Sometimes it takes a mongrel to illuminate life’s joys

AS I write a storm’s arriving, rain hitting the roof like thrown nails. Yet only two nights ago it was the highest of high summer, hot as the equator, Singapore hot, Singapore humid. I took a cooling shower before bed, but the house had gathered the day’s heat and held it, and by the time I’d towelled myself I was filmed with sweat again.

I wanted bed but the sheets would cling and twist and the pillow prickle. So I wrapped the towel around my waist and poured a last glass of wine and went outside and sat on a chair on the deck.

My dog, puzzled by such latenight antics, slid off the battered recliner chair that is his bed, and followed me out, sat at my side and nudged at my free hand to induce some absentminded stroking.

A lamp on the flank of the house was a mothMecca, was the Kaaba itself, the black stone at the heart of the great mosque, round which a million Muslim pilgrims circle on the Haj.

The moths were monomaniac, obsessive, writhing over each other to no purpose, and if you followed the weak rays of the bulb out into the blackness you could see whole squadrons more approaching and squadrons beyond them, stretching back into the night towards the point of mothorigin, like a radiotelescope looking back down time’s corridor to the unimaginable, startofitall bang.

We are such creatures of the day. We equate light with life and dark with death. Our funerals are black, our weddings white.

But in our blindness we forget that night teems every bit as much as day. And on this night the humid heat gave spontaneous birth not just to moths but to a billion other insects, insects that fizzed and blundered, squealed like drills, that brushed and fluttered, bit and mated, and then died, every one of them, anonymous, by dawn.

And it wasn’t only insects. Somewhere up the valley frogs were chirping like telephonic birds. Where they found water, or even dampness, here on the parched hills in the fiercest of summers I don’t know, but their chorus was loud and constant, jungle drums, over which the other night sounds played, the occasional closetohuman shriek of who knows what, the mocking growl and cackle of a possum.

I sipped my wine and patted the great slab of my naked Friar Tuck belly, and felt pleased to be there. Nightlife.

My dog’s flank stiffened under my hand and he whimpered and then I saw what he had sensed, made out the shape at the top of the drive. A dog, dark as a shadow, snuffling and panting, a vagrant. My dog went to meet the intruder.

I watched the two of them tautly circle with the ancient etiquette that goes back to the savannah and the pack, the raised tail, the sniffing. And when the vagrant dog came barrelling up the path and into the circle of lamplight I recognised it, a mutt from further down the road, a lowslung mongrel whose owners just open the back door of an evening and let him wander.

Once in a thunderstorm I found him in the back seat of my car in the garage, alongside my dog, the pair of them trembling.

But he’s a fine beast, a swashbuckler dog, an adventurer of the night, explorer and scavenger. He snorts and pants and exudes the energy of being messily, strongly, unashamedly alive.

He saw me and froze. He knows to be wary of us apes. We’re hard to predict. Some of us harry him off our territory, throwing stones or swinging a boot. But others welcome him, and I am one such, but he came with caution, tail swinging lower, and he sniffed my hand, and I stroked his beating flank and instantly he was reassured of allrightness and was a slaphappy dog again, alive in the here and now, infectiously how we all ought to be.

He was panting with the night’s heat and I filled a bowl with a hose and he drank at it even as I set it down, slurping up a pint or more with noisy relish and slopping another over the deck. When he lifted his head again you would have sworn he was grinning.

Then off he set on a tour of the deck and the garden, consumed by the pleasures of the world in the night’s hot and tasty jungle. And when he was done he went back off into the night with a sort of meaty energy, a relish, a sheer bloody tactile happiness in the present tense and no thought for any storms that might be brewing. Wisdom. Good. I went to my hot bed happy by contagion.