Skip to main content

Dog in the manger

 

Dog Ross by June Huff

Fiction

Samson was irritated. There were too many missed calls on his mobile phone when he came back to the staff room during the break. Almost all the missed calls were from father-in-law. The son-of-a-bitch!

Samson had no choice but call back. After all, his wife was his last hope, the ultimate redeemer.

Samson worked as a teacher in a private school which paid him and all other teachers a salary that couldn’t meet even a week’s expenditure of a normal family with four or five members. Not that he didn’t try for other jobs. All good jobs were meant for people with some connections: wives of MLAs or nephews and nieces of Catholic priests and nuns or followers of people who claim to be political leaders… Finally Samson hit upon an idea for the sake of survival and possibly success in life. Marry a nurse and leave the country with her. Nurses get jobs abroad easily. Eventually their husbands can be transported too.

“You’ll be working at some petrol pump or supermarket,” Narendran told Samson, “if you go abroad. They’re not going to let you teach them English. Imagine you teaching English to the British!” He laughed. He was of the opinion that unemployed people in the country should make pakodas and sell tea on roadsides. “Didn’t our PM himself give us the example?” He asked.

When did the PM get the time for that? Samson wondered. He says he studied up to Masters in “entire political science” while also working as a fulltime Pracharak of the RSS before becoming a fulltime politician. He didn’t ask, however. Narendran was what they call a nationalist nowadays. It’s dangerous to ask questions to neo-nationalists; they’ll troll you if not lynch you.

Better to be pump attendant in London than a private school teacher in India. That’s how Samson decided to marry Daisy Leela Chacko who had already passed IELTS and OET and was just waiting for the England VISA. Daisy was the only daughter of Chacko. So Samson would inherit a house too in due course of time. Good arrangement any way you look at it.

“Sam,” Chacko answered the call as soon as the melodious voice of the woman who advised endlessly about Covid precautions ended. What a contrast was Chacko’s voice to that woman’s!

“Sam,” Chacko said. “I’m in hospital with Maria.” Maria was his wife. “She is under observation. On drips, you see. So we won’t be home for a while. Caesar will need lunch. During your lunch break you go to our house and give him a plate of biryani.”

“Biryani?” Sam said.

“Chicken biryani. Caesar doesn’t like mutton. You can buy it from one of the hotels near your school.”

Caesar was Chacko’s dog. A massive German shepherd who growled angrily most of the time.

There are no hotels near Samson’s school. Only a couple of small restaurants. But they serve chicken biryani every day for lunch. Malayalis can’t live without chicken biryanis. And every little chai shop is named Hotel so-and-so. Humility is not a virtue in Kerala’s hospitality industry at least.

Samson bought a chicken biryani as soon as he had finished his own lunch of rice, curd, and fried brinjal and rode his bike to Chacko’s house where Caesar was getting impatient like some of our politicians who are questioned bluntly by TV news anchors.

“Lucky fellow!” Samson said to the dog as he unpacked the chicken biryani. “I eat brinjal and you eat chicken.”

He shut the kennel having transferred the biryani into the dog’s plate.

“Hey.” Samson thought he heard a voice.

Caesar had called him, apparently. He went back to the kennel. “Yeah? Any problem?”

“What’s this stuff?” Caesar asked.

“Chicken biryani.” Samson said as innocently as a newcomer to neo-nationalist politics.

“Where did you get this from?”

“Hotel Lotus.”

The word ‘lotus’ pacified Caesar apparently. He calmed down. “It’s no good,” he said. “You should have bought some chicken from KFC or McDonalds.”

“I’ll bring you British mushroom chicken from London, sala.” Samson muttered as he turned the ignition of his bike.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

Two Nuns and two questions

The nuns kept in custody  Two Catholic nuns were arrested on 25 July 2025 at Durg railway station for allegedly trafficking tribal women from Narayanpur in Chhattisgarh to Agra in UP. Today’s newspapers in Kerala have expressed their contempt of the act more vehemently than I had expected. It seems secularism has hope yet in this country. For those who are not aware of the incident, two nuns were arrested because some criminals of a depraved organisation called Bajrang Dal in Chhattisgarh chose to conclude that the nuns were committing the crime of human-trafficking. Since that charge wouldn’t stick, because the women confessed that they were going voluntarily to take up jobs with the help of the nuns in order to raise their families from miserable poverty in a country that claims to be a $5-tillion-economy, another charge was fabricated that the nuns had indulged in religious conversion. Now let us look at certain facts. Though I keep questioning the Christian churches for...

Missing Women of Dharmasthala

The entrance to the temple Dharmasthala:  The Shadows Behind the Sanctum Ananya Bhatt, a young medical student from Manipal, visited the Dharmasthala Temple and she never returned to her hostel. She vanished without a trace. That was in 2003. Her mother, Sujata Bhatt, a stenographer working with the CBI, rushed to the temple town in search of her daughter. Some residents told her that they had seen Ananya walking with the temple officials. The local police refused to help in any way. Soon Sujata was abducted by three men, assaulted, and rendered unconscious. She woke up months later in a hospital in Bangalore (Bengaluru). Now more than two decades later, she is back in the temple premises to find her daughter’s remains and perform her last rites. Because a former sanitation worker of the temple came to the local court a few days back with a human skeleton and the confession that he had buried countless schoolgirls in uniform and other young women in the temple premises. This ma...

The Chhattisgarh Story

Deforestation in Chhattisgarh Kerala’s Catholic Church is teeming with rage these days because of the arrest of two nuns in Chhattisgarh on false charges. No one seems to understand the real politics behind the Modi government’s enmity towards Christian missionaries in Chhattisgarh as well as other backward states in its neighbourhood. Modi is selling the tribal areas and forestlands to the corporate sector part by part, his friend Adani being the chief benefactor. The Christian missionaries are a severe hindrance in that commerce. Let us get some facts right, at least. The Adivasi villagers allege that Gram Sabhas (local governing bodies) were forged or manipulated under pressure from Adani and the BJP government officials in order to take away their lands. In Hasdeo Aranya, minutes of the local body meetings were altered to show the villagers’ consent for land transfers. Also, the Chhattisgarh Scheduled Tribes Commission found that Panchayat secretaries were detained and coerc...

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...