One dog, one bad afternoon

I don't think about this much anymore, but it came back to me recently while I was thinking back on second grade. It's the only time in my life a dog has truly scared me, and I figured it was worth writing down. My parents both worked, so one of them would drop me off at school in the morning. In the afternoon, an auto-rickshaw driver was hired to pick up a few of us kids and bring us home. He didn't drive all the way to our house, though -- we lived in what we called a "line veedu", a cluster of rental houses close together. He'd drop me off at the bus stop, and I'd walk the rest of the way, alone, maybe five or ten minutes. Part of that walk, about 300 meters, ran through a stretch with a lot of trees and not many people around. There was also a spot nearby where people used to dump trash. I never thought much about it. I was just a kid walking home. One day, on that same walk, I saw a dog. Black. One of those Indian pariah dogs. We made eye contact, and something in that moment…