Dog Eat...

You know when you are watching Animal Planet or The National Geographic Channel, and they have graphic dramatic footage of a pack of ten jackals attacking a massive water buffalo or an elephant? In order for the smaller predators to take down the larger prey, they instinctively and strategically go for the buttocks, the calf, and the neck of the animal before it falls (in slow motion footage of course) to the earth in a spasm of dust and death.

That’s what I almost felt like two nights ago.

I walked out of an internet café when a single street dog emerged from the dark on my left and barked aggressively. He was the first domino. An entire gang of dogs joined in a chorus from the right side. I was surrounded. This is actually pretty bad Lian, I told myself. I had nowhere to go. Bring out that animal instinct and fight back.

I raised my hand and pretended to throw a stone at them. I sssht and screamed at them. As soon as I did so, instead of cowering back like they usually do so easily during the day, the whole lot of them charged.

I felt the sharp piercing of dog teeth in my upper right calf and something sharp push on my left buttock. There was a grip on my coat. My strong persona shriveled like a broken balloon, I ran like a yellow chicken down the street and the canine gang pursued me. I think my yell devolved into a little-girl scream. And running just fast enough, they suddenly dropped off and left me alone with my rapidly beating chest in the half-lit vacuum of the main street of Leh, before a group of several Kashmiri men, closing shop, walked up to me and asked if I was okay. I staggered home and discovered a pierced cut on my leg.

“You get lot of shots,” says my father-in-law. “Seven.”

“You should get that checked out by a doctor,” says my husband. “I hear that dogs are eating up corpses from the flood. They are finding half-eaten bodies. So if a dog bites into you…”

“Imagine if Aamir had been with you!” says my niece-in-law. “They would have ripped his face off.”

At that point I shut the world up. I cleaned the wound, and went to the doctor the next morning, who optimistically told me that since the teeth didn’t actually pierce my jeans, the risk for contamination from saliva was minimal. That’s the last time my relatives tell me wearing jeans is not “honorable” for a woman my age. “Or we could examine the dog and see if it is infected. You probably could not identify which dog bit you?” said Dr. Gulam. I stared and wondered why an MD degree couldn’t logically compute that probability was less than one in a million in a town where dozen of street dogs roam like mafia. I discovered I had inadvertently walked into a section of the street that contained a drain where all the restaurants dump their leftover food, sauntering right into the dog gang dining table with my foul human shoes. My father-in-law advised that next time, I carry a big stick.

Like all kids, I called my parents and asked my dad to scour the files for a yellow laminated vaccination card ten years old. He confirmed I had the rabies vaccination. A decade ago, when I was so panicked about the diseases that India could scar me for life before my first trip, I wrote a $1,000 check to the Harvard Center for Woman’s Health and got immunized against everything from Japanese Encephalitis to all possible A/B/D/F/Z of Hepatitis. I remember my biceps being so swollen with shots that every vibration running up my arms from gripping the handles on my bike while riding home in the cold air on the Esplanade in Boston caused me to wince. Thank the Lord for that.

So, bygones. Another adventure (and scar) in India.