How not to make friends

The knock on the door came at 3.45am.

I happened to be up, expecting a cab, at 4am, to take girlfriend Jane and I to Goa's Dabolim airport she was due to travel from Mumbai to London the next day.

Instead of the cab driver, however, a skinny man with a Hawaiian shirt and long blond hair stood on the porch. He had an umbrella but was soaked to the skin.

"Excyuz me," he said in a Russian accent. "I've lwost my gyessst house. You can hyelp me, please?" Panic in his voice suggested drug-induced paranoia.

"Where is your guesthouse?" I said.

"It's nyerrr white church," he said. (So is everywhere in Goa.)

"Can you think of any other place?"

"Yes," he said. "There is a road." Brilliant, I thought. Narrows things down.

My guess would be he was on acid either that, or I was. I closed the door and told him, let's call him Pavel Chekov, to wait.

"You won't believe it," I told Jane. "There's a Star Trek character at the door who's lost his guesthouse."

"No way," she said. "Wonder where he put it?"

At 4am, on the dot, back-up arrived in the form of our cab driver Ashley.

"We-want-to-help-you," I said to Chekov, rather aggressively. "What does your guesthouse look like?"

"Ahh?" he said.

"LOOK LIKE what does your guesthouse LOOK LIKE?"

"Eez yellow," he said. "With red flowers."

Ashley gave me a look and smiled, an accomplishment at so unearthly an hour.

"Have you friends we can telephone who can help you?" I said.

"No."

Ashley agreed to drive Chekov around for ten minutes in case he'd recognise something, perhaps a white church. Wrestler, the fluffy white Pomeranian protector of the house, trotted after them, stopping to sniff at a plant, oblivious to the downpour.

Where were the other two dogs, Guido and Bruiser? The point of them was for strangers in the night to be barked away while my friends, who own the house, stayed in London in monsoon time.

Guido: sharp, sensitive to boot, craves human affection more than the others. It's the lack of such affection that led him to defect to the cleaner's pad. "The only way to get him back is to give him a reason for staying," said my dog-loving friend Sangeeta. "And you can always strap him to a post."

The cleaner's children adore Guido and give him all of the hugs and stroking my friends don't during the season, to my friends a dog is a dog.

He has depression, I thought, when I saw Guido moping about in the front garden wearing a glum expression a few months ago. I could probably help him if he opened up to me.

Ashley, the cab driver, returned without his Russian passenger.
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"What did you do with him?"

"I stop by shop he got off," said Ashley. "I gave him my number. If he need, he call."

Now hurtling towards the airport, Ashley navigated pitch-black lanes and, impressively, failed to kill cyclists who chose to ride without visibility lights despite having thought to wear raingear. ("Don't mind getting killed, so long as I don't get wet in the process.")

Having seen Jane off, I returned to Goa. Now, like Guido, I was lacking affection. So I dognapped Guido and forced him back to the house.

I marched to the cleaner's home and Guido ran up to me, jumping in joy. I grabbed his collar, floored him, tied rope to it, and goosestepped him HOME. Then, I knotted him to the railings on the porch. Out of nowhere, Bruiser appeared "Where have you been?" I yelled. Before he could make a run for it, I tied him to the nearest object, a plastic chair. When he moved and found the chair followed him, he whimpered in fear. Wrestler, the Pomeranian, stepped up and barked at me. My neighbours, two Goan women who share the same pathway, stopped to stare at us.

"Good doggie-doggie," I said to Bruiser, feigning sanity, wishing I hadn't tied him to a chair. "Wrestler, SHUT UP!" I waved at the women and smiled. Minutes later, the dogs looked philosophical about being restrained and chomped at the food pellets I had issued them.

My mobile phone rang, it was Jane from London.

"You've tied the dogs up?" she said. "No wonder they don't like you." I darted downstairs to release the dogs, patting them and stroking them with abandon. They didn't run away. We were a happy pack again.

A few days later I spotted Chekov at the supermarket. He'd had a haircut and looked dapper in a green Lacoste shirt and brown combat shorts. His shopping basket contained pasta and eggs.

"Hey man," I said. "You found the hotel?" He looked bemused.u00a0

"Guesthouse," I said. "Big red flowers."

He looked surprised I knew what his guesthouse looked like and walked off. I was another a madman, like the cyclist who braves roads at night with no lights but does wear raingear.

Iranian-born Peyvand Khorsandi is a journalist and stand-up comic based in London. He is in Goa, writing his first collection of short stories.