In Tokyo there is a railway station with five million people a day, and a small bronze statue of a dog beside one exit.
The dog's name was Hachiko. Every evening he walked to that exit and waited for his owner, a teacher who came home on the train at the same hour.
One day in 1925 the teacher died at work. He never came to the station again.
Hachiko came to that exit every evening for nine years and nine months. Workers fed him. Passengers stepped around him. He watched the doors.
His statue has stood at that exit since 1948, and people have used it as a meeting point for seventy years. "Meet me at Hachiko," they say. Millions of friendships have started at the feet of a faithful dog.
Now walk to a hospital gate in Tashkent.
There is a brown stray dog there with one white ear. He has slept under that gate since February. The guards have given him a name: Malchik.
"An old man came here in an ambulance in February," a nurse says. "The dog ran behind the car. He has waited at this gate for eight months."
The vet from the next street has looked after him free of charge. Two families have offered to take him home. He has refused to go: he stands, wags his tail, and stays.
Ninety years and four thousand kilometres between two dogs, and the same sentence works for both: He has waited since the day his person did not come back.