IT was the week after they arrived that Alice first noticed it through their screen door. It was the size of an emaciated rat, all black, and it had a totally hairless tail. She would walk by the door and call to Clayton, "It's here again, the black mange, what are we going to do?"

"Don't feed it! One morsel and he'll never go away. If we fed every dog in India," and his voice would trail off into a mumble.

The puppy continued to sit outside their door staring through the screen, a small heap of black bones, all eyes. He never scratched at the screen or whimpered or barked; he had come, perhaps, through one of the holes in their gate. For a week he perched on their doorsteps while workers in gray pajamas squatted in corners of the house waiting for the right piece to arrive so they could install a fan; hawkers sang their wares outside the gate, and the neighbors hung over the wall nudging each other and giggling, staring at Alice's fairness while she dipped water from the well in the front yard and smiled thinly in the direction of their smooth faces, their liquid eyes like dark pools. She ignored the women and talked to the dog who was heaped like a dirty rag on their porch.

Every now and then she tried to shoo him away but he persistently remained, a dark smudge in the corner of her eye. She watched him maneuver the garbage heap outside their gate, stealing from the cows, chappaties and other garbage tossed from kitchen windows. He would run up under the cows, scrambling patterns in the pink sand, the scraps gone before the humped white cows could bend their slow necks. The neighbors hated him for this.