Keyan Bowes

India's cities teem with stray dogs (though not as much as they teem with people). None of the dogs are fixed. You often seen bitches in milk  followed by a tumbling procession of cute wag-tailed pups. Before, I hardly noticed them; they were a given of urban life.  Now I do notice them, and I realize that not all strays are created equal.

Worst off are the scroungers. They have no human friends, and rely on what they can scavenge from garbage. Fortunately, there's no shortage of that. Unfortunately, with all the neighborhood bitches in pup twice a year, there's a lot of competition. They have short lives, usually, but reproduce themselves before they go.

Then there are the tolerated strays, which usually hang around bored outdoor humans - security guards, pushcart vendors, gardeners. They're occasionally given scraps, and provide some company and amusement. No one misses them much if they're killed by traffic or other dogs or disease.

Last evening, my hosts suggested a nearby park for a walk.

Out the front gate of the gated community (pretty much all communities in Delhi have been gated over the last five years or so), onto the main road heavy with traffic, and a sidewalk cluttered with rubble, rubbish and life.

On the right there's a taxi stand. It's a tent with a telephone and a sign, surrounded by black cars with yellow tops and lounging drivers waiting for a call. Then there's the traffic court.  Along the wall is a row of neatly placed tables and chairs, and wired to the fence above are the shingles of the advocates who will, right there, under the trees and amid the traffic, assist you with your complaint.

Next is a little row of shanties,  built with sticks and straw and woven plastic sheeting. In one, a little horse-shoe shaped stove had a fire of broken sticks. Three kids maybe 7-8 years old squatted around the fire, wrapped in brown shawls against the chill. On a curved griddle (called a tawa), they were making rotis for the family's evening meal. Stray dogs lay around sleeping, hoping no doubt for meal scraps afterward.

The park itself is pretty big. I walked in and found a plant nursery and a designated urban forest and a covey of peafowl on the locked latrine. They looked at me suspiciously in the dusk while I took pictures. I encountered two trees full of crows, who flew into a cawing flapping mass and screamed insults at me when I tried to take photos of them. Several trees fruited with roosting mynah birds (they're common in Delhi). They didn't give a damn about the camera.

The weather's cleared and though the trees are still dusty, it's beginning to look more like spring.