A Dog Named James

At six in the morning James takes up his position by the balcony door, a black Labrador arranged like furniture with opinions, and performs his single great act of daily diplomacy: he does not wake me. He simply exists, loudly. He sighs. He resettles his weight on the floorboards. He lets his collar clink once against the tile — an accident, somehow, every morning for six years.

Bengaluru is at its gentlest just after dawn, and we own that hour together. The same route: down the lane past the idli cart setting up its steam, around the park where the badminton uncles argue line calls, home by the gate where he checks the mail of every dog in the neighbourhood with the thoroughness of a customs officer.

He is six now, heavy-eyed, grey coming in under the chin. He has stopped chasing pigeons and started watching them, which strikes me as the most honest description of middle age I have encountered anywhere.

People say dogs live in the present, but I do not think that is quite it. James remembers. He knows the sound of my running shoes against the sound of my office shoes and adjusts his hopes accordingly. What he does not do is spend the good hour rehearsing the bad one. The rain that soaked him last monsoon has left no residue on this morning's sun.

I write thrillers about people who cannot escape their pasts, and I train for races that are mostly arguments with the future. Then I come home to an animal who has mastered the only tense that was ever really on offer.

Six years old, wiser than most people I know. All he has ever asked me for is breakfast, and the lane, and the steam from the idli cart rising into the morning like something worth watching. It is.