Best Women's Travel Writing 2010

Hidden between the Araveli mountains of Rajasthan, behind long stone walls and thistle, is a shelter for street dogs. It looked unremarkable when I first saw it from the road: just a few flat white buildings that housed the kennels, surgery rooms, and office, and some outlying mud-brick sheds. Hundreds of dogs were baying, calling me in, as the desert wind swept across the yellow dust.

The yard dogs had once been kennel dogs. They had survived and found their ways into the hearts of the hospital staff: Three-Wheeler who guarded the gates, pesky Fly with crumbs on his nose, head-nodding Bruce, shy spirit Julie with the bead amulet necklace. They lived on the grounds, on the manure piles, in bushes, and if they could get through the gates to the office they’d curl up on the wicker chairs, on the night guardian’s charpoy, in the file closet. They got into the bags of rotis people brought as donations. They went baying after cows, donkeys, goats, bicycles, herder girls, anyone who dared cross the land.

In the kennels were strange breeds, like hyenas and jackals, foxes, composite Salukis, Rampur greyhounds, rat terriers, shepherds, Labs. They were the color of sand, spice, clay, or tiger-striped, brindle, speckled, with short coats, soft as skin, long elegant legs, rat tails, long faces, flat heads, flesh-colored noses. They were dogs with crusted eyes, flea-bitten noses, half-eaten mouths, open neck wounds, maggots, mange. They were hairless, feverish, paralyzed, three-legged, one-eyed, dehydrated, suffering from distemper, parvo, or fatal rabies.

During the two months I volunteered there, I learned not to ask whether the dogs lived or not, or why they were here, or where they were going. But I wondered whether I was caring for the half-living or the half-dead. Nothing had quite prepared me for this—not my time in wildlife rehabilitation centers back home in Canada, or my youth spent in the forests observing life and death. I was grateful for Audrey, mother of the young woman who had started this charity and gone back to England for a needed rest. We laughed that maybe we were part of the dogs now, wondering if we had fleas in our hair or ticks or mange. Hand-washing blankets and sacks and draping them on the rocks to dry, welts and hives itching down our arms, brushing out the kennels with water and bundled straw, washing paralyzed dogs, bandaging wounds, warming orphan pups in our arms like mothers, taking the dogs out to the light. We talked more to the dogs than anyone else. We took on their smell in our clothes, our hair. The baying and howling in the kennels was the insistent song of life. Swollen ticks, maggots, open wounds were part of the beauty of survival. Their gentleness amazed me; a dog that had never lived with humans would lay his paw in my hand in recognition.

Sanam the intern drove us home on the moped, five kilometers to the village, where we lived with Anjou and her family. We carried four newborn puppies in a pink plastic laundry basket as we wove through cows with painted horns—green, blue, red, some with polka-dots; camels pulling carts, plodding on the pavement, bells jangling on their ankles; the great black water buffalos coming up from the river, their heavy curled horns like shells, ancient spirals.

Anjou’s soft bells tinkled in the evening as she met us at the gate. She moved so quietly sometimes I thought it was Raja, the little tortoise-shell street cat that the children had laid on my legs the first day after my arrival, sleeping off the strange night drive from Delhi.

A half moon hung from the dark sky and temple music rose from all sides of the village. Anjou and the children sang “Jende Mama,” a song for the moon, dancing in the courtyard. She lit an incense stick off the gas flame of her stove and stuck it in a potted sage plant wrapped in orange veil. The electricity had been off since sundown. The night smelled of roses. We sat in a circle in the moonlight with tiny syringes of milk, puppies crawling across our toes, all of us transported, giggling. The little beige pup fell asleep in Anjou’s lap, across her speckled green sari. Later, with the basket at my bed, I fell asleep to their squeaking, snuffling, and rumbling, and woke every hour to piercing squeals. Even in my exhaustion I was softened by the smell of milk on my hands, their warm bodies, white-tipped tails, and white paws, beige and black, pink noses, little white needle claws that scratched across my raw chapped skin.

In the morning, Sanam arrived and we rode to work in the chill winds with the basket of puppies, our eyes watering, the sand hills on either side beginning to glow red in the dust air, towering cactus spires, thorn trees, and gray-headed crows. The yard dogs summoned our arrival and escorted us in. The accountant, Vikram, sat in a wicker chair by old Nandi’s dung fire doing the paperwork, untangling the confusion of dogs, kennels, and illnesses.

The boys were waiting for the first chai. Someone impatiently threw on some straw and it blew up into flames and a great cloud of ash blew into the new boy’s face so that his hair turned gray. Great uproar of laughter. These were the boys who went fearlessly into kennels of angry dogs and hauled them off to surgery, then laid them gently on the stone. They made up the food and water bowls, cleaned kennels, washed laundry. Turtleneck boy, cool laughing boy with the jeans and baseball cap who sang to the dogs, Ravi who called himself “dog-catching genius,” Aladdin, the night watch-man, guardian of the gates. In the caste system, animal handling was relegated to the lower echelons, along with street sweeping and clearing garbage. But here everyone worked for the dogs.

