Neel's neighbour Mrs. Sharma had the meanest dog in the colony.

That was what everyone said, anyway. Rocky was a big German Shepherd with a bark that rattled the windows. He paced behind the iron gate all day, his nails clicking on the cement driveway, his ears flat against his skull. The younger children crossed the street to avoid Mrs. Sharma's house. Even the postman left her letters at the gate pillar instead of walking up to the door.

"Vicious animal," Neel's mother said, pulling him away from the fence one afternoon. "Mrs. Sharma keeps him half-starved. That's why he's so angry."

Neel believed this for two years. Rocky was the enemy dog. The dangerous one. The one you never looked at directly.

Then one evening during a power cut, Neel climbed onto the terrace to escape the heat and happened to look down into Mrs. Sharma's backyard. The old woman was sitting on a plastic chair under a neem tree, and Rocky was lying beside her with his head in her lap. She was stroking his ears and talking to him in a low, gentle voice. Every few seconds, Rocky's tail thumped against the ground — not the aggressive bark-and-lunge Rocky that Neel had always seen, but a tired old dog who liked having his ears scratched.

Then Mrs. Sharma pulled a steel bowl from beside her chair and set it down. It was full of rice and dal and pieces of chicken. Rocky ate slowly, almost politely, and when he was done, Mrs. Sharma wiped his muzzle with a cloth. "Good boy," she said. "Good boy."

Neel sat on the terrace for a long time after the lights came back on, feeling a strange ache in his chest. He had spent two years hating Rocky — or rather, hating the idea of Rocky that he had built in his mind. The real Rocky was a guard dog who did his job during the day and ate rice and dal from a steel bowl at night. He was not evil. He was not half-starved. He was just a dog behind a fence.

Arjuna asks to see the warriors who have gathered to please Duryodhana. He calls Duryodhana "durbuddhi" — evil-minded. But even as he uses that word, he wants to look at the men who follow Duryodhana. He wants to see them as they are, not as he has imagined them to be.

This matters. When we are about to fight, we make the other side into something less than human — a name, a label, a bark behind a fence. Arjuna refused to do that. He said: before I raise my bow, let me see their faces. Let me see who they really are.