon as I can.

That's it, ladies and gentlemen. The Dog has left the building.

Thank you, thank for hanging in till the end. What a long, strange trip it's been. Do let me know if you've made it through.

I made it Dogster! Wonderful, you have an amazing talent for carrying the reader along with you, I ducked when the tear gas came flying! and I could picture you slithering in the mud, picking yourself up, watching and observing. Thank you, this was The Best adventure. Pauline

Thanks Dogster - can't wait for your next adventure where ever it might take you. Please please let us take part in that one too.

One can only surmise that your adventures in Melbourne are as notable as those abroad. You have a gift for seamlessly inserting your personna into every occurrence. It's delightful.

GTG begins tomorrow.

Thanks! Next time in Melbourne, as I round a corner, I'll wonder if it's dogster I'm seeing...

Wow dogster - how intrepid! I'd have been heading the other way to the demonstrators.

So, back to India? I'd still love a dogster in China saga....

Thanks for bringing me with you on this long, strange trip. You will definitely be there in spirit with us at the GTG. I'll try to get Jeane to read this before we go - otherwise she won't have a clue when she hears everyone buzzing about "the Dog".

dogster - I just printed out your little epic for Jeane to read on the two hour ride to Boston - 34 pages...

Thanks Dogster and I will miss visiting Kolkata each morning.