You can’t take a goldfish for a walk

The car radio was tuned to 107.1 FM. The song playing was How Much Is That Doggie In The Window? (The line “you can’t take a goldfish for a walk” is from the same song.) The song after that was The Butterfly and The Dog, which I’m not familiar with but was nice too. I like listening to 107.1 FM in the mornings when I’m driving because it’s the last surviving FM channel that plays English music. I like Hindi music as much as the next person, but listening to the same dozen or two dozen Bollywood songs being replayed all day long on every FM channel, with endless ad breaks, is not my idea of listening to music. It’s just being used as a consumer, is all. The whole point of radio is the unpredictability of song choice, not knowing which track will come next, and of the simple pleasure of hearing an oldie but goldie, or a newbie but goodie, suddenly coming at you while you’re driving and thinking of other things. Good radio is what happens to you when you’re busy doing other things, like driving, or walking the dog, or just sitting in the car and looking out at a mangrove swamp on a rainy day in Mumbai.

And that’s the mangrove swamp in question. It’s pretty clean right now, thanks to the monsoons. You can’t see the ducks but they’re there somewhere, probably huddled under an overhanging tree. There are cranes and storks and kingfishers and birds I would need all my Salim Ali books to put a name to, though there seem to be a lot fewer each passing year and those that do appear deserve some kind of medal for braving the oil spills, oilfield blazes, and super-heat from the superweaponry ordnance deployed in all those wars against Terror. I’m just glad to see them, and to see the mangroves. Which, by the way, are also slowly losing the battle of attrition to the forces of forced urbanization. In this pic, for instance, I’m parked on a side road which should not be there and which leads to an electrical substation or distribution station or somesuch which as far as I know, ought not to be there either. It’s now got a small colony of squatters around it who presumably work for the substation but are nevertheless squatting on CRZ land. And there’s even a small mandir here, with loads and loads of trash around that never seems to get cleared. Oh, and right across the way is the local dump, where dump trucks dump trash by the hundreds of truckloads each day, right in the heart of the “protected” mangrove lands. I’m sure it’s all perfectly legal, but it’s not I who matter, it’s those birds and those ducks and I don’t think they’re interested in urbanization. Not much.

Willow. A little wet but no worse for wear. Missing her walk. But also content to sit and listen to the radio – which incidentally happens to be playing How Much Is That Doggie In The Window at the exact moment this pic was taken on my iPhone, and enjoy the cool a/c air. But the window stays open always, no matter what. Oh well. Calf leather is replaceable. Willow isn’t.

And when the rain let up a little, she did get to walk a bit. Just around the car, which is good too, because what she really enjoys is sniffing and snuffling. The walking is only a means to the end, and the end that matters is the end of her long nose. She’s too busy sniffing in this pic to pose properly which is fine because she’s definitely not a Page 3 dog. Thank dog for that. The bench appears to have been sponsored by an industrialist in memory of his late wife or maybe it was his mother, I forget which. Interestingly, I’ve actually met the industrialist in question a long time ago – he was a client for an ad agency I used to work with back then in another life. His industrial complex was near Kochi and I flew down several times in the mid and late 80s to get briefed on brochures, corporate campaigns, vacancy ads – and even the ads commemorating the person to whom the bench in the pic is dedicated. Small world. Nice bench. Next time I’ll try pressing it a few times just so I can tell my trainer at the gym that I’ve already done my bench-presses that day. If he doesn’t believe me, I’ll show him this picture. Oh wait. I don’t have a trainer. Just the bench.