In October 2018, while I was volunteering at All Creatures Great and Small, an animal shelter run by Anjali Gopalan on the outskirts of Delhi, we were visited one afternoon by a young couple with a story straight out of Vikram Chandra’s Sacred Games. Their pet companion dog, a Pomeranian, had been killed by being thrown from the eighth floor of their building by a neighbour who got irritated when it ran across the hallway into his flat.
The couple was devastated and filed a police complaint. But under pressure from others in the building, and even the advice of the police, they conceded to a token punishment. The neighbour would have to feed 100 dogs in an animal shelter but otherwise face no penalties.
An extreme act of violence was not treated as a real crime, but just bad behaviour, undocumented and soon forgotten. All the heartbroken couple could do was find a shelter where the neighbour could pay to purge his guilt.
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