Haroon Bijli

If you’re walking in the streets of Mumbai, you develop a certain skill, that of avoiding doggie poop. After a given time, it becomes a muscle memory; you learn to identify the object irrespective of its state of disintegration, and adjust your stride accordingly.

Then one fine day, an expensively adorned cute little puppy and its walker (the rich don’t walk their dogs) cut across your path and before you know it, you’ve stepped on its freshly laid poop. Expensive, branded dog food poop, but messy and putrid nevertheless.

You spend the rest of your walk trying to scrape that mess out of your shoes, stopping at every rough surface, dry leaves or the little puddles of car-washing water.

Some people look at you strangely. What a moron, they say. He should be grateful, he should know that the dog is pedigreed, worth lakhs if not crores, sleeps in beds with the finest upholstery, travels in classy limos and eats only the most exquisite branded (but vegetarian) dog food available. A few of them get angry. How can you treat that poop with such disdain? You’re scrubbing it off? How dare you!

But million dollar poop or not, it persists and irritates, and stays stuck on your shoes for a long time till you eventually get rid of it.

Till the next time.

(This is a work of fiction any resemblance to recent viral social media events is coincidental and probably only in your mind)