Ram agrees to try it out for a month.
So one morning, I walk across the road with a stainless-steel milk can to buy milk from Sarala. We pay monthly. Each family purchases “milk coupons,” at the going rate: some forty rupees a liter. If they need two liters of milk every day, as my family does, they buy sixty milk coupons, which, in Sarala’s case, happens to be her business card with her name, address, and phone number. Each day, I hand over two business cards to Sarala for two liters of milk. Some families buy half-liter coupons, which is simply a business card in another color—blue, as it happens.
When my coupons run out, my milk woman replenishes them. There is no plastic involved. The cards are completely recycled, a system that satisfies me on many levels.
My simple act produces more reaction than I anticipate. I thought it was only my family who had opinions about my life and choices. Suddenly random strangers who watch me walk across the street with my milk can offer their views. People from my building tell me that Indian cows are sources of tuberculosis and other diseases, that I shouldn’t buy their milk. Nina, the lady who walks her dogs in the morning, is among the dissenters. She issues dire warnings when she sees me buying milk from Sarala. Until that point, we are—quite literally—nodding acquaintances. She walks her cute pugs down the road at about the same time I take the kids to the school-bus stop. We nod at each other. That is it. Till the day she breaks our tacit cordiality with a single phrase: “I wouldn’t do that. I wouldn’t buy milk from those dirty cows.”
It takes me a week to come up with a response. “What if your cows are dirtier than mine?” I say one morning.
“How do you mean?” she asks.
“Well, your milk presumably comes from a cow. How do you know that your cow isn’t as mud-splattered as mine? How do you know that the cows that produced your packet milk are not tuberculosed, as you call it?” I say.
“Even if they are, the milk is pasteurized,” says Nina.
It is her smug tone that does it. “Oh really,” I say silkily. “Haven’t you read news reports about milking plants experiencing power cuts, causing the pasteurizing process to stop halfway through? They take the milk to the point of curdling and boom, the power goes out and the pasteurization process stops.” I am exaggerating wildly, of course, but the smug look is wiped off Nina’s face. She looks distinctly worried. There are certain explanations that you can use with impunity in India—traffic jams and power cuts being two of them. I plunge in with the delicacy of an assassin.
“Haven’t you read news reports about mixing laundry detergent with milk to give it girth?” I ask. “How do you know that your milk is properly pasteurized? How do you know that the stuff you mix with your coffee is not Tide, Shout, Surf Excel, or maybe all three?”
Nina has no answer. In her silence is my victory.
It has only been a few weeks, but I have already become an evangelist for fresh cow’s milk. One evening, to win over my neighbors and incentivize them to join me in my crusade, I invite several women to my home. My plan is to tell them about the cows across the street and see if we can start a milk cooperative. If a whole group of us “mass-affluent” citizens buys from my milk woman, we can pay her above-market prices and improve the quality of her cows (not that I agree with Nina the dog walker that the cows are diseased!). It will be like adopting a village, except we will be adopting some cows.
I invite these women, some of whom live in my building and some who live nearby, to come at around 5 p.m., in time for the evening milking. Instead of cocktails, I will serve them milk, or at least coffee and tea made with cow’s milk. The proof will be in the drinking. Once they taste local cow’s milk, they will change their minds forever. We will band together and collectively buy enough milk to give all the neighborhood cows good food and warm-water baths. Maybe we can create a cow spa with the extra dough. Our children will grow up feeling compassionate towards animals and predisposed towards eating and drinking local, seasonal food for life. They will escape obesity, diabetes, and every other ailment that troubles modern society, and live long and happy lives, thanks to the fact that we gave them organic raw milk. They will become champions of reducing climate change and the melting rate of glaciers. I have all the fervor of the newly converted.
It is a beautiful February evening. There is a light wind on my terrace. I arrange the chairs artfully in a semicircle facing the road, so that my guests can easily stand up and watch the cows being milked. There is music, canapés, and the clink of glasses.I think I might have made my invitation a tad formal, because the women come in wearing flirty cocktail dresses and silk saris. They have makeup, lipstick, and blow-dried hair. They have the look of women going out on a Friday night who are looking forward to pink cocktails interspersed with sparkling conversation. I decide to get the evangelical bit out of the way right at the beginning.
