We had a beautiful puppy named Tommy at our hostel. It used to amuse every one of us with different tricks — like barking in different styles, doing Namaste with its limbs, and dancing to our songs. But in no time its behaviour became bad and our hostel manager had to ba-nish it from the hostel thi-nking it would create unnecessary problems later.

Tommy then started living a street life, perhaps eating from rubbish on the streets and drinking water from the drainage. We all missed it and searched for it.

Once, a couple of days back, we had gone for an outing from the hostel and as we were walking along Newroad, a strange dog licked one of our friends’ fingers. We picked up stones to chase it away, but, interestingly, it sat down on the ground and greeted us doing Namaste. Oh! We then knew that it was our Tommy, which had become very lean and thin. What an intelligent animal! It knew it was us before we even recognised it.

We caressed Tommy for sometime and it kept wagging its tail. We then bought a packet of its favo-urite biscuit for it. We thought that it wo-uld remain there eating the biscuits but it quietly followed us, instead. We entered the hostel through the main gate but it remained outside. Our hostel teacher scolded Tommy and it hurriedly moved away. We all were watching this happen. Far from us, Tommy looked back once again and disappeared among the tall buildings. Many of our friends’ eyes were moist with tears.

— Class X students Bal Prabhat

Boarding School, New Road, Pokhara