I did the rounds of the kennels, the noise ringing in my ears. I was surrounded by wolves. Sometimes the singing hit a certain pitch that vibrated right through me. Sparrows went flitting down the corridors and passed through the bars. The little dogs who wagged their tails at me, the hunted ones, the angry ones, the fearful, everything was spoken in the eyes out of darkness. They were not human nor animal but something in between, a lost race. A monkey stretched his black hand through the bars and took the apple from my hand, but his hands were numb, useless. He couldn’t bring it to his mouth, so he let the apple drop to the ground and ate like a dog.

Explosions from a nearby farm rocked the earth. Pieces of concrete fell from the ceiling and the dogs went silent for a moment. The rescue vehicle came in after a night on the prowl with a load of street dogs, slavering and drooling in fear. All of the kennels were full, and the dogs just back from surgery lay dazed in the corridors with their raw sutured wounds, their new tattooed ears. The vets were doing the medication rounds and I saw the dreaded bottle of orange soap and the tray of clear liquid bottles and syringes on the floor.

I took my peaceful white-and-black dog out to the cactus hill where he sank his paws into the sand and sat and I laid my hand on his neck, soft as rabbit’s fur. He looked at me with his soft brown eyes. He was healing from cancer, but nothing showed on the outside. I was trying to avoid the herder girls who were passing through with their speckled goats, their ornamental veils and heavy silver anklets, their flirting goat calls, laughter.

Crows floated in and out of the shed where the cows lived and descended on their withers in search of fleas. The young vet Darpan and the boys were holding down a cow with a maggot wound. The young vet vaguely wrung his perfumed hands. He never seemed to want to touch an animal but with the tip of his sandal. Nandi sat on the cow’s head, smoking a bidi and softly talking, it seemed, to the cow. I felt drugged, sleepy, unable to understand the moaning, howling, weeping of the dogs back in the kennel, or that I seemed to have no natural wisdom but the laying of light in my hands. Wasn’t there something like that? Learning to release the shadows and the walls within me?

In our courtyard of convalescents, the mynah birds had pockmarked the eggs we left on the wall to cool. A female peahen’s broken leg was splinted with a piece of X-ray film paper and white bandage. She nestled against a male peacock like he was a pillow, shimmering turquoise breast and neck, marbled waves of dark greens and blacks down his back and the tassel headdress that the yard dogs always tried to pull through the cage bars. Lady, our grandmother dog that had once been paralyzed and could now walk, sat in the middle of cardboard boxes and cages of puppies, alongside a cat that shared his milk with the puppies. She watched over them all with her broken-tooth grin like some kind of healer.

We climbed the precarious bamboo ladder and ate lunch on the sunny roof with the men, among all their tiffin boxes of rotis and dal. Cell phones rang joyfully with Indian music. Sanam’s made the sound of a cuckoo to remind him of his fast for the new moon. From above we could see the land like a map, the milling goats and the herder girls’ red veils, the sound of a pump and the flow of water gushing, an old man walking barefoot, following the head of the water and opening the gateways with his hoe, an egret following him from channel to channel.

There was to be a caesarean procedure on one of the cows with a stillbirth. Everyone rushed through the last chores to come and watch, all the boys, the three vets, and a visiting transvestite in red veils with a gold hoop through one nostril. Nandi squatted down with a bare foot resting on the cow’s cheek, his fingers rubbing her gums to comfort her. Someone held the IV pole and watched the tubes and the dripping liquid. Stately Dr. Aakash waved everyone back and performed the cut through all the layers down to the uterus, all of us kneeling before this ritual, silent, but for the transvestite’s sensual voice giving us spiritual counsel. The smell of death. It took four men with Ravi, the driver, strongest of them all, to pull out the dead black-and-white calf by the hooves, and then we had to keep the yard dogs away. The uterus sat like a wrinkled folded bag on the cow’s side. The young intern Dr. Darpan had to put it all back together and he was expert in this.

All the ringed fingers, silver and gemstones and bracelets and wrist watches, passed trays of iodine and instruments. Wrong instrument. The other one. He clamped the veins. Now the sutures. No 8. Wrong one. They passed him a new package. He pierced the curved needle through a layer of skin and pricked himself. Ah. He wove the thread in and out. His back was getting tired. He gently pushed the sutured lumps back through the hole and sewed it all shut. Then he looked up at me and smiled.

