Disguised as a beggar, in Homer's The Odyssey , when Odysseus returns to Ithaca after 7300 days, or twenty years, he comes across his faithful old dog Argos, whom "he trained as a puppy."
Argos has been a "castaway on a pile of dung" without his master all these years, old and infirm by now, but still he "sensed Odysseus standing by" and "he thumped his tail, nuzzling low." Odysseus "flicked away a tear," and, when he moves on, "the dark shadow of death closed down on Argos' eyes."
The story of Odysseus and Argos is one of the earliest examples of the relationship between dogs and humans in literature, dating back to the eighth century BC.
Dogs have fuelled a wealth of art and literature, served as Darwin's muse, inspired philosophical meditations and have even been credited with saving countless lives.
Fatima Bhutto's The Hour of Wolf joins some of literary history's most moving accounts of writers' love for their canine companions.
In 2015, Bhutto adopted a dog, Coco, as a gift for her youngest brother, but instead, both Coco and the writer fell in love.
"A model writer's dog, she sits quietly for hours while I work, holding a ball between her paws," she writes.
Her small and ferociously loyal Jack Russel terrier is by her side when she is at her most vulnerable, particularly dealing with an emotionally abusive relationship.
Written with raw honesty spilling over the page, Bhutto's new memoir paints a harrowing picture of the romantic relationship she has been entangled in for 11 years. It's a story we know all too well, of manipulative narcissistic men, who appear intoxicatingly charming at first until their real selves begin to unveil.
In the book, the author more than once writes about her disbelief that something like this could happen to a strong, independent woman like her. It does beg the question, then, why do smart women fall for narcissistic men?
"The skilful narcissist is a person with some pretty amazing traits. In my opinion, they can be formidable," Dr Samuel López , a psychologist, tells The New Arab. " You can also be charmed by the pulling power of someone reflecting you so as to create a deep rapport. This intense connection is created when a person gives you the feeling that you've known them for a long time, or when you initially feel safe with them. They have unlocked the door to your insides. A skilled extreme narcissist knows just how to reflect your music back to you so that you feel like he has your playlist of favourite songs."
A confident, successful woman looks for a man who does not need her ongoing support and who has the strength and ability to manage any situation, and narcissistic men play that role to perfection in the initial stages of the relationship. They sweep women off their feet with an abundance of attention until the relationship has solidified, then they start to reveal their true personalities.
By that time, one is already too invested, and it becomes extremely difficult to free oneself from the tight, dangerous coils of their manipulative charm.
Yet, the very fact that none of us is immune to emotional abuse, no matter how strong we think we are, is the reason why this account is much needed, especially when women are silenced into shame despite being the victims.
"This was not the book I wanted to write, but one that I needed to," said Bhutto in an Instagram post after the release of the book, acknowledging the embarrassment that comes with being in a coercive relationship for much longer than one ought to. Reckoning with loss In her piece for the New Yorker , The Seditious Writers Who Unravel Their Own Stories , Parul Sehgal writes about a small, seditious group of serial memoirists whose one book "follows another not as its sequel but as its unmaking." She likens this to "pentimento," a term for the ghostly emergence of something painted over, obscured. "With time, the paint fades. Behind the steady calm on a portrait sitter's face, another expression reveals itself." While Bhutto has written fiction, publishing two critically acclaimed and award-winning novels, her memoir, Songs of Blood and Sword, remains one of her most widely read and popular works. In The Hour of Wolf , however, she reveals her struggles with depression and anxiety after her father's death and what was really going on behind the façade when she first published that book and went on the book tour, even losing her voice at one point.
Bhutto sheds the tough journalistic armour she donned in her previous memoir and lays herself bare in this one. The reader now gets a peek into more intimate details of her relationship not only with her father but also with her stepmother (whom she previously referred to as Mummy) and brothers.
Reading through the memoir, one begins to notice that Bhutto returns frequently to the scenes of her childhood, to the stories of her father, as if she is trying to hold on to the memories, writing them down as an act of preservation and remembrance, for the relief they offer from the pain of loss. Alice Munro once wrote that in our lives, there are a few places, or maybe only one place, where something happened, and then there are all the other places.
For Bhutto, that place is outside her family home where her father, Murtaza Bhutto, the eldest son of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, founder of the Pakistan People's Party (PPP) and prime minister of the country in the 1970s, was killed. The brutal shoot-out that happened when Bhutto was only 14 has had a profound impact on her life, through which her memory filters experience. The heartache of motherhood A running theme in the book is motherhood — of struggling with a mother figure, of becoming a mother but not being able to, of experiencing motherhood by proxy through her pregnant dog. Bhutto's yearning for motherhood and her deeply moving account of freezing her eggs all remind us of the travails of womanhood, yet it is friendship and especially the companionship of our pets, in her case, Coco, that make it endurable.
Accounts of her travels, stories from Islam, Native American mythology, and even astrology are intricately woven into the narrative, giving the text an almost spiritual, meditative quality in some places and showing readers the timelessness of hope and survival, no matter how broken we feel inside.
While The Hour of the Wolf may have started out as a book entirely about her dog, Coco, as Bhutto confessed, it turned into a brave, deeply vulnerable account of a woman who suffered in silence and shame until she couldn't.
In sharing her struggles, Bhutto has shown us, especially women, that there needs to be an open and wider discourse on emotional abuse and that even those who we think are the strongest amongst us may be broken inside, carrying an enormous amount of pain and grief.
The book also reminds us of the beauty of nature and humanity's connection to it — its munificence and rapaciousness both.
Finally, it lays bare the truth about love and gives us hope with its redeeming, radicalising nature.
As far as the author is concerned, how does anyone live without a dog? She wouldn't know. Maliha Khan is a Karachi-based writer. She is a 2022 South Asia Speaks fellow and is currently working on her first book about her experience of living in India as a Pakistani Follow her on X @malihakhnwrites and Instagram @malihakhanwrites