Tribute to an Unsung Hero

Over a year ago, at the inception of the Monsoon season, he chanced upon a mother and her freshly-born litter in a narrow underground tunnel in a bustling and not very pretty marketplace in South Delhi.

It was raining in earnest and the raging water was filling up the tunnel. The mother was literally imploring pedestrians to come and help. No one did but Parshu. He took off his shirt, crawled in, and came out with 11 pups, perhaps four or five days old.

That is how my love story with the Jor Bagh Lane pups began.  Only three pups survived, the rest claimed by speeding cars, or just vanished (speculations on circumstances abound but may be too gory to relate in a group of love and compassion.)

Of the three, two sisters are now naturalized Americans, the beautiful Lucy and Muskaan, with Margaret and Tom Moureau and Jacklyn Grabow, respectively.

Brother Jute (seen in the photo between Parshu and myself) is with me as we speak, in an Amsterdam layover en route Chicago, likely to reunite with Lucy very soon (please, expect no tears of joy, only growls of unfamiliarity; but they will end up loving each other.)

It was thanks to Parshu, if indirectly, that I ran, just half a block away in the same squalid, underdeveloped marketplace, into two pups in desperate need for medical attention, very much on the verge of death.

Both evolved gloriously. Faline, the Queen of Egypt, the Duchess of Savannah, is with the loving Angela W Ewing. Oscar struck gold and silver and bronze with Brad Reed in Chicago.

In short, Parshu has added something quite precious to our life. May he be blessed and lauded in a very harsh land where most people are too busy surviving to care for mammals even more vulnerable than themselves.”