In Thinking of Winter, Shantanu Naidu reflects on isolation, responsibility, and the small, life-altering choices we make in moments of despair. The following excerpt captures the quiet transformation that begins when Winter enters his life.
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People do selfish things when they are lonely. I don’t know if that justifies it, but I did them too.
In the eighth month of university, all the love letters posted abroad were spent, all the attempts to make friends had failed, and all that there was to do at the end of every day at Cornell, was to look in the mirror in disbelief: This was not how I thought it would be.
I would like to believe that a lot of smaller breakdowns over a longer period of time lead to a single moment that brings you to your knees and makes you give up once and for all. It can be losing your keys, or a phone call that wasn’t picked up, or missing the last bus home.
But what did ‘giving up’ even mean? There was a library of answers to that question. I, however, chose the most selfish one.
His name, was Winter.
Let’s be abundantly clear. Bad dogs do not exist. This is a blanket rule. There are no bad dogs, and we could, of course, delve deeper into unpacking this and talk about bad parenting and other reasons for some dear souls come to have behaviours that make them seem like bad boys, but for now, we’re just going to establish the inexistence of bad dogs.
I am in favour and support of a very large community of human beings who greet every dog with ‘whoozagoodboy’’ and sure enough the answer is and always should be, hesagoodboy.
But not Winter, no. A few million times during this story I will remind you with sweet frustration that I simply do not know what it was: genetics, soul, character or maybe something beyond our limited understanding of the world. But I do not know what was wrong with Winter.
Winter was a golden retriever, a runtof-the-litter puppy in a far-off town called Moravia while I studied in Ithaca. Forsakenness had me ride there, claim him one night in the fall of 2016, and bring him home a month later with the only friend I had: a Taiwanese introvert called Wen-Ko.
In the first week of Winter in my student apartment, while I contemplated daily whether I was even remotely capable of taking care of another life, Winter was busy stuffing himself in every gap that could be defined as one, even the ones that barely qualified. The only way to find him was to spot an absolute bushy butt sticking out of one place or the other. Some days easy to spot, some days laying still, waiting to be discovered, or worse, rescued.
As the urine stains on the carpet began to stay as contemporary art forms, depending on how hard you squinted, me and Wen would sit amidst them, saying very little but with the shared activity of looking at whatever Winter was up to in the room. Which, of course, was identifying gaps and stuffing himself in them.
Wen, a germophobe, who likes every aspect of her life in complete order, would watch in silence as Winter would create another pee spot next to her. Wen, the germophobe, would say nothing. As one loner to another, she accepted, in not so many words or any words, the reason why Winter was there in the first place. Her being there with us a was a strong nod in my direction saying, ‘If this is what will rescue you, I will support it.’
The Barron’s dog bible on golden retrievers that I had picked up in Boston instead of attending a job interview had me brace myself for what was to come after pee spots: poop on the carpet, furniture chewing, destroyed shoes, destroyed cables, lots of biting—unruly, unhinged, drunk puppy behaviour—and I was very ready for the damage. My roommate, on the other hand, was unaware, let alone prepared.
But it never happened.
Shoes stayed intact and the furniture unbothered. Cables right where I left them. Not a bark or a whimper. Nor a bite or a scratch. And while I waited patiently, anticipatingly almost, for Winter’s standard puppy phase, he seemed to have missed the memo.
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