An occasional side-benefit of being a professional cynic is that one is very rarely surprised or shocked by bad things. This year’s Diwali “celebrations”, though, have surpassed my most dire expectations. (Given the Delhi government’s statements and the general ugly gloating about “Hindu pride”, I had accounted for five or six straight days of firecracker activity of varying intensity – instead it began a good week before Diwali, around Karva Chauth, and is still going on today, with Govardhan Puja presumably being the latest pretext.) And there’s a very real chance now that I have lost one of my gentlest, most nervous community dogs for good: despite having made every effort days in advance to keep him safe; despite having pledged to myself (after a couple of traumatic instances when he fled the more moderate cracker activity of previous years and re-emerged only after two or three days) that this time I would do everything possible for him. 
On the evenings of the 15th and 16th, when loud fireworks were already in use – even if “only” for a couple of hours – in the colony park adjacent to mine, I kept this dog inside the flat and let him out only when the noise outside had died down. What I couldn’t have realistically accounted for was that the next *morning*, at around 10 or 11 AM, a series of loud explosions would spook him so much that he would flee our part of the neighbourhood.
He has been gone for six days as I write this, and there doesn’t seem much hope, especially given his very timid personality, reluctance to come out into the open in unfamiliar terrain even when hungry or thirsty, and the fact that he is always liable to get attacked by other dogs. (When he first appeared in our colony around seven years ago, he was immediately attacked and wounded. It took him a long time to settle down; even after all these years he still gets bullied by a younger or more boisterous dog, and he spends – I mean spent – the majority of his time on our DDA flat stairway.)
What makes it especially painful this time is that there has been not a single day’s respite from loud crackers over the past week: it’s the 22nd evening as I write this, and occasional deafening bombs are still bursting nearby. Even if it’s just two or three sudden explosions per minute (it is currently more than that), that’s still more than enough to keep nervous animals on edge, anticipating worse noise to come. Pandey ji – that’s the name given to this extremely nervous dog when he first came here, and it stuck – is exactly the sort who might stay hidden deep inside a colony naala waiting to emerge only after half a day of absolute silence. And in the past week, there have been no such windows of time.
I have been up nights, keeping a couple of the other outside-dogs indoors, circulating information on animal groups (which are anyway chock-full of posts about lost dogs across the NCR, including the ones that get run over after straying, badly disoriented, onto busy roads or highways), and making as many rounds of nearby areas as I can. And asking our guards – this is morbid but it has to be done and there are precedents for it – to let me know if there are any foul stenches from any of the narrow naalas where a dog might get trapped. Will of course keep hoping, but it’s wearing thin.
P.S. anyone tempted to offer their opinion that Diwali has been “quieter” this year, kindly desist. People who are trying to help terrified street animals with very heightened hearing might have different benchmarks for these things than you do; in recent years, even though I don’t have super-sensitive hearing myself, I have flinched each time a loud bomb has gone off nearby. And anyway, it also varies with the nature of the colony and its residents. While a Panchshila Park colony group I am on regularly calls out residents who express enthusiasm for loud fireworks, and asks for quiet celebrations (whether this works is another matter), it is sadly the opposite in the neighbourhood that I live in (not helped by a very animal-unfriendly RWA). On Karva Chauth night I got into a nasty altercation with a fellow who was proudly encouraging his kids to behave like hoodlums and burst loud crackers, and who later abused me soundly on the RWA group calling me a Leftist devastated by the emergence of the brave smoky new Hindustan. (I haven’t been a Leftist at all in this millennium, and barely even a typist in the past few months, but whatever…)
(I also mentioned Pandey in this post from two years ago - an obit for his friend Kaalu)
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