Sarala introduces me to new and wondrous things often. The patch of land that is the holding ground for her cows before and after their milking is home to bees, butterflies, shrubs, and plants, each of which has its own use and purpose. When I get a skin rash, Sarala plucks off a few leaves from a nearby plant, rubs it in her hand to warm it, and then squeezes out the juice. The thick green liquid smells vile but soothes my skin when she applies it, drop by drop. Within a day, the rash is gone.
On some days, Sarala brings different varieties of greens from within the army compound. On others, she shows me spiders and spotted owlets that make their home in the craggy bauhinia and flame-of-the-forest trees nearby. Casually and without fuss, Sarala opens my eyes to the urban Indian network that has been right under my eyes yet remained invisible so far.
Cows are the epitome of patience in this community network. Goats are tetchy, arching their necks stubbornly against the rope as they get pulled down the streets. Roosters scratch the ground moodily. Stray dogs are hyper—racing each other, chasing their tail; cats, aloof; and crows, clingy. Cows wait their turn. Their eyes look at eternity. As animal species go, cows have a good temperament. Not all of them—the Tapti Khillar cows that can outrun a horse across ravines and rock formations are like moody, bad-tempered divas—but most cows are pretty even tempered. They have to be in order to adjust to the urban environment. Cows aren’t fazed by traffic. They amble right through or simply stand or sit.
One of Sarala’s best milkers often falls asleep right beside the road divider. I ask Sarala if she is worried about her cow getting hit by traffic. She shakes her head. Who will hit a cow in India, she asks?
I don’t believe her, and with good reason, as I will find out. One day, I watch a cow standing in the middle of the road. Vehicles race by: dozens of rickshaws, trucks spewing diesel, buses overflowing with people, cars of every stripe, bicycles with school children riding side saddle, standard issue bullock carts, scooters with two riders and a goat straddled between—the usual cross section of traffic in India. They all come hurtling down and screech to a halt before swerving crazily around the cow while somehow managing to avoid each other. Not once does the cow get hit; nobody comes even close.
Since then, I have observed cows ambling across highways, sleeping at night on roads, and lying beside the median on busy streets. These animals are nuts, I think. Or worse, dumb. They are inviting death. But it doesn’t seem to happen. It is the traffic that swerves to avoid the cow.
“Why is the cow so secure on Indian roads?” I ask Sarala.
“She is like your mother. Who will run over their mother?” she says.
When I don’t look convinced, she adds, “She is the giver of wealth, of prosperity. Why would you kill the goose that is laying golden eggs?”
I nod, surprised that Sarala knows that story. She takes my silence as disapproval.
“You have to shoo them away, Madam. Why don’t you do that?” Sarala accuses, taking the offensive. “When I see cows by the divider, I pick up a stick and shoo them over to the side. These animals don’t know any better. They don’t have as much brains as us.”
“I thought you said that they are as smart as humans,” I mutter.
She is contradicting herself, but I get it. It is an age-old question: are animals smart? Are dogs smarter than humans? Are cows? Depends on what parameter you use. Their sense of smell and spatial memory are probably far better than ours. But anticipating accidents? Maybe not.
I think of Sarala’s instructions every time I see a calf or cow sitting in the center of the road. The only problem is that it is hard to stop my car, get out, find a stick and shoo the animal away. There are too many vehicles honking behind me, their size inversely proportional to the volume of the horn. Mopeds trumpet like elephants; motorbikes roar like lions; my massive SUV that can fit ten people has a wheezy horn like a geezer’s cough. They all drive like maniacs but never seem to hit the animal. Is that fear of being cursed by Mother Cow, compassion for the mute bovine, or an ancient instinct that teaches humans to value livestock?
As my father, an English professor, notes, the word “cattle” comes from the Latin capitale, a term that referred to moveable personal assets. Walking bovines were moveable assets not just for hunter-gatherers but also for Sarala’s ancestors and mine, not to mention Sarala herself.
Early humans domesticated cattle in two places. The Bos taurus species was domesticated nine thousand years ago in the Fertile Crescent, the strip of land that runs from the Nile River Valley through the Middle East to the Persian Gulf. The Bos indicus species was domesticated in the Indus Valley region in Baluchistan (in modern-day Pakistan) between 6500 and 5000 BC. Until then, wild aurochs about the size of Indian lorries (midsize moving trucks in America) had roamed the world and been immortalized seventeen thousand years ago in the cave paintings of Lascaux.
