Coco’s ordeal

Dear blog,
I should have talked to you yesterday, but I was distraught, so I made do with crying at home when I was alone. What else could I do? I couldn’t make sense of what had happened, why it had happened and how anyone could do something like this. Coco was a good dog, he didn’t deserve this. I wasn’t even there to protect him when those fiends beat him up brutally. I was not there to take action too, make sure justice was done. What is the point of me living in this beautiful manicured country when I can’t be there for my own animals?

Coco and Coffee have been resident dogs in the building where Ive spent half my life in Jangid Complex, Mira Road. I have been witnessing their galloping exuberance and gentle joyfulness for as long as I can remember. Coffee is this big lumbering girl with floppy paws while Coco is a smaller version of Coffee, but much naughtier.

Both have been much adored by a majority of the residents and they have never ever given anyone any cause for complaint. In fact they are two of the best guard dogs the building has had. At least theyve got more guts than the idiotic, lazy security guards we have always had. They wouldn’t hesitate to bring the whole building down if a stranger so much as stepped close to the place. Suffice it to say with these two, the building was always safe.

Night before last, a group of 3-4 adolescent boys paid a visit to the garden behind our building where Coco must have been strolling around. The boys were charas doped and whether in that state or not I do not know, three of them pounced on Coco for no apparent reason and held his legs in place while the fourth (identified as an AMJED something) inflicted several blows on Coco with a heavy piece of wood. Coco managed to escape once but they ran after him and repeated the same thing again and again, till Coco’s body was twisted in pain and his spine bent from the multiple blows. Hearing the commotion people ran down from their houses, when these boys fled the scene and somehow got possible witnesses to shut up about it.

Coco was rushed to the hospital on grounds of possible spinal fractures and has been in observation ever since. X-rays show severe concussions in several regions of his spinal cord, micro bleeding which has caused the liquid to accumulate in his chest cavity, high fever and permanent loss of vision in one eye. Painkillers and concussion depressants seem to be working albeit slowly.

I keep having visions of this sweet naughty playful little fellow jumping on me whenever I was near him and never wanting to get off me. I keep think of the wet lickies he used to bestow on my unsuspecting hand as I walked around. And of course how he LOVED to frolic with Coffee...his best friend.

I am inherently a very spiritual person and I know that human beings have been given a free will with which they make their choices and thereby set their karmic wheels in motion. But animals are subject to mass world karma, not having free will of their own, so Ive been told. Why then is the animal kingdom subject to so much suffering for no fault of the individual animals themselves? And the bigger question is how can a human being bring himself to commit such atrocity with such seeming cold heartedness?

I have witnessed so much of animal cruelty in my life of 25 years, but I have always made it a point to forgive the perpetrator and hope for a better future. But yesterday I found myself unwilling to restrain myself from cursing those four young men. I know God has his plans and therefore I feel a little guilty about cursing them, but I also felt a certain relief when I did. When I put out into the universe thoughts of ravaging pain, paralysis and suffering for these young men, I realized that it was the only thing I could do to exact revenge, to action justice for what they had done to my defenceless friend.

I don’t know if Coco will survive this ordeal. Even if he does, I don’t know if he will be a vegetable all his life. And I am sure this trauma has scarred him emotionally forever. In a way it’s a good thing. He will stay away from the real “animals” that inhabit this world.
I pray to God that I am someday capable of forgiving these satanic actions. I hope that I can. For now, I can only pray for Coco...my darling little Coco.
............Devastated, Twinky.