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The Book of Joshua | EXTRACT

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17.11.2020

The Book of Joshua is a story about two world travellers who meet at a party and realize, as they spend the evening in each other’s company, that they are meant to be together. Enter Joshua and the couple’s life is transformed forever.

Keep reading to learn more about the irresistible cocker spaniel in The Book of Joshua.

‘I am I, because my little dog knows me’ — Gertrude Stein

 

WHEN I FINALLY SAT DOWN ONE EVENING TO WRITE THE STORY OF Joshua my first thought was that I needed to find a publisher abroad because Joshua doesn’t have too many fans in India— too many fans who know him, that is. However, those whom he has never met, at home or abroad, find him a never-ending source of fascination. This fascination has less to do with what he actually does and more with the effect he has on us.

Of course, a cocker spaniel is a cocker spaniel the world over. Anybody who has once fallen under the spell of those anguished eyes gazing into yours, declaring that you are the Master of their Universe, that silky paw pushing insistently at your cheek at 3 a.m. when he wants to go out, that rollicking bark straight from the belly as he rolls on the grass after a meal, that velvety muzzle … but let me not get carried away (or not just yet, although in the opinion of many of those dear friends who are not fans of Josh I should have been sent to take a ‘rest’ in some secluded place, several times a year, preferably taking him along). Joshua is old and grey, going on fifteen at the time of writing this book, but he was far from being full of sleep.

He may not have been able to run the way he did as a pup, with all four legs simultaneously off the ground, like a spring lamb, but he insisted on a walk every couple of hours. Unfortunately for us, even at night. Blind as he was, he had figured that it made no difference. We lived (and still do) in the mountains where there are panthers, bears and bison at large after dusk, so he had to be taken out on a leash. It may be romantic to see the stars blazing in the milky way at midnight, or the full moon sinking into the valley at 3 a.m., but we felt like hell the next morning. Naturally, Joshua had a prolonged lie-in, in his new bed, with his new quilts, recovering from the adventures of the night, while we staggered on with the business of a new day.

Of course, slower on his feet and medicated for his heart, he was watched anxiously by Antonio and myself every time he had a coughing fit, yet he still attacked his meals with the starving concentration of someone shipwrecked for a week, and adored parties more than ever. There was none of the usual mood of warming both hands at the fire of life, believing that ‘it sinks and I am ready to depart’ in Joshua’s take on ageing.

The fire of life was still inside him, and he kept it blazing merrily for as long as he possibly could.

Naturally, I felt like I couldn’t ever leave him. I recently went away for a fortnight for urgent family reasons, but apparently Joshua terrified everyone by not eating, not sleeping, and padding around in search of me until he was breathless. A friend came to stay and help; the long journey to the vet, made over the mountain roads was in desperation, but the instant I came back the patient made a miraculous recovery. Leaping like a young gazelle, he rejoiced; he ate like a boa constrictor, he rejoiced again. Finally, he fell into a deep, untroubled and abandoned sleep in his favourite posture; on his back with a paw braced against me, and didn’t budge for over twelve hours. His love was home, and all was well with the world once more. Of course, I had to stay in bed too—that goes without saying—for fear of waking him.

The first thing I would feel again, each and every morning would be a big, icy cold nose touching mine, greeting me to a new day, packed with enjoyment.

From the time I was little, I identified people by the dogs they had. Fortunately, growing up in the Calcutta of the 1960’s, I had many four-legged friends that came with their two-legged attachments. But, in our family, we had always had cocker spaniels. Cocker spaniels of every colour and variety … sometimes with a dash of mongrel, sometimes without: coal- black, blue-roan, spangled-blonde, speckled-rust, deep-tawny. All boys.

But Joshua was a revelation to me. Not only did he come into my life at a vital moment, but he was also—luckily for both of us, as all of us know how dangerous unfulfilled expectations can be—my soulmate in every way.

When I was twenty-one, I left Calcutta for Paris, where I would spend the following twenty years.The idea of Love and the Ideal Husband were as firmly intertwined in my head as I hoped I’d myself be, someday, in that man’s arms.

Eighteen years on, nothing had changed except for the second part of the equation: for Husband, substitute Dog.

But in that interim, my life had undergone many, many sea changes before I’d had my epiphany.

The best time to make dramatic changes is when there’s nothing dramatic going on. My little universe was ticking over nicely (apart from a heart that weighed more than I did at that point, over a prolonged bout of unrequited love). But, during one of my annual rejuvenating trips back to Goa to visit my family, I suddenly realised there was something missing: I wasn’t as happy to go back to Paris that January as I generally was.

Back in my flat, for about the first time in my life, I sat down on the floor of my hallway, stone-cold sober, and emptied my mind slowly of all practicalities—job, business partner, employees, friends, lovers, lame ducks—until I had created a great, big, empty space to think in. I took a deep breath and asked my gut what it wanted, and it instantly shouted back—

‘A dog! I want that cocker spaniel, that little black and white boy—I can almost smell that milky breath, I feel that ice-cold nose, I’m kissing that silky head, I want him, I want him, I want him now!’

‘What else?’ I asked my gut.

‘A garden,’ it replied, not shouting any longer, but crooning seductively,‘a garden to write and to paint in.’

‘That’s it?’
‘That’s it.’
I then rapidly calculated in my head how long it would actually take me to get things in order to be able to change continents with a clear conscience; I arrived at the figure of two years, wrote down the corresponding date, put on Leonard Cohen (‘Songs of Love and Hate’, an all-time favourite, some things don’t change), and already romping in that mythical garden with my mythical pup, proceeded to get happily drunk.

I never regretted that decision. For a while, nobody really took me very seriously. Of course, my business partner buried his head in the sand and would listen to no talk of training a replacement for me. It was only when I finally packed up my desk and told him it was my last day on the job (having already written myself a severance cheque and paid my taxes in advance), showing him my one-way ticket from Paris to Bangalore that he started like a bolting horse and began to charge around—opening file cabinets and rummaging around in them as if he hoped to find the Rosetta stone. But my mind was made up. The subsequent slide of the business into bankruptcy (although I had built it so carefully) is a story that deviates from its main objective, who at that point was barely a gleam in his father’s eye, as my own father would have said.

It was only when I started packing up my at that all the comrades started wailing, ‘But why now?’

‘When, then?’ was all I could reply.

Always better to leave at a high point in one’s life (except for the still-aching heart, but that is a given when one is a woman—a given, that is, until you find your dog) when no reason, except something primeval deep inside you tells you it’s time to go. Never wait until some negative event pushes you to leave, especially onto what you have persuaded yourself will be a wonderful new road, but which only turns out to be either a dead-end or a loop back to the beginning.

To read more from this heart-warming book, order your copy of Tanya Mendonsa’s The Book of Joshua today!

The Book Of Joshua
About the Book - The Book Of Joshua

Two world travellers meet at a party and realize, as they spend the evening in each other's company, that they are meant to be together. Enter Joshua, an irresistible cocker spaniel, and the couple's life is transformed forever. The Book…

About the Author - Tanya Mendonsa

Tanya Mendonsa was educated at Loreto school and college in Calcutta. After spending twenty years in Paris, studying French literature at the Sorbonne, painting and running a language school, she returned to India, a story told in her memoir The…

To read more, order your copy of The Book Of Joshua, by Tanya Mendonsa today!

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