Rohit Chawla’s photo-book ‘Rain Dogs’ frames the pathos and pain of stray dogs on beaches of Goa

Like most of the natural world, dogs have a way of bringing out your essence. You could love them or hate them, but in either case, it tells more about you than them. They are the litmus test for your compassion or your cruelty, a mirror to your soul. You could say with Ratan Tata that a pet is no different from a member of one’s family. Or you could be ‘The Neighbourhood’ that Anuja Chauhan so satirically describes in her essay, ‘Drain Dogs’—part of the 30 write-ups by eminent personalities like Manu Joseph, Namita Gokhale and Javed Akhtar in Rohit Chawla’s wonderful new book on stray dogs on the beaches of Goa.

 

Chauhan narrates how The Neighbourhood came down on them when they rescued a drowning brood of six puppies out of the gutter during a cloudburst. “Chheeee! Chheeee! Rabies,” it went. “Horrified uncles and paranoid aunties ordered the amiable old garbage collector to load the puppies onto his garbage truck and drop them off somewhere Far Far Away,” writes Chauhan. [How many of us, if we are honest, has a Neighbourhood-shaped hole in our souls—an allergy to the strays that we flaunt as though it is evidence of how evolved we are.]

 

Chawla, however, didn’t have any problem with the dogs following him. He began photographing them during the pandemic, when he sought refuge in sea-facing room at the Hotel La Amore in Goa. To stay fit, he began walking the beach, 20km a day. The stray dogs probably hoped he was the messiah bringing them manna from heaven. The tourists had left and the beaches were devoid of leftovers. “It broke my heart to see them so emaciated, eyes large and dead with hunger,” writes Chawla in the introduction to his photo-book, Rain Dogs. “In all our own scrambling for food those days, some hoarding away more than they needed, those homeless, helpless dogs had been completely forgotten.”

 

The photos he shot of those dogs, he says, are some of the quietest, most introspective work he’s ever done. “The quiet desolation and bleakness of those times against the magnificence of the Goan monsoon became my poetry of choice,” he writes. The photographs are magnificent, not because of the framing or the composition, but because they evoke an emotion that these days is in short supply—compassion—tilting the axis of your being ever so slightly. The serenity of the scene is heightened even as it is set against a temperamental, tumultuous ocean. With practised skill, Chawla snaps the world to stillness—the hum of the sea breeze ceases, the waves are paused mid-air, the man frozen in his yoga pose, a dog staring motionless at a riotous sunset. And in the quietness, you are forced to surrender your prejudices. The dogs cease to be a mirror to your soul, and you cease to be The Neighbourhood. Instead, just for a moment, you glimpse the embers of a relationship as primordial as life itself—that between a man and his dog.

 

Rain Dogs

By Rohit Chawla

Published by HarperCollins

Price Rs1999

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