If I close my eyes now I can still see it. I think it is my earliest memory. I see my mother’s body in a white nightdress wriggling under the body of my father’s. He attacked her that night, restraining her and hitting her at the same time.

It’s either that or the memory of my mother pointing to a leather belt hanging behind the bedroom door, telling me to behave or I’d get the belt. I can still see the brown 70s style belt hanging by its buckle off the hook. It was a belt my body came to know well.

I grew up in a house of violence but any sympathy I felt for my mother, watching her being beaten up, was replaced with rage as she inflicted violence ten times worse on me.

When I escaped my parent’s home, it was to my grandmother where I was faced with more violence from my aunt or being called fat and stupid.

I had no love in my childhood, I only had fear.

The only bonds I had were with animals. At a very young age, my father got me a black and white cocker spaniel. I named her Heidi after the book. In hindsight I realise what a selfish act it was to bring her into my world.

When poor Heidi peed inside the house, my father would dangle her from the balcony of our 7^th floor flat. I would watch in fear, praying “please god don’t drop her”. Heidi grew up to have behavioural problems. Like most dogs she was aware of the abuse she was enduring.

Few years later we got Tinker. A little white and brown cocker spaniel who was smart and energetic. Tinker brought a lot of joy into my life which was otherwise miserable.  

One summer I returned home and Tinker was missing. I ran around shouting his name. It later transpired that my father, either still drunk or heavily hungover, had run over Tinker. Tinker died only a couple of hours before I got home. He died alone, without love and I’m sure in agony.

I wept every day for a year over him. The day after his death I was sent back to school and as I cried the nun said to me “what’s the big deal, you’ll get another one”. After a while my family got more and more irate over my tears. No one understood exactly what it was I lost. In a world without family, Tinker was my own family, my only friend.

Again in foolish and misguided grief I got another dog into that world and I pretended that he was the reincarnation of my Tinker. It was the only way I could console myself.

When I was 15 my father met another woman. He was done with me, with my mother, with our life in India. Overnight he locked the house and left. I was marched off to my grandmother’s in Bombay where she begrudgingly took me in. My grandmother had celebrated the birth of two new grandchildren, born off pure Hindu blood, unlike me. She didn’t want me around.

I lived in another isolated world, alone and without love. I missed my dogs.

Eventually my grandmother’s protestations got so severe my father was compelled to come pick me up and take me to Scotland. A burden he never let me forget. I begged him to take the dogs but he refused. Frightened I’d be left behind again, I eventually towed the party line. I got on a plane and looked ahead to a new life.

Within months Heidi suffered a strange and catastrophic injury and died. A year from there my other dog was bitten by a cobra and died. They died alone and I was helpless to ease their pain or protect them. I carried that pain with me as a young adult.

In 2007 my father and his Scottish mistress decided to move back to the very same house back in India. When I finished Uni I went home to live with them while I figured my next move. There I met Goldie. Goldie was a street dog who used to come to the house, who my step mum took a fancy to.

Goldie was the sort of dog I had never known before. Highly intelligent and independent yet completely unaware of human lifestyle. The one time he came into the house he had a panic as he had never seen or ascended stairs in his life.

Goldie and I began to form a close bond much to the anger of my father. Goldie was the first time I had been around a dog after the tragic circumstances in which mine had died. We would go on long walks together. He would introduce me to his stray pack and we would walk the Indian countryside together.

One day Goldie fell ill. He began vomiting and over the next two weeks he stopped eating. At the time I had no money, no car. I was stranded in the Indian countryside. I begged my father to at least drive us to a vet but he refused.

After 2 weeks Goldie had entered acute organ failure, I just didn’t know it then. The evening he died I called out to him and even though he was at death’s door he stood up to walk towards me but collapsed. I picked him up and took him to my room, where he died crying out in pain in my arms. I had to bury him with my bare hands in the dark of the night.

I vowed that was it. Friends who had known me advised me to never get attached to a dog again or at least not one that my father was somehow involved in.

Over the next few years I tried everything I could to set up my own life. A stint in New York and London. But somehow an art degree in the wake of the 2008 crash wouldn’t get me very far.

I returned home again. To my horror, my father had got another dog – Sean. Sean was a rescue who came through a rescue organisation in Bombay. I had to keep my distance this time, I could not suffer another loss, I could not watch another dog suffer and die and have that on my conscience again.

Of course, I failed.

I reared Sean as a pup but when I was not around, my father’s neglect continued. Sean was left to wander the streets like a stray and one morning I found him covered in wounds with his belly ripped open. Sean had been attacked. Over the next few months I nursed him back to health from death’s door.

In 2012 I returned to London hoping I could raise the funds to bring him to me but I failed. Years of poverty followed and I would lay awake at night thinking of Sean; worrying about him, praying he was alive. When my life failed to improve my prayer changed “if he is to die, please make it quick, please don’t let him suffer like the others did”.

One year I tried to return to India to see Sean and my father threatened to kill him if I did. Contact between my father and I dwindled and for years we never saw each other again, until one day his mistress called me. Dad was dying. He had stage 4 incurable cancer.

I don’t know if it was guilt, but as his parting gift I asked for Sean to be returned to me. To my surprise, my wish was granted. To date Sean has been my only inheritance.

In April 2016, I went and picked Sean up at Heathrow airport. There he was, alive and well. Over the next few months, we discovered the full extent of the abuse and neglect Sean had suffered. He had parasites which in turn led to one of his kidneys failing, his platelets had dropped and his organs were swollen from an infection. An x-ray also revealed a broken hip and pelvis.

Sean was treated intensively at the RVC but he will forever now be on medical watch.

Every day I have with him is a gift, every year is a miracle. I cannot ease the suffering of those before him but I hope my love for him puts some good back in to the world. When he finally came to the UK, I realised exactly what the nature of our relationship was. Sean and I survived trauma together, his survival represents mine.

I have an obligation to him, to undo what my father inflicted on him and the others and in doing so I win back some of my own humanity and peace. Anyone who has ever loved a dog, knows that it is more than just a pet, whether it is a kinder more peaceful love or one that has grown through trauma.

To my boy who turned 13 this week, you are more than just my dog, you are my life.