THE FULL-MOON

 I am in a mood of writing about dogs, today! Just a while before, I have posted one: ‘A Baby Becomes A Buzzo’. Here is one more.

“A dog may bark at the Moon,” my idol, Prof. B.S.Raman had bursted out , one day, angrily , at one of my classmates, “But, the Moon will not lose its shining.”

I do not remember the context: Why did he cry so? And, who was that classmate of mine that provoked the outburst, and why?

Our village dogs always howled through the night. Sometimes, at the trespassers – both men and beasts - sometimes, at the burglars, and, sometimes, just when the Moon shone, up in the sky, in its full glory! The dogs would simply look to the skies and keep howling, and keep howling! Then, they would feel tired, breathless. The howling would end. They would go to sleep. And, they would open their eyes again, look up and howl, all over again. When the steam was out, they would stop howling and go back to sleep.

This would go on and on till someone, whose night these night-howlers had ruined, would come from behind and cane them hard… so hard, that they would think ten times before looking up… Leave alone howling!

When I was in school, a teacher had told us a touching story which I do not clearly remember. “On a full-moon day, you can see a howling dog… there, up inside the Moon,” I vaguely remember her telling us, the little ones. Probably, on every full-moon night, our village dogs, on sighting another dog in the skies… would howl at him. They probably envied him. To them, it was not the Moon that shone… It was the dog… And, our poor village-dogs did not like it, even a bit.

So, howl they would, 

on every full-moon day – 

all through the night  - 

just hoping to make that dog in the sky 

stop shining. 

Just hoping to get even with him, 

here on earth!

Suddenly, today, I remembered all these village dogs… the dog in the Full-Moon… and, that tender story of my school teacher… and, above all, I remembered that angry outburst of my idol, Prof. Raman:

“A dog may bark at the Moon,” Yes, he had howled, “But, the Moon will not lose its shining.”

GERALD D’CUNHA

THANKS:
The image used in this Post is by Ashok Ahuja. He is a professional Photographer and a very dear friend of mine. He is also one of the founder members of The Dawn Club, and, along with his gifted-artist wife, Sudha, has been helping me, and the Club, right from its inception.