There’s a time of night in the city when the animals rule. Those who work late on the streets and also live there have finally gone to sleep. The rickshaw-pullers, istiriwallahs, ragpickers and even the homeless insane have all called it a day; the cabs have vanished. That’s when the dogs come out in packs to tear into the garbage bags and rummage inside the bins. Their relentlessness is the opposite of the city’s exhausted surrender to sleep. The cats are awake too. But they go about their scavenging with a silent, but wary disdain for the wolfishness of the dogs. The moon is nowhere to be seen, and the crows have settled into sleep among the high branches, like black fruit. Every now and then, they seem to have a collective nightmare, suddenly breaking into a din for a few seconds and, just as suddenly, going back to sleep. Sometimes, a mole sends out its shrieks into the night, like a rape-alarm refusing to stop, and goes quiet again. A human baby crying out somewhere could be mistaken now for a lustful tomcat.

Walking back home at this time of the night, the street on which I’ve lived all my life becomes, for a while, a corner of hell — strewn with what the dogs have messed up but left uneaten, plastic bags tossing about in the breeze. The halogen air is malign with the day’s refuse starting to rot and with rampant, canine terror. Turning the last corner before my house, my eyes meet those of a pack of dogs frozen in mid-hunt by my footsteps, and my heart stops with fear. I quickly wake the istiriwallah sleeping on his cart and plead with him to reach me home. He advises me never to look into a dog’s eye and not to let it sense my panic. “You see,” he adds, “this is the time when those we cannot tame come out. Some of them are spirits, and if you take Ram’s name when they come near you, you will see them melting into the night.”

There are pets, I realize, and there are animals. If pets create in our lives a realm of tender control, of possession and dependence at its least pathological, of tameness at its least boring, then the realm of animals is its dark obverse. It is one of mythic fears and revulsions — phobias — and of instant, unthinking cruelty. Think of snakes, rats, lizards, bats, cockroaches, wasps and ants. Our coexistence with creatures that are not human, especially in the cities, always has these two sides. Masterless cows aren’t so much a part of the city’s streets any more. But there still exists a prolific grey zone between the fierce and the tame: the world of the strays — usually dogs and cats, but sometimes more exotic fauna as well — that haunt our lives with their discomfiting otherness. They keep undoing the barriers between what must be kept out and what could be let in, between pity and hygiene, compassion and safety.

Just outside my ground-floor bedroom is the wall surrounding the house. Sometimes, late at night, a Cat That Walks By Himself — remember that monster of aloofness in one of Kipling’s Just So Stories? — walks past my window along the top of the wall. With the next-door insomniac’s bedroom light falling on the creature from the other side, its giant shadow moving upon the fragile walls of my mosquito-net. I’ve kept the mosquitoes out. But this leopard-shaped piece of the night has somehow got in, and prowls the borders of my sleep.