The short story "The Dog of Tithwal" by Saadat Hasan Manto tells of a stray dog encountering factions of soldiers in a beautiful but remote mountainous area. The story takes place in Tithwal, also known as Titwal or Teetwal, which is on the border between the Indian and Pakistani regions of Kashmir.

The story begins in the camp of the Indian soldiers. They find the dog in the bushes, give it an Indian name, and jokingly demand to know whether it is an Indian or Pakistani dog. The dog then wanders into the Pakistani camp, where the Pakistani soldiers find the dog's Indian name written on a rough collar and change it to a Pakistani name. Finally, when the dog attempts to cross back over to the Indian camp, both sides begin firing on it until it is killed.

The conflict or war in which the story takes place is the ongoing Indian-Pakistani struggle for Kashmir. This disagreement over where the border should be placed began after the Indian Subcontinent was partitioned into the country of India and the country of Pakistan in 1947. When the British left the subcontinent and granted self-rule, the land was divided according to religious differences, with Pakistan regarded as a Muslim state and India supposedly a secular state but with Hindus in the majority.

Several wars have been fought between India and Pakistan over the issue of the Kashmir region, and between wars there have been conflicts among militant factions and each country's security forces. Manto does not specify the exact time period of the story. However, what we know is that it takes place in the incomparably beautiful mountainous region of Kashmir between soldiers that on both sides are fully convinced their cause is the righteous one. For Manto, the incident with the dog expresses the pointlessness of using armed conflict to settle this issue.