“Oh that,” says the milk woman. “That’s a Kangeyam bull. It belongs to the brick mason who lives behind the temple. It pulls his bullock cart filled with bricks. Would the children like to sit in a bullock cart? That we can arrange. Instead of the bricks, we pile on kids.”
I am not sure. I have a feeling that the German kids would prefer riding a bull in the buff, as it were, sans bullock cart. They want it raw and real.
“What about a buffalo?” I ask.
Sarala shakes her head.
“Buffaloes are the vehicle of Yama [the Hindu god of death],” she says. “Why would you want children to ride death? Plus buffaloes are lazy. They won’t carry children. Even if a crow sits on top of it, the buffalo lumbers.”
“Can you find any animal that can carry children on its back?” I ask, desperate at this point. “It can be a cow, buffalo, or bull . . . ”
The milk woman shakes her head. She knows people with bulls, but they won’t carry twenty giddy seven-year-olds on a sugar high around the building. It isn’t safe for the bull or the children. Bulls hate red. If a child wearing a red dress approaches, it will throw off the offending child and run away. Worse, it might bend down and ram its horns into the child.
“What about a tractor?” she asks. She can find a tractor with a trailer. All twenty kids can be given a single ride around the building. That is possible.
But that isn’t acceptable to the German family. They want to send home photos of their daughter astride an animal, not merely sitting on a giant red tractor, the likes of which they can find back in Düsseldorf. They want an experience on the wild side, of true India. Finally, the maintenance committee agrees to let them use a camel for the birthday rides. How they find the camel is up to them.
A few days later, I encounter a camel when stepping out on an errand. It is a testament to German—and Indian—enterprise. A joint venture like none other. An Indian camel carrying German schoolchildren. I am not even fazed. I am getting used to India.
Bangalore, now officially called Bengaluru, has a population of about 12 million people. The city’s booming economy has attracted some ten thousand expats and an equal number of foreigners who fly in every day for meetings with software firms and startups. In fact, if you only take in the glass-and-steel high-rises of South Bangalore and ignore the beggars, jasmine-flower sellers, squeegee men, vegetable vendors, transvestites, and of course cows, it is possible—difficult but possible—to imagine that you are driving through California’s Silicon Valley. The buildings come quick and bold—Cisco Systems, Google, Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft, Sun Microsystems, Yahoo—and together they give this city its rather uninspired moniker: India’s Silicon Valley.
In the beginning we all miss New York. The kids miss ice-skating on the rink and the Christmas tree at Rockefeller Center, and their friends from school. I miss small things: stopping off at Isabella’s for molten chocolate cake after walking through the Museum of Natural History; the sound of sirens at night; Ray’s pizza, made with sauce, cheese, grease, and love; the breathtaking sight of the New York skyline from the Long Island Expressway; the crowds on Fifth Avenue during Christmas; the wispy smoke from vendor carts; the smell of roasted chestnuts, the fleeting sight of tulips in spring along Park Avenue; the clatter of the cash register at the Korean deli where I picked up milk on my way home; Jazz at Lincoln Center. Okay, I didn’t actually attend Jazz at Lincoln Center very often, but it was nice to know that I could.
Slowly, though, we make friends and set down roots. We run into expats everywhere—or perhaps we seek them out. My yoga teacher, Javed, is from Iran; my daughter’s piano teacher, from Hungary; and one of the reasons I go for a haircut at Talking Headz salon, on busy Brigade Road, is to get a jolt of stylist Seth Lombardi’s Brooklyn accent. We go out for Italian, Mexican, Thai, or Japanese food—French and Belgian chefs headline five-star hotel kitchens here—and we can cook good Indian food at home now. The spices are readily available and they taste fresh, unlike the ones I got in Little India in Queens or at Kalustyan’s in lower Manhattan.
Our kids adjust well. They like their new school and the fact that their very Indian and Hindu names—Ranjini and Malini, Ranju and Malu, for short—aren’t mispronounced by their friends. They like the bone-rattling yet perversely exciting rides on auto-rickshaws. Basically taxis with three wheels, auto-rickshaws are my favorite Indian vehicle. Yellow and black, as iconic to Indian cities as the yellow cab is to New York, they are variously referred to as “auto rickshaws,” “autos,” “rickshaws,” and, more fashionably, “ricks” by young people, as in “I’ll just take a rick home.”
