As usual, I was wandering from one room to another inside my house to find a convenient place to solve Maths problems. I was wandering.. not because I wanted to get a suitable place to study Maths, but because, my father had told me in the morning to complete three exercises of Quadratic equations before he returns from office, but Maths is a subject which seems monstrous to me. I'm not exaggerating, but studying Maths has always been a torture. Finally, I sat down on a sofa in the living room. From the big French-style windows, I could see the road outside. After solving each question, I would watch the road for a five-second break. The road was calm. Its location in the Cantonment area was the reason for very little traffic on the road.

I was solving the maths problems peacefully, until I suddenly heard a loud Thud quickly followed by continuous barking of a dog. In a moment I realized that some car must have moved over the dog. I ran to the balcony beside the window. I was right. I saw three people in a Maruti 800 trying to look and figure out what had happened to the dog. Then the driver sped up. I noticed, the dog was alright . I recognized, it was the same dog which would follow me playfully every evening, whenever I used to move out from my house for a jog. It was a black and white street dog-neither beautiful nor ugly. It was okay. Often it used to come inside the lawn in front of my house.

Standing on the balcony, I observed the dog running restlessly here and there, as if something was wrong with it. I was confused. Then it turned. And lo ! Its tail had been chopped off ! I saw a lot of blood oozing out slowly from its wound. 'Oh no! This should not have happened. This is so painful!' I screamed inside my head. I felt very awful and pitiful at the same time. The dog ran towards the gate and returned again. It was shrieking out loud because of immense pain. It ran again and got out of my sight. My eyes searched for it for a few minutes. I moved into another balcony on the other side to see where the doggy went. Looking at it once again made me feel worse. By now, both of its legs were red with blood. It was crying out more loudly now. Seeing its such a poor condition, my eyes got misty. Perhaps, I would have been able to alleviate its pain, but I was too afraid to go downstairs and get closer to it. 'What if he gets frightened and bites me ?', I thought.  Also, I had no idea about what I could do to help the poor dog. The dog ran and screamed for a while and then got disappeared again. It left behind bloodstains on the ground.

Only if I could know how to help that poor little creature, or if I had known a local vet's contact number, I would have definitely been able to lessen the dog's pain. But I didn’t even try to help. I knew it was futile to feel upset for it when I didn't help it. But I was really upset. However, I came back in my living room and picked up my maths notebook. Images of the dog bathed in dark red blood kept flashing in my mind for a long time. It was a horrific scene. Horrific, it was, because I heard the dog crying and I saw it suffering intense pain and I knew it that it was actually feeling pain and its blood was red, just like humans, just like...me. Had its blood were green or silver, maybe I would have not felt so bad for it.

I don't know where the dog is now. If the dog had an owner, then I could have hoped something. But since it was a stray dog, I suppose no one will really help it. Because if humans were to help in the first place the driver would have stopped the car just as he would do for a human being, or maybe not- perhaps the driver won’t have stopped even for a human.