Extract

OCTOBER 2009—EIGHTEEN MONTHS after my mother had died—I was scouting the net to buy a dresser. An odd, desperate classified: a college student, unable to care for an eight-week-old miniature dachshund puppy, had put her up for adoption. The student arrived at a friend’s office in Khar with the puppy, who had the swift, elusive air of a mongoose; tan, brisk, soft, supple as if drawn out of hot wax.

Under the shade of a giant rain tree, I rang my sister to say I was coming home with a puppy, she might cheer my father up—he was now cured of his cancer. In early 2008, we had shut off my mother’s room after her death; now, we’d have to open it up again, the puppy needed space. On the ride home I felt I was bringing home a baby, her large wondering eyes gazed out at me, her paws were the dearest thing. She had that biscuit smell of puppies.

“Why Bruschetta?” My sister Parul, who met us at the front door, asked. I’d spent the previous summer in Rome where, at a ristorante on the Tiber in Trastavere, a plate of bruschetta was all I could afford on a night out. “Small but delicious,” I told Parul, who stroked Bruschetta’s pendant ears. Behind her, emerging through the hedge of areca palms, a black butterfly with red wingtips.

Although dachshunds were originally bred to hunt badgers, they have also privileged artists and writers as muses: David Hockney’s Stanley and Boodgie became subjects of his paintings, and later, a book—Dog Days. E.B. White wrote of his own wiener dog Fred, famously recalcitrant and single-minded. For Vanity Fair Dorothy Parker was photographed with Robinson, who exhibited a dachshund’s housetraining woes at the Algonquin Hotel—their carpets never recovered. Andy Warhol often arrived at Studio 54 with Archie. Like the artist, Archie was said to stare intently at guests without further comment.