The Senior Carried the Chain: A Story of Two Kalis

I’ve been thinking a lot about the word “good.” We all want to be good people, right? But lately, I’ve been looking back at my childhood and realizing how much of my “goodness” today is built on the mistakes I made when I didn’t know any better.

They say we do not truly know a soul until we have looked into the eyes of a dog. But what happens when those eyes are searching for a home you haven’t yet learned how to build?

The Wanderer: Senior Kali

I had a dog named Kali. We call her Senior now, mostly because of Junior, the dog who occupies my life today.

Senior was… different. We got her when she was maybe a month old. Looking back, I can see it so clearly now; she was just a baby, staring at the road, waiting for a face she recognized. We were so scared she’d get hit by a car that we chained her. And honestly? I think that was the beginning of the end. The more we pulled, the more she wanted to run.

She became a ghost. She’d escape, roam for days, and come back smelling like the streets and covered in mud. My father, frustrated and tired of the “smelly dog” problem, eventually took her far away and left her. I can’t even describe the guilt of that. But the crazy part? Senior came back. It took a week, but she found us.

When she finally found her way back home, my heart felt a sudden, sharp relief , but it was quickly followed by a cold guilt. I had let her be abandoned in a place where she was completely alone.

After that, our lives settled into a quiet, hollow routine. There was nothing left to say and nothing more to write. She belonged to the chowk now, a ghost of a dog who only occasionally walked beside us. Then, one day, the silence changed. We stopped seeing her altogether. The chowk felt empty, like a stage without its actor. We searched every corner, every shadow, but she was gone. She had vanished into the very freedom we were always so afraid to give her.

A month passed. The searching ended when we finally saw her. But she wasn’t running, and she wasn’t looking for home anymore. She was just… dead. “

For a long time, I was just a kid wondering what I’d say to her old owner if she ever showed up. I was scared of being scolded. Looking back, that feels so selfish. Was I mourning her, or was I just afraid of being a “bad kid”?

The Second Chance

Then came Junior.

I think I was trying to apologize to Senior for the way I treated Junior. We got her even younger, maybe two weeks old. This time, there were no chains. We took her to the grass, we let her sit by the shop, and we just… let her be.

And it worked. Junior is 8 years old now. She doesn’t run away. She knows the path to the shop and back home by heart. She’s polite, maybe too polite. Sometimes I wonder if I scolded her too much, if I broke a bit of her spirit to make sure she didn’t end up like Senior. She doesn’t have that “rejection power” or that wild survival instinct Senior had. She’s soft. She’s like a sister to me.

When I come home from living away, the way She jumps and dances… It’s like she’s saying, “I’ve been waiting to tell you everything.”

Am I a “Good Person”?

There’s a quote that’s been stuck in my head: If you are not sure about something, it’s not that you don’t know; it’s that you are fearing something.

I think I’m afraid that I failed senior . I’m afraid that my “protection” was actually the reason she stayed in the mud and the streets. If I hadn’t chained her, maybe she would have stayed. Or maybe she would have died even sooner. I’ll never know.

I used to think being a good person meant doing everything right the first time. But maybe it’s actually about carrying the weight of the things you did wrong and making sure you never do them again.

Junior lives a life of freedom because Senior lived a life on a chain. It’s a heavy trade. I’m still not sure what to feel, but I needed to get this out. I couldn’t save Senior, but I’d like to think she’d be happy seeing how Junior turned out.

Looking at my journey from Senior to Junior, do you see a person who has finally learned how to love, or do you see someone still trying to pay a debt to a dog that is no longer there? Can we ever truly outrun the ghosts of our first mistakes?