Cynthia A. Branigan - The Last Diving Horse in America: Rescuing Gamal and Other Animals—Lessons in Living and Loving

In 1980 on West 57th Street in New York, you could set your watch by the chanting of the Hare Krishnas. Every afternoon at five oclock the saffron- and claret- and tangerine-robed throng serenaded midtown with an ecstatic, impassioned, a cappella performance punctuated by a trembling tambourine. Actually, I heard them before I saw them, faintly when they rounded the corner of Seventh by Carnegie Hall, louder as they moved east toward the Russian Tea Room, and louder still as their spiritual conga line reached the office building of The Fund for Animals, where I was working. From a large bay window, I would gaze down at them as they snaked along the street, their daily devotional drifting from the gum-stained sidewalk, rising up the elegant but soot-covered building, and permeating the dingy windows.

Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna, Krishna Krishna, Hare Hare

Some of the other employees must have taken the song-and-dance routine as a sign from God that they should straighten their desks, pack their belongings, and call it a day. No one looked at me to see how long I was staying. By now they knew that I was more the ten-to-six type, or even the eleven-to-seven type, and no one was willing to stay at the office that late. And why should they? They arrived hours before I did. When they realized I was not watching them, they stopped watching me.

In fact, I barely noticed their departure. My interest was in the show on the street. It wasnt the Krishnas bright swirling hues or exotic sounds that caught my attention, although I could hardly be blamed if it was. Between New Yorks precarious financial footing and skyrocketing crime rate, these were bleak, even dangerous, times in the city. Any pop of color or hint of optimism was a welcome respite.

Neither was my interest in their ritual a result of my being shocked by every sight and sound in New York. I may not have been a native New Yorker, but I grew up little more than an hour away. It was vital to my father, if not always to me, that I be well traveled and well educated, someone who hailed from New Jersey, not Joisey. When we werent traveling the world, we were visiting the crossroads of the world, New York.

Although I was affected by the Krishnas, surely it was not in the way they intended. I experienced no subsequent compulsion to bolt from the office, renounce my few worldly possessions, and join the devotees. My fascination was more practical than spiritual: they seemed not only to have discovered their calling, but knew what to do with it once they did. I could not say the same for myself.

My twin passionswanting to write and wanting animals in my lifehad been whispering in my ear for as long as I could remember. In Greyhound racing circles, they might have said I came out of the box with early speed. My mother unleashed a monster when, between music and art appreciation, she also taught me to read. By age three I had exhausted her homemade curricula and insisted on attending kindergarten. My parents enrolled me at the only school that would accept a child my age: a Victorian-era relic directed by its equally old-fashioned founder, Miss Ireland. By age five I grabbed my crayons, found some index cards, and wrote my first story, The Book of a Kids Life. The plot, thinly disguised propaganda: A girl refuses to take a nap unless her mother agrees to get both a cat and a dog from the local shelter. The mother relents, and both creatures become part of the family (using a writers prerogative, I dropped the nap subplot).

In real life, my desire for animal companions was only partially fulfilled. We always had a cat or two, ragged males we found, or who found us. These scrawny, dirty, beat-up toms walked the thin line between feral and domesticated. With enormous scarred heads, and equally oversized testicles, their pleading eyes told a cautionary tale of what comes of being a slave to lust. If any stick-thin female cat tried to slither in our door, she would be whisked to an uncles farm to live out her life as a mouser in an empty barn. Once there, I would never see her again; but I would never forget her, either.