Lost & Found in the Cosmos
He wasn’t a good boy. He was the nastiest, most incorrigible dog to exist. Eight years, eleven months and seven days ago, the most dysfunctional family I knew brought home a cross-bred German Shepherd from their family friend. He was a birthday gift to my younger brother, but in retrospect, he enriched the lives of everyone he met. At one-month-old, Jasper aka Chinu aka Tannu was not a lot to look at. He had smaller hair than purebred dogs of his breed and was so well-fed that sometimes his hind legs would slip under the weight of his tummy. My brother, 10; my sister, 12; and I, 15, had no clue how to raise or train a dog. All we knew was that he was the best thing that had ever happened to us. Being the eldest of the three, I was supposed to assume charge of, with my siblings expected to help in feeding and potty training the “fourth kid”, as my mother put it. Tannu was too big to be put in a shoebox, so we put him in a plastic cloth-washing tub and slid it under my side of the bed.