Domestication may have emerged as a solution to overhunting. Dorian Fuller, professor of archaeobotany at University College, London, writes, “Each step along the trajectory, from wild prey to game management, to herd management, to directed breeding, may not have been guided by a desire to completely control the animals’ life history but instead to increase the supply of a vanishing resource. In this way, animal domestication mirrors the process of unintentional entanglement associated with plant domestication as humans first foraged and then, through increased reliance on the resource, became trapped in positive feedback cycles of increasing labor and management of plant species that were evolving in response to human innovations.” Humans and cattle came together, with each dependent on the other. Sometimes, after killing animals, humans took in their young and nurtured them as pets. Large males were hunted because they had a higher amount of animal protein, leaving the smaller males to mate with the females, thus selectively and perhaps inadvertently breeding smaller-sized cattle over several generations. Docility and adaptation were prized and selectively bred, leading to the taming of the shrewish aurochs into the docile cows that we see today. The wild auroch went extinct when the last one died in Poland in 1627. Now there are attempts to resuscitate them through genetics.
The Bos indicus, known as zebu or hump-backed cattle, is characterized by a fatty hump above the shoulders, folded dewlaps, droopy ears, and more sweat glands than their European cousins. In India, they are simply called desi or “native cows.” These cows can handle hot, humid climes. The Indian food chain, even in busy urban cities, still links cows and humans. In my home, for instance, I boil cow’s milk every morning, then let the milk cool a little before scooping out the cream on top and setting the remainder into yogurt. I collect the cream for a week and then churn it to separate the butter from the buttermilk. I divide the butter into two parts: one for sweet cream butter to spread on my children’s toast and the other to boil into ghee or clarified butter. The whole thing is a painstaking process—a nuisance, really—but I do it. As do many of my neighbors. We set yogurt, churn butter and when needed, squeeze a bit of lemon juice into the milk to curdle it into fresh paneer. Doing all this is a daily reminder of all we get from a cow, the giver of good things.
Sarala’s son Senthil has a baby boy. Sarala wants to name the baby—her first grandchild—Muneeswaran, after their family deity, but the family is worried that the name will sound too old-fashioned. They want a modern name—short and snappy, like a Bollywood hero.
“It has to have two syllables, Madam,” says Sarala earnestly. “Only then will companies give you a job. If my grandson goes and says to an IT company that his name is [she sings this out] Moo-neee-swaaa-raaaan, they will tell him to milk cows, not man a computer.”
Finally, the family reaches a compromise. The baby will be called “Muneesh,” modern enough for Bangalore and expandable to “Muneeswaran” when they visit aging relatives in Sarala’s native village of Arni.
Senthil quits his job at the courier company to start his own business selling bottled water. I see him now and again, carrying large bottles o
f water on his motorbike.
“Why don’t you ask those rich people in your building if they will buy my son’s water?” Sarala asks me often. “He has the best water; better than Ganga water. And he will come and deliver it at your doorstep.”
“Okay, Sarala,” I say.
She knows I am brushing her off.
“Why don’t you try bottled water for a month, Madam? Our Kaveri river water is so bad.”
“We use a filter at home.”
“Oh, you shouldn’t trust those filters. They don’t remove all the dirt. Better to drink bottled water.”
This from a woman who uses a plastic sieve to remove the stray germs and flies from her cow’s milk.
Sometimes Sarala brings Muneesh to the evening milkings, and the customers take turns holding the baby. Sarala wants a granddaughter. After four sons, she is fed up with boys. “Girls take care of us in our old age,” she says.
Then she adds, “Keep your eyes open for a good school for my grandson.”
6
Are You Happy?
How would the happiness studies that put India low on their lists explain the resilient matter-of-factness of India’s poor? Happiness studies call it adaptation. People get used to a certain standard of life, a way of being. They adjust to their lot. They learn to be happy within their means. Are they happy? Yes. In part. Well, most people are happy in part, you could say. But in India, the swathe of what is acceptable is broader. Notions of poverty are wider. Sarala’s healthcare woes spiral out of control each time someone in the family gets sick. Much of her family is illiterate.
Money is linked to happiness: not just in India but all over the world, even though not all rich people are happy—quite the opposite sometimes. But the reverse isn’t necessarily true: not all poor people are unhappy. Most studies use self-reporting to measure happiness. They ask questions and use the answers to gauge the person’s “subjective level of well-being.” This is a ridiculous approach in my view, because Indians—or for that matter most people from Eastern cultures—have been trained not to share or even vocalize their good fortune, in case someone casts the evil eye and jinxes it.
Ask a street sweeper if she is happy and often you will get the sideways shake of the head that means, “Yes.” Or she will reply with obliqueness.
Question: “Are you happy?”
Answer: “Where is the scarcity for happiness?” (“Khushi me kya kami?”)
Nobody in India would have the following exchange, which I regularly had in sunny Greenwich, Connecticut, where we once lived.
“How are you today?”
“Fantastic.”
In India the best you’d get is “could be worse.”
The Gallup World Poll and the World Happiness Report use Princeton social psychologist Dr. Hadley Cantril’s ladder of happiness, in which people imagine their “best possible life” by answering the question “On which step of the ladder do you personally feel you stand?” Indians would reflexively choose the lower steps. What if you climb so high you topple off?
