Just under 2 years ago now I found my tiny pup in a quiet cave in the Himalayas. This time last year, we were reunited in Delhi & she picked up my passion for early Indo-Islamic architecture before flying home to the UK.

Happy 2nd birthday, Gandhi! I'll see you soon, my girl.

In fact, let's do a thread so the next time I'm asked how I ended up with a Kashmiri Mastiff I can link this.

I was working for an NGO/museum based at a Buddhist monastery in Ladakh, then Jammu & Kashmir, & found twelve (TWELVE) tiny puppies in a cave at the monastery.

They were terrified of hoomans (or anything that wasn't mother, frankly), but two had already died so the next day I came back with food and most of them warmed to me. Gandhi, however, did not- which is how she got her name.

There were five black (Clive, Curzon, Hastings, Willingdon, Chelmsford), three brown (Babur, Humayun, Akbar) then one tiny tiny white puppy who was severely malnourished & seemed to be terrified even of her brothers (and obviously us).

Her hunger strike earned her the name Gandhi- but after a few attempts, I finally got her to eat something, after which she seemed to look at me as if to say 'okay, you're my dad now' and started following me.

I realised she probably wouldn't make it in the wild & she liked me enough so I moved out of the monastery and into a tent, and Gandhi came with me. Every morning at around 6/7 all of her siblings + parents would wake me up for food and would normally follow me around the village

I thought living with Gandhi would make getting up in the mornings easier but I guess it's true they take after their owners because most of the time she was just as bad as mornings as me

She became a bit of a local celebrity in the monastery & other parts of Ladakh: one day we hitchhiked with the King of Matho and she got to go to one of the Dalai Lama's teaching sessions, barking loudly 'in reverence' throughout.

Here she is at the monastery in summer 2018.

And here she is joining me after work. She'd wait for me in the same spot on the mountain and would come running whenever she heard my voice.

And her family were still around all the time, but I slowly (incrementally) stopped feeding them before I left to improve their chances of surviving through the winter.

P.S. I forgot one more black puppy Mountbatten!

Whenever I went anywhere at Matho I'd normally get at least half a dozen wild dogs following me around, so I didn't get much peace and quiet.

Not sure why the rest of this thread didn't link in, so here: https://twitter.com/IziDuffy/status/1252925113810354179