In India, my kids succumb to the warm embrace of grandparents and the pleasures of living in a land where everyone looks like them. They start making their own memories: tennis lessons in Cubbon Park, rollerblading in Coles Park, trekking in Nandi Hills, and going for Sunday brunch with friends at Garuda Mall.
Ram is the wildcard. He was head of emerging markets in Morgan Stanley with a portfolio of investments that went from “Chile to China,” as he would say. How is he going to reinvent himself in a new land that, from a Wall Street – finance perspective, is still considered a developing economy—a backwater, to put it bluntly? Not to mention, a country of glaring inequalities. As it turns out, over the next ten years, Ram morphs into someone with fingers in many different companies that range from retail to micro-finance. The one who was most doubtful about our move back home ends up having the time of his life.
3
Milking the Milk Story for My Neighbors
Every morning and evening, I watch the milking ritual that happens opposite my home with giddy trepidation. I fear for the health of my family but I am drawn to the novelty of getting milk from a known cow. Or perhaps it is just rebellion combined with a queer sense of being a pioneer: because nobody else in my building is trying it out, I want to. I will show them the way. When they see me and my family thrive on Sarala’s cow’s milk, everyone will patronize her, too. Eschewing “packet milk” for fresh raw milk: that is Shoba’s Choice.
When I look up “drinking fresh cow’s milk” on the Internet, the first site that comes up is fda.gov, followed closely by the Centers for Disease Control website. There is a ton of information about how bad raw milk is. In a video entitled “The Dangers of Unpasteurized Milk,” a maternal woman wearing a yellow sweater speaks in dulcet tones about the risks of raw milk: that it can cause diarrhea, vomiting, paralysis, and, in some cases, death.
The CDC website is no better. The jargon is so complex and scary that I stop my research. Instead, I look for cues where I live. The milk lady across the street has a line of customers, many from the army cantonment. They don’t just show up; they wait in line for her milk. Apparently, they don’t fall sick or die from drinking her cows’ milk. In fact, the army people look healthier than the well-to-do people in my apartment building, all of whom get pasteurized milk from plastic packets rather than a live cow’s udder.
Like many Indians, I grew up drinking fresh raw milk from a cow—and I’m perfectly healthy. In one generation, though, India has switched to pasteurized milk. Those who buy fresh milk from dairy farmers are in the minority. Yet even today, I know Indian families who live in posh neighborhoods with anglicized street names, such as Race Course Road, Boat Club Road, or Wallace Garden, in homes designed by internationally famed starchitects. Behind the Kartell furniture, Starck lamps, Roche Bobois modular sofas, and Frette linen—quite literally in the backyard—is a cowshed with a few native breeds providing milk for the family. You need a bungalow for this, of course, with a yard, where you grow hibiscus, marigold, jasmine, and roses for your daily puja (prayers). If you are unlucky enough to live in an apartment building, as I do, you have to improvise. (This is where jugaad comes into play again.) For me, Sarala, the milk woman, is it. And although years of living abroad have made me both suspicious of and entranced by this back-to-nature approach of my ancestors, I am, perhaps without even realizing it, swi
mming towards such a life myself.
One day, I walk across the street and strike up a conversation with Sarala. I tell her that I am considering buying milk from her but that I’m worried that fresh milk might be impure.
“How can you say that, Madam?” she replies. “It is the pasteurized milk that is impure. Milk curdles in a few hours. That is how nature designed it. How can it last in a carton for days?”
As proof, she invites me to a dairy wholesaler, where, she says, the milk that is delivered to homes such as mine is packaged.
We go back and forth for a week. I talk to her every day to convince myself that it is okay to buy her milk. She tells me about how milk powder is mixed with pasteurized milk to thicken the latter, about how pasteurization robs the milk of its essential healing qualities, and how nobody amongst her customers has ever gotten sick from milk.
