When I think of Blacky, I think of the wide, big eyes that looked curiously at me, asking if I love him.

I think of his growls. He growled when he was happy being petted, he growled when he was angry at Jumbo, the other male dog around, for entering his area. He growled when happily following me along with Whitey on a walk in the evening. Growling was his go to sound for expressing a range of emotions.

His curiosity, his growling, his love for being petted made sure he is always the one to get most pets. Also the one I was usually wary of – that he would rise on his hindlegs and put his forelegs on my clothes, covering them with dust, because he hadn’t got his share of pets. He had a weak sense of boundaries, like many other dogs.

***

It is now a month since Blacky died. One Monday morning, at 6.45 AM, while on a walk, M and I found him lying in the wet mud, with a huge wound on his shoulder and several other smaller ones on all of his body. I did not recognise him at first, as his body was covered in the red-brown wet mud of Auroville, his fur dishevelled. But soon I did.

Blacky lay there stunned, no expression on his face, barely breathing, breathing so little that at first it looked like he was dead.

A few other people came to the spot. They felt that he was going to pass away any moment. We called several doctors and dog shelters, but nobody was reachable. It was more than an hour later that an animal ambulance arrived, and O, one of my neighbours who fed Blacky, and I, went with the ambulance to the dog shelter.

Although Blacky’s wounds were cleaned and treated at the shelter, he did not make it. He had probably suffered too much nerve damage and eventually his body gave in at night. The next morning, as the shelter staff arrived, they found him in his kennel, having died in the night. The shelter’s director sent a message on the animal carers’ group telling us that Blacky had died in the night. 

CCTV footage showed that Blacky had been attacked by two big dogs, helped by Jumbo. He was brutally assaulted half an hour before we found him. The human of the two dogs was found. They had come from another neighborhood, about a 15 minute walk from here. Their human too was disturbed by the incident and agreed to not let the dogs out ever again, except when walking them on chains. He also knows that he may face serious difficulties in this community if a similar incident occurs. The dogs are now always on long chains in his large courtyard and are receiving training to bring down their aggression. They will soon be sterilised, which will probably also reduce their aggression. We realised that they had also killed two cats in our neighbourhood in the preceding month. 

***

I write this to talk about how Blacky built a relationship with me, a relationship that became deeper through his woundedness and his death, on his last day on this earth. 

That Monday morning, as we waited for the ambulance to arrive, I sat down on my haunches right next to Blacky – wounded, stunned, as he was. Slowly, Blacky rose to sit on his forelegs, in a Sphinx like position. He wanted to get up more, but couldn’t. It seemed that the wound on his shoulder was so deep that it had damaged his nerves, thus disabling him from using his left foreleg to lift himself up.

He simply sat there. His face was sad, sorrowful, feeling alone. Blacky had never thought that a dog fight, one of those that happen every few days, would turn so deadly that he would die. He probably did not know that there are dogs out there who fight to kill and hunt, and not just to bully someone away like Blacky himself did.

This was the time to sit with Blacky in all the warmth, courage, togetherness I could muster from the depths of my heart, and convey them through my eyes, my face, the sounds I made, the touch with which I touched him on his paws, gently stroking them and sometimes gently stroking his forehead, carefully avoiding the wounds.

“Help is coming Blacky, and I am here. O is here, S is here, we all who have loved you and fed you are here and are heartbroken to see you like this, and we are doing what we can. And even if you don’t make it, we are doing what we can to make you feel you are loved, and you are not alone, as you pass away and your life is cut short by a brutal attack on you” – if Blacky was a human I would explicitly say this to him. But it didn’t matter that he was not a human, I said it to him anyway, and I felt I could say it better because I didn’t have to use cliched and over-used, often insincerely used words of a human language to convey this. I simply felt all of this deeply, every single word, and I felt that Blacky was picking up the essence of what I said. 

***

O and I went with the ambulance to the shelter. We were with Blacky for another couple of hours there as his wounds were treated, the fur near them shaved, injections administered. The doctor said she couldn’t say whether he would survive or not, but the next 48 hours were crucial.

Then we came home, planning to go to meet him frequently in the days to come.

Four hours later I decided to go to meet Blacky again. He was deeply sad and alone, and I had time at hand, so it was not fair that I don’t sit with him for some more time. 

This time, in the afternoon, Blacky was in one of the kennels of the shelter. He was on the floor, so I sat down on my haunches again and started to caress his paws and forehead again.

Blacky hadn’t gotten better in the last 5 hours since I had left. There were bowls of food and water next to him but he hadn’t eaten. I had bought treats for him from a shop on the way, but it was clear that he would not eat anything for now. He seemed just the same as in the morning, sitting on his forelegs, unable to move any more, unable to lift himself further up. This time though, he made sure to make deep eye contact with me. His head slowly moved forward towards me till a point that it would not move any further because of his wounds. Like old times, he seemed to want to sniff me, lick my face or touch it with his wet nose. He looked very sad, he looked lonely. 

Again, I sat with him, and I kept conveying to him some of the essence of what I felt for him – warmth, love, companionship, peace. Sometimes my touch on his paws was playful, sometimes gentle and soothing. 

My feet started to hurt as I was not used to sitting in that position, so once in a while I would stand up, keep communicating with Blacky while bending down, and then go back into the sitting position after a minute when my feet had had enough rest. 

