I HAVE never known life without a dog. Jack came first — before memory, before language. He lay under my bed when there was no nanny, alerting my mother when I cried as a newborn, following me around on my walker as though he had appointed himself my first guide in this world. We took our dogs everywhere, including a cruel six-month quarantine in the UK in the early 1990s, because that is what you do when an animal is family. You do not leave them behind.

Chia arrived 12 years ago and immediately made clear she had her own terms.

She trained beautifully for her trainer — sat, stayed, heeled with the precision of a dog who understood exactly what was being asked of her. The moment he left, she returned to her natural state, as if to say: ‘he gets the obedience. You get my irreverence.’ I stopped being frustrated. There is a particular intelligence in knowing which rules apply to you and which don’t.

She was an equal opportunity lover. She did not discriminate — not by class, not by disposition, not by whether you liked dogs. She would work her way through the entire galli, disarming the harshest critics one by one, until even the most committed dog-hater had softened. A neighbour kept a monkey in a cage outside his gate. That monkey would wait for Chia. When she arrived, he would reach through the steel bars to hold her — and she would let him. If you needed proof that love recognises no boundaries, there it was, in a galli in Karachi, between a dog and a caged monkey who had found each other anyway.

How we treat animals says something unambiguous about us.

She also had politics, or at least she shared mine. Every single day, she relieved herself outside a particular official’s house — with a consistency and a commitment that I can only describe as principled. She knew. I’m convinced she knew.

When we brought other dogs home, she tolerated it. When stray cats followed us in, she tolerated that too. She taught us, quietly that almost everything can be tolerated — my moves away to Vietnam, my returns, my uncertainty, the losses that accumulate in life.

If someone shed a tear in her presence, she would come immediately, not with noise but with weight, placing herself against you as if to say: ‘I’ll take some of that.’

In the end, it was old age — the one opponent she could not outwit, could not charm, could not simply ignore until it went away. She had spent 12 years placing herself against anyone who needed the weight of her. Chia faced death the same way she faced everything else: on her own terms, for as long as she possibly could. In a country where staying, truly and unconditionally, has become a radical act, Chia was the most radical creature I knew.

Twelve years is a long time anywhere. In Karachi, it is several lifetimes. Chia sat beside me through all of it — but she also walked through a city that has never quite decided what to do with its animals. We are a place of profound contradictions: a culture that can be extraordinarily tender towards creatures, and yet one where strays are poisoned in the streets, where the municipal response to an animal problem is extermination, where animal welfare legislation exists largely on paper and almost never in practice.

There are people who show up anyway — the feeders who come every morning before the city wakes, the small rescues operating on no budget and absolute conviction, the individuals who have decided that if the state will not be accountable to these animals, they will be. They are doing, quietly and without recognition, some of the most thankless and necessary work this city produ­­­-ces.

Chia was luc­ky. She was lov­ed, housed, fed, mourned. Most animals in this city are not. The same galli where she charmed every sceptic into softness is also a galli where strays are kicked, starved, or quietly disappeared when they become inconvenient. We are capable of the monkey reaching through the cage to hold her and we are equally capable of the cage being the kindest thing an animal here ever encounters.

I am aware some will feel this column is excessive — grief, for a dog. We do not make easy room for it here, and we make even less room for the animals who have no one to grieve for them at all. But how we treat the animals around us — the ones we own and the ones we don’t — says something unambiguous about us. Tenderness, when it is selective, is not really tenderness at all. It is preference dressed up as love. This is not a peripheral issue. It sits at the same table as every other conversation about what kind of city, what kind of people, we are choosing to be.

Chia had someone in her corner. She always did. The ones on our streets are still waiting.

The writer is a former journalism instructor.

X: @LedeingLady

Published in Dawn, May 10th, 2026