“They may get diarrhea from the water but never from milk,” she says.
Finally, I decide to bite the bullet and accompany her to see the wholesaler. Sarala says there is only one problem: We have to set off at 4 a.m. She needs to return by the 6 a.m. morning milking. The time actually suits me. At 6 a.m. I have to get the kids ready for school.
I set the alarm and go down into the 4 a.m. darkness. Sarala is waiting at the gate with a call-taxi, an Indian precursor to Uber for India.
The taxi driver takes off as soon as we get in.
“Careful. No need to go this fast,” I mutter.
“He has to be done with us and get to the airport before the flights land,” explains Sarala.
At Mother Teresa Circle near my home (and herein lies the irony—you’d think that people would drive more peacefully at a circle named after Mother Teresa), a milk truck comes flying down a side street towards our street. Our driver slows down but doesn’t brake. Both vehicles engage in the macho brinksmanship that happens on Indian roads. Each expects the other to let him pass. Within moments, the inevitable happens, leavened slightly by the slow speed. Our cab hits the milk truck, which topples onto its side, sending about one hundred half-liter milk packets flying out on the street. They plop like water balloons and burst open, causing a spreading lake of white milk on the black tar road.
Our trip to the milk mart has resulted in a pool of spilled milk. Is this a sign?
“It is a good omen, Madam,” Sarala says. “We wanted to see milk. The gods have sent us a milk shower.”
Thankfully, nobody is hurt. The furious truck driver climbs out from the side of his vehicle and begins yelling at our unrepentant cab driver.
I survey the scene and wonder how we can get to the milk place and return in time to pack up the kids for school. I feel somewhat bad for thinking about my own concerns when the milk truck, engine still running, is spewing smoke from its exhaust pipe into the milk, making volcano-like bubbles on the road. The two grown men are yelling at each other, operating on the premise that a higher decibel level and attendant outrage means a lower level of blame.
A public transport bus appears behind us.
Sarala and I glance at each other. In unison, we get out of the cab, hail the bus, and hop on.
The two men are still yelling at each other over the spilt milk.
Every morning, whether in Kolkata or Delhi, Mumbai or Madras, India wakes up to the comforting plop of milk packets being deposited in front of homes. We scissor open these packets and make our masala chai infused with cardamom, cinnamon, ginger, cloves, and a pinch of salt. In the South, we make filter coffee, which is like café latte. We cut open a half-liter packet, heat the milk, and mix it with the coffee decoction.
The milk that comes out of these packets begins its life in a cow’s udder. Or so we like to think. The milk makes its way to a wholesale center, like the one Sarala and I are heading to called Rajanna Dairy. The milk cooperative sits amidst a line of disparate shops: a Vodafone phone booth; a copy shop; a center that offers SAT instruction; and a chain bakery called Iyengar’s.
We see dairy farmers leading cows down the dark streets and women clad in nighties carrying milk cans to the tiny storefront, which is a hive of activity. Cows stand at the cooperative’s entrance, chewing on cauliflower stems that a vegetable vendor has discarded. Inside, each milkman squats beside his cow and collects the milk by hand in a stainless-steel bucket for sale to the proprietor, a paunchy man who stands behind the counter, collecting cash with rapid fingers. In the back of the store is a milk tanker with a cylindrical hold into which milk from the cows is piped. It will be taken to a giant pasteurization plant on the outskirts of the city, where the milk is heated, spun, cooled, and put into packets for distribution through the day.
Sarala greets the proprietor cheerfully. She tells me she sells her extra milk to him. He always gives her good prices. Her cordiality with him is at odds with her views on pasteurized milk. “I brought this Madam here to tell her about packet milk.”
The man smiles. “When you are buying milk from Sarala, what is the need for packet milk?” he says. “Fresh cow’s milk is best.”
Sarala tries to egg him into saying that milk powder and other preservatives are mixed with packet milk. “Not here, of course. Not in your cooperative, but in other ones.”
The man doesn’t agree or disagree. “I have heard that such things happen,” he says, counting money and disbursing milk packets with flying fingers. “But I haven’t seen it with my own eyes.”
