Sophie arrived in September 2018, nine months old, with the energy of someone who has decided the world is basically fine and she will move through it at her own pace, thank you very much.
She came from World For All Animals in Mumbai — a rescue organisation that takes in strays, gets them healthy, and finds them homes with people who have clearly passed some kind of invisible test. I don’t know exactly what the test was. I’d like to think I did well on it. Sophie has never confirmed this, except by being my adventure buddy in life and giving me all her love.
From the beginning, she was her own person. Not aloof — she’s deeply, quietly affectionate — but entirely on her own terms. She doesn’t perform. She doesn’t do anything for the sake of doing it. If there’s a phone or an iPad on the sofa, she will stand at the edge and wait, with great dignity, for you to move it before she jumps up. She does not make a fuss about this. She simply waits. She knows it will be moved. It always is.
She reads moods the way some people read rooms — instantly, accurately, without being asked. On bad days she appears and stations herself next to me, not crowding, just present. On good days she’s somewhere sunny, doing the very specific kind of nothing that dogs have perfected and humans have entirely lost the ability to do.
I booked four weeks and went to see for myself.
She has lived, in her years with me, a fairly extraordinary life for a Mumbai street dog. Every month we’d make a pilgrimage to Phoebe’s Farm in Khopoli — a brilliant pet resort-cum-shelter where she’d run off leash across paddy fields, swim in the river, dig up mud on the banks, while we slept in luxury tents and ate every meal together with other pets and their people. She discovered Goa — the space, the smells, the paddy fields she clearly loved as much as I love sarson ke khet. She survived a cyclone, a move to a hotel (no one has ever appreciated a Marriott bed more than Sophie), the arrival of the raised beds she was absolutely not allowed to dig in.
And then she came to the Nilgiris.
She’s an explorer at heart, and loves every place, as long as I am there too. She takes it all completely in stride. Of course this is where we live. Of course there are hills and mist and birds she’s never seen before. She adapts with the quiet confidence of someone who has always assumed things would work out.
She was here first, and the estate bears her mark in small ways. The particular spot on the driveway that’s hers. The corner of the deck from where she can see the village and the road below stretch on both sides — I partly built the deck for her, knowing she’d want that vantage point. Every morning she does a full survey of the estate. It’s her job, and she does it with great purpose.
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