After about 35 minutes of such conversation, I thought I should leave and come back the next morning. I said bye to Blacky and left the shelter. The grief stayed with me all afternoon and evening. I felt like going back, but the shelter’s opening hours had passed. O and S told me they were cooking delicious food to take to Blacky the next day. The next morning, as I was planning to go to the shelter, I saw the message saying Blacky had died. 

***

In my heart, as perhaps those of other humans around him, Blacky has remained alive. I know that like me, O and S have been grieving for Blacky. 

Most of all, what stays is his innocent but deeply sad face, partly shocked, partly lonely, at what had happened to him that morning, and how his vital force seemed to be planning to depart from a body that was no longer functioning. 

But also, the opportunity to love him when he needed love the most. To give him warmth when his life felt most desolate, to give him company when he was in most pain, physical and emotional. 

Blacky’s friends are two girls, Brownie and Whitey. That morning, Brownie was walking with Blacky when the attack took place. Brownie, a skinny dog, almost half the size of the dogs who killed Blacky, watched from a corner as her friend was being killed. Three times, she went forward and bit the attacking dogs, trying to distract them away from her friend, but each time those dogs more or less  just shook her off, for her bite was too weak. She knew that for these attempts to save her friend’s life, she could have lost hers. The dogs, one of them or all three, could have turned to her and attacked her too, leaving both Blacky and Brownie in the same state. But she still tried three times, before – as the camera shows – she gave up and left. 

That morning at 6.25 AM, ten minutes after this attack, I met Brownie at the beginning of my walk. She sat with Whitey. I petted both of them but didn’t sense that anything was wrong. I wondered where their friend Blacky was and asked them. 20 minutes later, I found him almost dead from the attack.

Seeing the CCTV video, I was deeply moved by Brownie’s attempts to save her friend’s life despite the fact that doing so was putting her own life at risk. She had seen her friend die. For all the days that have followed, I have felt an immense compassion for Brownie, this skinny, old little dog who shares with me the grief of the death of a friend, a violent and difficult death, where we both did what we could to help. 

Our friendship has deepened, just as my ability to love Blacky and offer him companionship deepened in the face of pain and trauma. 

***

A month has passed since that day when Blacky died. There is still grief in my heart as I write this, and several, several times a day I remember Blacky, his face on the last day, our last meeting in the kennel, the immense warmth between us.

Death doesn’t end anything except the body. If you love someone, they remain alive in your being even if they die in the world of matter. 

Brownie seems to have gone through a grieving process too, and is doing fine now, although she now asks for a lot more pets from me than she did earlier – following me, lying down at my feet and tugging at them with her paws, indicating that she wants me to bend down and pet her, play with her. 

Blacky’s death is no different from the passing of a human friend. The grief, loneliness and trauma of that death would have been similar if the affected person was a human being. These emotions required sitting with, being held in the heart, and slowly released.

This death made me realise how much he, Brownie, I are part of this forest-like space we live in. How the bare, red-brown earth on which he died, the early morning sky, the trees, we all silently share the largest and deepest part of our being. That human language, and all these thoughts – they are simply ripples on the surface of a vaster ocean in which we are silently with each other. 

Like small children singing a prayer together, we affirm our belongingness to this vaster reality of nature. 

And like the softness and innocence that is contained in a beautiful lullaby, our gazes at each other, our silent walks together, the caresses and the pets and the sniffs, they all constitute a simple and spontaneous song that has both play and love. 

Everyday, after petting Brownie and Whitey, I go on a long walk with Jumbo. In the silence of the forests of Auroville, we walk together. 

***

My vocation is to work with people who struggle with their mental health. They struggle with grief, with anxiety, with trauma, with rage. In themselves and in relationships.

I have always seen that a place of healing is slowly found, as one unravels the layers of the psyche, in nature. In the shade of green that the leaves have as sunlight falls on them at different times of the day. And in the lives, struggles, and stories of the creatures who share this earth with us – cats, dogs, squirrels. 

As a person finds in him the ability to face the pain of life, to sit with it rather than avoid it, his sense of who he is expands and finds a connection with all of the above, to less or more extents. 

The problems of mental health are perhaps as old as human beings are – 3 million years or more. But the problems of mental health are accentuated by lives lived indoors, lives lived with total identification with the narrowness of particular relationships and objects. 

When J. Krishnamurti set up schools to be a place where the child could heal from the wounds of the world, and particularly from the fears instilled in him by the world, he emphasised that these schools must be buildings clustered in the middle of valleys, hills, riversides. They must be in the midst of vast nature, so that the children can take long walks with each other, sit and watch the sun set while a cat purs next to them in contentment, watch the silent night sky with stars glittering in it. That these experiences must create the cocoon in which any learning of the skills of reading, writing, cognitive manipulation of any kind should take place. 

Slowly, as I find a way of living away from cities, close to nature, I find myself looking for a true school in nature, slowly unlearning all the excess learnings of school and college, and finding a school in the dogs, cats, peacocks and trees. And in the sky and the bare earth which invites one to walk barefoot on it. 

The wars, the terrible inequalities, the hate in society are all results of the mental health problems of human beings, to put it in a way that almost sounds simplistic but truly isn’t. If we survive each of these and ever create a new world, it will, no doubt, be one that arises from being in nature, with nature, and truly feeling part of nature. From what I understand, that is the only possible path to continuing to remain alive as a species on this earth. 

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