A grandmother was among us with two turbaned men. She showed me photos of her black-and-white cow, this one, now healed, that she had come to watch over. The photos were framed in glass, one with the family in front of their store, the other of herself and her cow. After they had gone, the stone was littered with matches and half-smoked bidis, green leaves rolled with string.

Later a herder girl came in with a wounded finger, an old piece of cloth plastered to her bloody finger. Sanam gave me some cotton soaked in iodine to dribble over it while I carefully pried it off. She winced softly. I looked at her face and stopped.

He just smiled and told her what I’d said. He teased her, and she pulled the veil over her face. He made a gesture that I would just have to yank it off quickly. I gave her the iodine cotton and told her to keep working on it. When I came back it was off.

The red sun was sinking into the smoky hills. Wild peacocks scattered before us. Audrey and I snuck behind the cow house to gather cow dung and thorn twigs, our solution to having run out of stove gas at home. Who knew how long it would take for our order to come. Out in the yard before the hospital the yard dogs lay dormant in the last light. The boys were hovering around Dr. Aakash on his wicker chair throne, listening to a lecture. No one noticed as we sped away with our bag of dung.

“That’s O.K.,” I said, and pulled out my little bottle of Nescafé. They didn’t know what to do with it so I poured it into the pot of buffalo milk and everyone had café au lait in little plastic cups, a novelty and yet in no way did it compare to chai. Later, Nandi presented us with a giant burlap sack of cow dung. Audrey and I looked at each other and smiled. Nandi, caretaker of the grounds, simply looked away and nodded.

Wounded-Mouth Dog lay convalescing under a huge white lace blanket in the sun. She had staggered in one day with a hole in the lower jaw and a bullet-sized hole in the neck behind the ear. She walked right up to us where we sat with the patients and looked at us. We had thought she was one of the surgery dogs that had wandered off, drunk on anesthesia. But no one had seen her before. The Wolf Pups now walked on top of her like she was a mountain, and every time they went to look under the cloth she made a whining fed-up growl. Tiger Dog, a bony brindle shepherd with distemper, was now able to walk around, tip-toeing on his long shaky legs, looking at us with big bat ears up, piercing orange eyes lined with black like kohl, looking for food. He stepped into one of the pups’ empty cardboard boxes, squeezed himself inside, and fell asleep twitching softly, with his head over the edge framed by a blue scarf patterned with Indian kings on horses.

I was disturbed by some of the things I had seen, like an aftertaste, like my dream of a haunted house where a ghost girl came out of the darkness with a hatchet. The next morning, in real life, I watched a goat herder girl get on the bus with her hatchet. It was like the image of the Goddess Kali and her many arms holding out the tools of life, a flower, a sword, to pierce the darkness with light. So many deaths at the hospital, puppies, dogs. And the peahen with the broken leg. I had taken her body in the evening up to the hill to dig a grave but the earth was all rock and dust, so I threw the bag up into the cactus trees where it caught on the thorns. Death had followed us home. We found our cat Raja dead outside our gate, without a mark. Was it rabies or poison?

Yes, the one I thought would never die. My head felt crushed. My lungs were char and fire. Audrey said she thought she was cursed, while we smoked on the roof in the evening wind, wrapped in our blankets. The prayers were coming in waves from the temple, echoing off the mountains. I thought there must be another explanation. The animals sensed they were dying and they came looking for a way to leave, or stay.

All life was sacred. Cows and buffalo wandered the streets, bus drivers threw carrots to the monkeys on the mountain, marigolds were strung on stones, in trees, in taxis, new houses were sung to. This was why our vets hesitated to put a suffering dog to sleep even when we pleaded. He had to be absolutely sure that it was in accordance with the universal flow of give and take. And then death ignited life; the moments were so pure.

In the cold Rajasthani winter, we warmed ourselves beside old Nandi’s fire, eggs boiling in one pot for the needy dogs, tea water in another for us, and the great black pot of rice and lentils set aside for the dogs’ dinner. The Doberman amputee that all the boys were afraid of sat on my foot and looked up at me with warm amber eyes. Smell of spice, smoldering cow dung, Nandi’s gruff voice, earth and smoke, his unspoken way with animals. Dust devils, swirling blowing dust. I could taste the grit in my mouth. I heard the trees talking and saw marigolds draped on the black stone in someone’s field. I had a heightened sense of awareness that something greater than me was being played out, in this place where all life was one.

Erika Connor is an artist and writer from rural Quebec, with a love of animals, nature, myths, and culture. She has taken care of wild birds and raccoons in rehabilitation centers, worked for the Humane Society’s “visiting dogs in hospitals” program in Canada, traveled by white horse both in West Africa and Mongolia, observed wild horses in Mongolia, lived with the Fulani and Bambara people of the Sahel, and continues to lose herself between the worlds.