“Let’s start with some tea or coffee,” I announce brightly. “Who would like some South Indian filter coffee?”
My guests look wary—they had expected champagne—but play along. They all nod their heads, which is good because the milky coffee is already made. I serve each of them a small cup of coffee and invite them to the terrace. After a few moments of chitchat, I stand up and tap a spoon on my coffee cup.
“I have some wonderful news to share,” I begin. “The milk in the coffee that you are drinking comes from the cows that are being milked right across the street from here.”
Some of the women sputter and spit out the contents of their mouths into their cups. They look up and stare at me.
“We are living the California dream, my friends. People there yearn to buy local and organic. This is our version. Come,” I invite. “Look at those cows down yonder. They are eating the grass that grows in our neighborhood parks. They are digesting all this with their four stomachs—not one, not two, but four stomachs. And they are giving out the goodness of their digestion in the form of the milk that graces your coffee.” My voice rises.
When I rehearsed my speech, I believed that it would be touching. We would sip our coffee and commune with the mud-splattered but still-beautiful Holstein-Friesian cows who had given the contents of their stomachs for our coffee. We would stare down at them in silence and pledge to improve their lives and my milk lady’s livelihood. We would be at one with nature and cows, and lead a zero-emissions life, at least in the dairy department.
What happens is a little different. Most of my guests immediately announce that they are late for another event. They have places to go. Some of them get emergency phone calls and have to leave right away.
I never see them again. Well, that isn’t really true. Some of them live in my building and I am forced to encounter their baleful glares every time we pass each other at the gate. But it takes years before they agree to come to my home for coffee.
4
Farm to Table, Udder to Butter
My milk routine soon falls into place. I take my daughters downstairs every morning and wait for them to board the school bus at 7 a.m. Then I cross the street with a stainless-steel milk can to the culvert where Sarala and her cows stand. Typically, customers and I talk about schools and recipes, cows and garbage trucks, babies and bath water. A breeze ruffles our hair. Everyone is relaxed. It reminds me of the morning repartee that I had with our garage attendant, Chris, in New York. It lasted just a few minutes, while I waited for my car to be driven up from the underground garage.
“You a vegetarian?” Chris exclaimed one time. “Man, I would die if I couldn’t eat meat.”
“What’s chicken like?” I asked
“Hmmm, lemme think. Like chewing gum,” he replied.
“That sounds horrible. Why would you eat garbage like that?”
Friendly banter laced with mild insults. It is similar at the milking spot. We are a motley group from around the neighborhood. We can talk with an impunity that comes from anonymity. Beyond the milking, we don’t socialize. Parakeets shriek joyously as they circle a fruiti
ng fig tree nearby (Ficus religiosa). Milk from the cow’s udder squirts softly and rhythmically into the large stainless-steel bucket. White bubbles hive the top.
Sarala herself is an engaging conversationalist. No matter what the situation, she has a comforting response. Shorn of false niceties and overt politeness, her speech brims with empathy and warmth.
“My son has so much homework,” says one of the regulars one day.
“Why don’t you change his school?” Sarala responds. “I did that for my son and it did wonders for his confidence.”
“When was this?”
“Oh, thirty years ago. He is thirty-five years old now. Works with the Indian army.”
“I am worried about my husband,” says another. “He has gained so much weight. I think the military will throw him out of his job.”
“Put him on a diet of millets and he will lose ten pounds in a week,” says Sarala. “Make some ragi [finger millets] porridge every week. Just mix the batter with some onions and green chilies. Add a pinch of cumin powder. Chop up some curry leaves and throw them in. You’ve got yourself a tasty meal.”
Three of Sarala’s cows stand under the bauhinia tree, which has pink orchid-like flowers and leaves shaped like a widow’s peak. One pink flower falls on top of a cow’s head.
