Summary of Chapter - 1 (Page-2)

Then one full moon night, on the fifteenth day of the fourth month of the Bhutanese calendar, after roaming around the town for the sixth time, Dawa looked up to the sky and was wonderstruck by the beauty and perfection of 'the big, circular yellow mystery’. He decided to call himself Dawa Koto, a strange fusion of the perfect and the imperfect.

Inspired by the name, he started walking around confidently. So much so that the other dogs became curious, teasing and tormenting him to no ends. But despite all the teasings and torments, Dawa prevailed over them. His new-found confidence instilled in him a desire, an ambition to be looked up to in the dog community. He wanted to be the leader of the howling pack. He practised day in and day out, taking his stance under the spread of the willow tree on the left bank of the Paro river. He put in all the hard labour till he was sure of leadership.

Exactly a year after he christened himself Dawa Koto, on a full-moon night, he patiently waited for ‘the glorious golden circle’ to come out. Finally when it was out and cast its hypnotic spell over the valley, Dawa let out the howl. He howled thrice. A few dogs pitched in the third time he was doing it.. Surrounded by the unbelieving dogs, he went on howling to the sheer distress and discomfort of the local populace. Dawa felt sad at humans’ inability to grasp the reason behind the howling. So this is how he became the undisputed leader of the howling pack.

One day he was sitting on a pavement near a shop when a shower of dried fish fell down from the sack being unloaded from a truck alluring some stray dogs to the spot in a flash. The angry shop owner, in order to teach them a lesson, asked his reluctant, TV addicted, obese son to fetch the whip, a bunch of electrical wires tied together. At Dawa’s prior warning, the dogs fled away, leaving the man frustrated and venting his anger on his son.

Later on, on being asked to explain how he knew human language, Dawa admitted his knowledge of human language. What he did not know, however, was that in his previous birth, he was a translator and knew many languages other than Dzonkha. In a strange twist of fate, he was reborn as a dog thereby retaining all his linguistic skills of the previous life.