Good Morning

Travel leads us to meet different people and different creatures, but do we acknowledge them?

 

Mornings are different at different homes. Back in Chennai, Iyengar and Pattabi, our two street dogs, will be sleeping below a tattered white Maruti 800. We would stretch out our legs on the bare cement porch, dreaming about plans, schemes, and plots. Secrets kept. Secrets revealed. Silence.

We peered out of a window, three floors high. Every morning, we waited for two dogs to crawl from underneath the dusty car in the parking lot. Here, in Penang, crows, dogs, and other urban wildlife are banned the right to life. Grey logs floated down the clean sewer, running alongside the cars.

University beckoned us, the tag-along sisters. We caught some heavy and cheap breakfast, drank gallons of ice tea, and picked up the Xerox for our father. Xerox is known as photocopy here. The younger one, me, retired to the library to explore books on birds and films. The elder one, her, gathered paper and started sketching, painting, and scribbling; Future is entwined in us, here and there.

I found twenty cents on the floor every day. Three more, I could pay to pee in the mall. Plans and plots. But the keystone was missing. Who was under the car? We hurried downstairs, early in the morning. Slowly and steadily. Relaxed and happily, an iguana crawled out from under the car. As he lifted his head to meet my eye, all the fellow iguanas catching a swim in the sewer lifted their heads above the stream and said, “Good morning.”