“Look, God just blessed this cow,” exclaims Sarala. She walks up to the cow, touches its face, and then touches her head in a prayerful gesture. Others follow suit. Wanting to blend in, I do the same, even though I am internally frowning at what I think is a silly practice.
A fire-engine red BMW drives down our street, looking like Mardi Gras in a monastery. It stops across from us. A tall dapper man gets out, crosses the road, and approaches the cows. Everyone makes way, a little shocked by his three-piece suit. He carries bananas and holds them in front of the cow’s mouth. The cow’s rusty tongue swipes the fruit. The man puts his palms together and bows.
Sarala glances at me as if to say, “See, I told you. God has blessed this cow. Why else would she suddenly get bananas from a stranger?”
Wordlessly, the man walks back, gets into his Beamer, and drives away.
in India, slums coexist beside sparkling towers. On one side of our apartment building is a five-star hotel, on the other, a series of slums. Sarala’s home is in one of the slums and situated in a tiny gully beside a statue of Mother Mary. She has a loose arrangement for her cows: some stand guard outside her home, a few are fitted into a cowshed, which is at the end of my road and right beside a commercial milk parlor, and some roam the city looking for the bovine version of Airbnb.
“In the thirty years that I have lived in Bangalore, I haven’t locked my house; not once,” says Sarala. “I live with Muslims and Christians and we all help each other out.”
As is typical of communities forced to live with each other in a ghetto, Sarala’s view of other religions and castes is nuanced, specific, and sometimes opportunistic.
“These Muslims: they eat beef but I don’t hold it against them,” she will say. “You have a problem and they will be the first ones to offer assistance. They help me wash and clean my cows.”
Sarala joins the Christians on her street during the annual St. Mary’s Feast festival. She wears the beige sari that Christians don for a month and goes to St. Mary’s Church in nearby Shivaji Nagar to pray. She thinks Mother Mary is more powerful than some of the Hindu gods she worships.
“You have two daughters. Why don’t you prayer to Mother Mary for a son like Jesus?” she tells me.
I am used to the son preference of India manifesting in a variety of unsolicited questions and comments and have ready answers. “And have him nailed to a cross? No thank you,” I reply.
Caste and religion are important to Sarala. Tending to cows, she says, is a Hindu occupation. Her husband’s name is Naidu, a common enough name in South India. It also indicates that he belongs to the Naidu caste. Not all names are so transparent. My last name, Narayan, for example does not indicate my caste. I am what is called a “Tamil [language and region name] Brahmin [caste name] Iyer [subcaste name].” My cousin has converted his name to include an “Iyer” at the end of his name but I haven’t. My relative in Massachusetts has anglicized the Iyer to Ayer, which is his current last name. Indians are adept at recognizing caste from surnames. Naidu is a prominent South Indian caste. There is a shop named “Naidu Hall” in Chennai, which sells, among other things, great undergarments. According to Sarala, dairy farming comes naturally to Naidu folks. They have the touch. Cows trust them.
Sarala has a round face, soft clear eyes, and a beautiful smile. She looks like the cows she cares for, but I cannot tell her that. Relative to her withered, bald husband, she has the glow of youth, with shining mostly black hair and an unlined face.
“It is not simple, you know, to tend cows. These animals are very sensitive,” says Sarala. “They can see what you and I cannot: one’s past lives, one’s aura, whether one is good or evil, whether a person is trustworthy.”
“If they can see all these things, then why don’t they run away from the butchers?”
“You think they don’t try? What animal wants to die, Madam? Cows can outrun a man but they can’t outrun a butcher’s van.”
Sarala, I am discovering, has answers for everything. She ought to have been a lawyer. Or a politician.
