Mumbai’s stray animals fall in the grey zone between boundless greed and unbounded compassion, welcome till they become unwelcome
When a builder gets his paws on prime property, its human residents hurry to relocate elsewhere. Suddenly, there is no one for the homeless stray cats and dogs that depend on humans to survive. Illustration by C Y Gopinath using AI
One day, Bella got a call from a chowkidar at Kalina. He was concerned about some stray cats that needed food because the family that fed them was leaving.
The chowkidar was a migrant worker, a kind of stray himself among the towers and new gated communities of Mumbai. He instinctively understood both homelessness and hunger. Bella used her contacts to arrange for cat food to be delivered daily to Kalina.
“Aren’t there other families who can feed them?” she asked him.
“Everyone’s leaving,” said the chowkidar. “They’re being forced to leave.”
The chowkidar worked at the serene campus of a green, gated colony. The entire area came under corporate ownership and was eventually sold with its buildings to a well-known builder, who had acquired most of Kalina and had plans to plant skyscrapers everywhere.
In the grey zone between boundless greed and unbounded compassion for animals in distress fall Mumbai’s stray cats and dogs, welcome till they become unwelcome.
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As always, when a builder gets his paws on prime property, its human residents hurry to relocate elsewhere before the jackhammers and piledrivers arrive. In the empty apartments they leave behind, suddenly, there is no one for the homeless stray cats and dogs that depend on humans to survive.
Unless you count people like Bella, whose waking hours are spent in the service of god’s creatures abandoned by the city.
Bella and Chum have a family of five. Here are their names: Zimbo, Pillu, Chidambaram, Mayavati and Monica. Here are their stories.
The building Pillu lived in for 12 years was up for redevelopment. Being just an indie dog, Pillu had nowhere else to go, but the watchman was kind and fed her daily, so she stayed on happily after the wrecking crew brought the building down. She even fell into a construction pit eight metres deep once. “After the building became snazzy and new, nobody wanted a stray dog hanging around,” says Bella. Now, Pillu has cancer and is one of Bella’s many saved souls.
Zimbo was Pillu’s friend on the street, but timid. Bella rescued him when she found him cornered by a pack of street dogs. For a year she kept him in a pet foster home, paying Rs 700 a day. But that couldn’t last, so finally Zimbo came home too. The two dogs, once friends on the same street, became enemies when they had to share a territory, and are now kept apart in different rooms.
Then there was Monica, a cat; Chidambaram, another cat they thought looked uncannily like the former Finance Minister; and Mayawati, a kitten they found cowering under a car’s bonnet. “They stray from their mothers and crawl inside some car’s machinery,” says Bella. “Then they don’t know what to do, so they sit right there and travel with the car for miles and miles, terrified out of their wits,” said Bella.
The world she and Chum deal with daily is full of iniquity and malfeasance, and its casualties are always the mute animals bred to depend on humans for their needs. A veterinarian billed Bella Rs 17,700 just to rehydrate a dog that had dried up and suffered a sunstroke. Pet foster care homes reap profits by charging 3-star hotel rates to harbour homeless animals.
Mumbai has a small community of grifting “animal whisperers”—with 4316 messages at last count in their WhatsApp group—who claim to be able to communicate with animals and charge money for tracing lost dogs and cats. Their main skill, however, is not telepathy but the ability to play on the emotional attachments humans often form with their pets, like circus oracles who will connect you with long-dead relatives.
Bella and Chum struggle to pay for the work they do. They are not party people or binge-watchers of Netflix movies. They don’t bar-hop or check out new restaurants. Childless by plan, they have chosen to live lives of continuous sacrifice, using their earnings for the animals the universe brings into their lives.
“My vet bill will be approximately Rs 2 lakh,” says Bella. “Chum is retired now, and I don’t get much money from my little business, so I thought I might liquidate an FD. Recently, I sold some of my jewellery to pay my bills. Providentially, a Recurring Deposit matured just this month.
“I look at all this differently. I want to leave everything I have to the animals. I’m not 25 anymore. I may have, max, 15 or 20 years of life. There’s always a hand above us. Somehow or other, something works out. I didn’t even know I had an RD about to mature.”
Bella asked not to be named in this column, partly because she fears being trolled by the mercenaries who live off the city’s strays, but also, I believe, an innate humility. If you want to use your considerable wealth to support her work with strays, mail me at cygopi@gmail.com.
If you’re serious and substantial, I’ll connect you with her.
You can reach C Y Gopinath at cygopi@gmail.com
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The views expressed in this column are the individual’s and don’t represent those of the paper.
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