The Biscuits Are Still Here

Riki was the neighbor’s dog.

That sentence is true in the way official things are true. It says where he belonged on paper. It says who had the right to decide what would happen to him. It draws a boundary between houses and, in doing so, seems to settle the matter.

But it leaves out our kitchen.

When meat was cooked in our house, some part of it was always kept aside for him. No one announced this. No one treated it as an act of generosity. It was simply understood that Riki would get something too. Before the meal was finished, before the bones were cleared, someone would remember him.

That is how he entered our lives. Not through ownership, but through repetition. Through small, unspoken adjustments that slowly made space for him.

There were biscuit packets kept for him as well. They were bought without discussion and placed somewhere in the house for whenever he came near. Their presence carried a quiet assumption: that he would continue to be part of our days.

He lived next door, but he was included here.

That is why calling him only the neighbor’s dog feels incomplete. It is accurate, but it does not describe the waiting at the gate, the food kept aside, the years it took for a presence to stop needing an explanation.

In the cover photo, he is lying on grey tiles with his front legs stretched out, his body relaxed in the sun. His fur is black, with white on his chest and near his paws. His tongue is slightly out to one side, as if he had been caught in the middle of something simple and content. The rest of the frame is ordinary: a wall, part of a bike, a chain on the ground. Nothing in the image suggests that it will later carry weight.

At the time, it was just a moment.

He came when he was small.

He used to wait near the gate in the evenings, his tail moving before anyone called him. When our gate opened, he would run inside as if the sound had been meant for him. He learned the sounds of the lane: the scrape of metal, the rhythm of footsteps, the way our door opened. My parents knew him. The neighborhood knew him. Over time, he became part of the environment in a way that no one formally acknowledged.

Later, Tiger began coming with him. Riki had brought his friend into the little area between the houses. That is how it looked from our side: Riki came, Tiger came too, and after a while Tiger also knew the lane.

Tiger is still with the neighbor.

Then Riki was given away.

There were reasons. They said he bit. That matters. A dog who bites is not a small problem, and it cannot be ignored just because he was loved. Care matters too: how he was handled, what he was taught, what he was not taught. Maybe he had become difficult. Maybe the situation had worn people down. Maybe the person who took him really will keep him better.

All of that can be true.

But it is not the whole truth.

The biscuit packets are still in our house.

They were bought for him. They remain where they were kept, unchanged, because no one expected him to suddenly stop being part of the routine. They are small things, but they show something important: our house had already made room for him in a way that was not temporary.

The same is true of the food that used to be set aside. That habit did not come from obligation. It came from familiarity. He had been present often enough to be included without discussion.

These details do not change what happened. They do not give us any right over him. But they make it harder to accept the simplicity of the explanation.

My parents tried to convince the neighbor not to give him away. They did not have the authority to stop it, but they understood that Riki had become part of more than one household. They tried to express that, even though there was no formal way to prove it.

It did not matter.

The decision was made where the right to decide existed.

Riki did not understand any of this. He did not know about ownership or responsibility or arrangements between people. He did not know that his life was being discussed and settled in terms he could not answer.

He only experienced the result.

A different place. Different people. A different routine.

I hope he is being cared for properly. I hope the promise that was made about him is being kept. I do not want to assume that his situation is worse now. It may not be.

But that does not remove what remains here.

The biscuits are still in the house. The habit of setting aside food still exists, even if it no longer has a clear purpose. These things show that he had already been included in a way ownership did not recognize.

Nothing dramatic happened. No one died. The houses are still there.

But something changed.

A presence that had been quietly woven into our daily life was removed, and what remains are the traces of that inclusion.

Riki was the neighbor’s dog.

The biscuits are still in our house.

Both statements are true. The distance between them is where the loss exists.