Bangalore doesn’t have four spectacular seasons like the American Northeast. Our seasons are muted but still felt. The Indian calendar identifies six ritus: spring, summer, monsoon, autumn, mild winter, and winter. Each season has a rhythm. Through the year, I get to know the rhythms of milking—both seasonal and daily. Cows get pregnant and need to be sequestered when sick or lactating, all of which we observe during the long sweep of the year. The daily milking, too, has a rhythm. It begins with herding of the cows, not on foot but on a motorbike. Selva, at twenty Sarala’s youngest son, drives all over the neighborhood searching for his flock and nudging them with his bike so that they amble or trot to the milking spot. It is an urbanized version of a cowboy with his lasso. Selva knows where to find his herd. They like sleeping under the almond tree down the road, or occasionally foraging amidst the garbage for food. This, then, is the paradox of the holy cow: it is venerated but also allowed to forage amidst garbage. One much-cited documentary called The Plastic Cow, available on YouTube, shows doctors operating on a cow and removing 150 pounds of plastic from its rumen. When Prime Minister Narendra Modi chastised the cow vigilantes on national television, he said that those who care about cows should get plastic off Indian streets instead of beating up butchers.
Sarala doesn’t believe that cows eat plastic. She thinks that the cows can pry open plastic garbage bags to access the vegetable and fruit peels inside. Not only that, Sarala says that they can discriminate, these cows, between vegetarian food and other meaty discards that they will not touch. I have seen cows nosing around garbage but I am not sure Sarala is right. Nor could she stomach what I saw in the documentary, so I don’t bother trying to convince her.
By the time I come out with my milk can each morning, Sarala has already washed her large, stainless-steel buckets and placed them on the cement culvert. Selva hustles the cows to their milking spot, parks his bike, coats his hands with oil, squats beside them, and begins milking. On some days, Sarala’s eldest son, Senthil, helps his brother herd the cows. But mostly, it is just Sarala, her husband, and Selva at the milking spot. Senthil is off doing “business,” Sarala says. He tries many things. His current job is with a courier company. When we see him occasionally at the milking spot, he is astride a motorbike with a mobile phone. He zips away whenever he can on unnamed errands, something that Sarala rues.
“Can’t even talk to that boy let alone get him to help with the milking,” she says.
It is left to Naidu to manage the cows. While Selva milks one cow, Naidu herds the others to a grassy meadow just within the army campus. The meadow is about the width of a country road but enough to feed four free-r
ange cows every morning. Sarala’s herd has dwindled to ten cows, a decent number for downtown Bangalore, but she used to have more. “Look at me. When I moved to Bangalore, I had twenty-seven cows. Used to line them up inside the army compound and feed them. But my daughter-in-law does not have the cow-fortune. So my cow numbers are falling.” Sarala has four sons. Only Senthil is married. She says that one of the things they look for in the horoscope of potential brides is maatu raasi, or “cow-fortune.” Actually, Sarala vacillates about whether she wants brides with this cow-fortune. Yes, it will be good to find daughters-in-law who can take the baton from her and tend to the cows. Yet on the other hand, the whole world is moving away from cow herding. She wants her children to be happy and healthy, not stuck with cows if they don’t want to be.
“As long as I am alive I will tend to these cows. After that?” she glances upward at the heavens.
Her husband has a different view. He sees cows as a livelihood rather than a life calling. Or so I think when I hear him complain about his wife. “Because of her, I am stuck with these cows,” he says, nodding at Sarala. “If not, I would just sit in one place and take it easy.”
“Yeah, right. He is going to sit still, it seems,” snorts Sarala. “He can’t even sit at home for one minute and the man claims he is going to retire.”
They don’t bicker much, though, this husband and wife. Too much happens; too much needs to get done. The cows intervene. Naidu has to go and tend to one that is mooing or stamping, or that needs to be untied.
“The man doesn’t know what he is talking about,” says Sarala after Naidu leaves. “The thing about keeping cows is that you won’t fall sick. You have to wake up early and go to sleep early. You get good food to eat, good milk to drink, and the love of a good animal.”
Sarala believes that, more than any other creature, cows are connected to humans. It is an emotional, intuitive bond, she says, that goes back millennia. Sarala likes all animals. But cows are special. When they live with you, they know how to give comfort, she says. “Whenever I am sad, I just go into the cowshed. A few minutes with these beauties and I forget all my woes,” she says.
The Milk Lady of Bangalore Page 4