Suddenly, a heated conversation erupts in the milking area out back. A farmer hasn’t been able to track one of his cows. It was standing at the Cox Town Circle last night, he says. He has been riding his motorbike all over the neighborhood since 3 a.m. Where could the cow have gone? It never leaves that spot.
People offer suggestions and sympathy. Perhaps the animal just wandered off into a bylane. Perhaps someone took it by accident. Perhaps the Muslim butchers have made off with the animal.
Why not register a police complaint, I say.
They all stare at me. I am getting used to this look. It says, “Look at this modern ‘suit-boot’ lady who has no clue about our lives and doesn’t know what she is talking about.”
They can’t complain to the police, they say, because their cows roam the streets. The police will only take down an FIR (First Information Report) and register a case if cows are stolen from within someone’s property. So these farmers buy Alsatian dogs to guard the cows. They buy roosters to wake them up at dawn for the milking; and then buy hens to give the rooster something to do. Within the compound of an urban dairy farmer lies an entire ecosystem.
Days after our excursion I am still waffling. I am avoiding Sarala. She wants an answer; she wants it now and she has taken my queasiness about her cows’ milk personally. As far as she is concerned, I have cast aspersions on the quality of her animals and their milk. She is determined to prove me wrong.
“I don’t want your business,” she says one day. “It is not about that. But you should realize that you are mistaken about fresh cow’s milk.”
Sarala doesn’t understand why I am hung up about pasteurization.
“No need to worry so much about nature’s product,” she says.
In the end it’s the idea of buying milk from Sarala that I find irresistible. Why do we love the things we do? Certainly it is not an objective exercise. It is not even about taste. Raw milk, for me, isn’t really about taste. It is about ethos and to some extent principles—principles that rest on a shaky foundation, I might add. If you swear by wild-caught fish, grass-fed beef, or fair-trade coffee, you can find a dissenter with a cogent argument that disproves your thesis. For example, “Consuming wild fish caught in faraway rivers and seas uses more fuel than raising fish on a local farm. Your insistence on buying this product increases your carbon footprint.”
The reason we choose an object, a product, or a lifestyle—whether it is mink or milk—has to do with complex layers of emotion, romance, nostalgia, and yes, if you must have it this way, loss. We buy mink because it reminds us of a happy c
hildhood in Vladivostok with our elegant grandmother, a roaring fire, snow, and squealing, happy children. The reason I want to buy milk from a cow is because I am trying to recapture the simple times of my childhood, particularly after the intricate dance that I have undertaken for the last twenty years as an immigrant in America.
Milk is my way of reconnecting with the patch of earth that I call home.
Converting my family takes several weeks. My children refuse to drink milk directly from an animal. They don’t care about implementing my farm-to-table, zero-carbon-footprint principles, which is what I tell them, even if the truth of why I want to buy Sarala’s milk is more complicated. They want homogenized odorless Nestlé milk, with cavorting cartoon cows on the box, manufactured thousands of miles away in Zurich, and bought from Thom’s, our local grocery store, where it is displayed—is there a message in this?—in the aisle next to laundry detergent and plastic plates.
Trained as an engineer, Ram, who graduated from the University of Michigan (imbibing its practical Midwestern sensibility) and worked with “quants” on Wall Street, is dead set against it. He says that we are inviting germs and bacteria into our home and bodies. My septuagenarian father-in-law is visiting and comes to my rescue. A rational man, he agrees that there are health hazards with raw milk. But he has grown up drinking raw milk from cows and knows that the pasteurization and homogenization processes rob the milk of its valuable digestive enzymes.
We come to a compromise. I will buy cow’s milk but double-boil it, and then use it only to set homemade yogurt. The logic is that this two-step process of boiling the milk and then getting the probiotic bacteria to work on it during the process of fermenting it for yogurt will somehow beat down the malefic bacteria. The yogurt that we will mix with rice to make the famous South Indian “curd rice” will come straight from a cow. For our daily café latte and chocolate milk, we will continue to use homogenized milk from plastic packets.
The Milk Lady of Bangalore Page 3