‘Dogs are essential to my life’: Indologist Wendy Doniger writes about her pets in her memoir

Through all of the turmoil and triumphs in my life, my closest companions have often been dogs. For I have measured out my life not in coffee-spoons but in dogs; even in India, among all the many temples I visited, I remember with special pleasure my visit to the extraordinary dog temple in Varanasi, dedicated primarily to the dogs of the god Shiva, himself often accompanied by dogs, one of the many things I love about him. The temple was filled with statues of gods to whom people made offerings of food that was quickly snaffled up by the many live dogs that roamed the temple, unharassed, an extraordinary phenomenon in India, where street dogs are starved and beaten.

Will Rogers once said, “If there are no dogs in heaven, then when I die, I want to go where they went.” Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, author of The Hidden Life of Dogs, was once asked if she thought there were dogs in heaven. “I know there are,” she replied. When asked how she was so sure, she simply replied, “Otherwise it would not be heaven.” (Androcles, in George Bernard Shaw’s Androcles and the Lion, says, “I really don’t think I could consent to go to heaven if I thought there were no animals there.”) Now, there is a famous, unresolved argument about dogs in heaven in the ancient Sanskrit epic poem, the Mahabharata. The virtuous king Yudhishthira, the son of the god Dharma, is unique among all humans in being allowed, at the end of his life, to walk right into heaven in his own body. (When other virtuous people die, they reincarnate in heaven in a new heavenly body.) But as Yudhishthira walks up the long road to heaven, he is joined by a dog, who stays with him through thick and thin and is deeply devoted to him. When Yudhishthira reaches the gates of heaven, the gods say, “Welcome, Yudhishthira! Come right in!” But when he starts to bring his dog into heaven with him, the gods object that there are no dogs in heaven, because dogs – whom Hindus regard as unclean animals, scavengers, omnivores – would lick the sacrificial offerings and pollute them. Yudhishthira objects that he could never abandon a creature who is his devotee, his bhakta.

This is a crucial moment in the history of Hinduism, a moment when the strict caste laws of the old sacrificial Vedic religion are challenged by the very different values of bhakti, the new religion of devotion, which transcends the issues of caste and purity. But the Mahabharata – composed sometime between 300 BCE and 300 CE – was not yet ready to choose between the two competing religious views. The solution? The dog suddenly vanishes and is revealed to have been, all along, the god Dharma, the moral law incarnate (and also, incidentally, Yudhishthira’s father). There was no dog. And so, there is no problem. In this way the great Epic sidesteps rather than resolves a dispute between two very different kinds of Hinduism, a dispute in which the crucial factor is a dog.

I myself am on the side of Yudhishthira (and Will Rogers and Elizabeth Marshall Thomas). I know there are dogs in heaven. Dogs are certainly essential to my life on earth. I have never been very good at sleeping; I spend much of the night awake, thinking or reading. (I often recite to myself that wonderful old Quaker night prayer: “God grant us sleep. But if we must be wakeful, cheerful.”) And I have never liked to sleep alone. When I was very young, I slept with Lisl, our large, fat Dachshund. Our house was always very cold, and before I undressed for bed as fast as I could and slipped into my flannel nightclothes, I let Lisl jump into the bed, under the covers; by the time I got into the bed, it was warm.

This habit morphed, after some years, into a preference for a human sleeping companion, and so I slept with men, first husbands (like dogs in their comfort and loyalty), then lovers (more like horses in their glamour and unpredictability), until I finally returned to my original and now ultimate solution: sleeping with a dog. No dog ever says, “It’s two o’clock in the morning! Stop reading and put out the goddam light!” I’ve already discussed the husbands and the horses. Let me now begin again with the dogs of my adult life and go on to the lovers.

After [my husband] Dennis and I returned from Moscow to Oxford in 1971, and after our son Mike arrived, we got a Dachshund puppy born from Dotti, the charming pedigreed Dachshund bitch owned by Richard Gombrich and his wife Dosha Friedrich. Dotti traced her lineage back to the first Dachshund in Oxford, brought by the great Indologist Friedrich Max Mueller. And so, we named our Dachshund Friedrich Max Mueller (but called him Max for short). Max travelled with us from Oxford to Berkeley to Chicago and died in Chicago, full of years.

Then came Sam the Beagle, so named by Mike, who always gave our animals good old American names, while I tended to give them Sanskrit (or, in the case of Max, Sanskritist) names. My habit of confusing the names of my younger male relatives (Tony and Mike) with the names of my male dogs (Max and Sam and Henry and Bill and Raja) reached its apogee (or nadir) on one occasion when Mike himself absent-mindedly called Raja “Mike.”

Sam will be forever remembered for an event that took place in 1980 in the office of Chris Gamwell, then the Dean of the Divinity School. In the Dean’s office was a large bust of Paul Tillich on a rather low table – significantly low. I went to see Gamwell one day when I happened to have Sam with me. Sam was still very young, and he sidled up to the bust of Tillich and peed on it/him, as I watched in helpless horror. I was speechless with embarrassment, but Gamwell just laughed and said, “Frankly, I’ve often felt that way about Tillich, myself.”

Sam was killed in the Forest Preserve. He had been following David Grene and me as we rode through the forest, staying just the right distance behind the horses, as Beagles know well how to do. But suddenly he saw something he wanted, and he doubled back away from us and ran into the road, where he was run over. He died instantly, and we buried him there in the forest. Mike loved Sam with all his heart, and at a time when he was still recovering from his father’s rejection of him, he was more than usually reliant on me, and on Sam. I didn’t have the heart, or perhaps the guts, to tell him that I was responsible (indirectly, but still responsible) for Sam’s death. So, we told Mike that Sam had simply had a heart attack while racing about in the forest with us and the horses. That seemed to ease the shock, and when, many years later, I confessed the truth to Mike, he forgave me both for my part in the accident and for having lied to him about it.

As we drove back from the stable on the day when Sam died, David and I stopped at our feed store, and there, in the hope of easing Mike’s pain of grieving, we bought two very young male puppies, twins born from a white German Shepherd bitch and a male Golden Retriever (with whom the pedigreed Shepherd had apparently made an informal alliance). Mike loved the puppies from the instant that he saw them; he named them Henry and Bill. They were charming and great fun, and quite sweet and gentle with humans. But as they grew older, they became (in their interactions with other dogs) the very worst-behaved dogs I’ve ever had. David refused to let me have them neutered (he seemed to regard them as a kind of farm animal, best kept whole for breeding), and so, once they grew to maturity, they tried to kill every male dog they saw and jump every female dog. Mike walked them and bravely held on to their leashes as they pulled him through hedges and puddles. One snowy evening, they pulled him down and dragged him over the ice on his belly; when they hit a speed bump, Mike sailed up into the air for some distance before landing and continuing his belly-slide, still holding fast to the leashes.

On one occasion we had to bathe them; I think they had rolled in something dead in the park. After we had soaped them both and rinsed them and toweled them off a bit, we put them out in the back yard to dry in the sun. But we had inadvertently washed away the familiar smell by which each one identified his brother. Suddenly confronting what each regarded as a stranger, they attacked one another and shed a considerable amount of blood before we were able to separate them. We never bathed them again.

Excerpted with permission from For the Love of Stories: Confessions of an Accidental Feminist, Wendy Doniger, Speaking Tiger Books.