Which may be why the World Happiness Report 2016 ranks India 118th among 156 countries, below Somalia, Bangladesh, China, and Iran. Yet other studies throw a monkey wrench in the India happiness quotient. One study, conducted by Robert Biswas-Diener in the slums of Kolkata, reported high levels of well-being even though income levels are low. Part of it has to do with acceptance and contentment, avoiding what happiness researchers call the “hedonistic treadmill.” Carol Graham, a fellow at the Brookings Institution, calls this the “paradox of happy peasants and miserable millionaires.”
I don’t know how true that is, but the pain of India, at least for me, has been to learn how to deal with the inequalities of life that I see between my family and the people who help us in our house. I know these are among the top attractions for most expat Indians who contemplate moving back to India: they can afford to pay staff to help with raising the children and keeping house. But being fundamentally egalitarian in principle and approach, I view things differently.
Every now and then, my American friends will ask me, “What is the hardest thing about living in India?” Some things in my list are trivial and random. I miss a good bagel, good wine at a decent price. But for me, being surrounded by people whose means are drastically different from mine opens up a Pandora’s box of guilt—and it bothers me. We have a fantastic cook at home. Two sisters come to do the “top work,” as it is called in India—sweeping, mopping, doing laundry, washing dishes, cleaning the bathrooms. We have a driver. Four people to take care of the four of us. It is ridiculous, actually.
But these encounters also give texture to my life in Bangalore. It begins at dawn and doesn’t stop till late at night—when the ironing man comes with my freshly ironed clothes as we finish dinner. Then the other milkman, Shiva, who brings our pasteurized milk in packets. He works for a moving company during the day but wakes up at 4 a.m. to collect milk packets from the local dairy union to sell to customers like me for a small profit. The newspaper man, Nagaraj, is tall and athletic. He delivers newspapers and works at a courier company during the day. I have two flower vendors: Shafi delivers flowers in the morning and Mastaan in the afternoon. At least, that’s the arrangement. Sometimes, both of them deliver strings of jasmine in the morning. Our two maids come in and out of the house. As do the driver, the gardener, and the handyman.
These are the people I see daily. They know my life and I know a little bit about theirs. Most of the time, our interactions are brief. Sometimes, they take on an urgency, which happens when they need money and ask me for it. That’s when I get to know them as people. I know their concerns, their lives, their personalities, and their ability to pay back large loans. That’s when India knocks on my door.
Sarala wakes up at 4:30 a.m. every day. Her herd is spread all over the place: a couple in the cowshed down the road, four tied in front of her home, and another four wandering around the neighborhood. Sarala washes the four cows that stand in front of her home, cleans their dung, gives them breakfast, and sends them on their way by 5:30 a.m.
Sarala brags about her cows. “They have an unerring sense of direction, these cows,” she often says. “They walk straight to the milking spot.”
She makes it sound like they have GPS tracking, when in fact her home is just down the road a few blocks away. But still, the cows find their way to the milking spot, lending credence to the notion that they have great spatial skills and memories.
Typically, Sarala’s cows walk themselves from their cowshed to the milking spot opposite my apartment building. These are the holy cows that roam Indian streets, the ones that drive-by tourists photograph with their cameras. The same cows that make me angry because they are a danger to themselves—and others—on the roads.
What most people don’t realize is that these cows have a biological urge and a purpose that drives where they go. In the morning and evening, they walk with steady gait and patient faces to a specific location for a date with their destiny, to relieve themselves of the milk that has collected in their udders. During the day, in between milkings, these free-range animals search for grassy patches in India’s urban jungle. If all else fails, they dip their noses into garbage and eat vegetable peels—and, as we know, sometimes plastic, too. Cows don’t want to eat garbage, says Sarala. They have adapted to their urban lifestyle. They know where they can find leftover vegetables.
Instead of cows, I get two humans cleaned and fed, and send them on their way to the school bus every day with a pat on their back.
I wake up at 6 a.m. and get half an hour of morning calm before the yelling begins.
“Take a shower.”
“Hurry up, we are going to miss the bus.”
But the magical time from 6:00 to 6:30 is mine. It is light outside. Sunrise comes early to South India. Typically, I open my balcony door to listen to the sounds of the koels and kingfishers that frequent the jacaranda trees around us. I love this part of my day. Hot coffee and m
e on my balcony. A black kite has recently built a large nest on an adjoining silk cotton tree. She has used leaves and twigs, but also Styrofoam and mop detritus, adapting the tools to her urban dwelling. I watch this kite every morning using my binoculars. She sits on her three white eggs, unmoving and quiet for hours: an act of profound maternal warmth.
One day, the morning breeze is uncharacteristically warm when I open the balcony door. Immediately, I know that something is wrong: there is too much noise, the sound of people shouting in the ashy dawn.
I walk out on my terrace and look down. It is a horrifying sight. A cow lies sprawled on the road, its legs bent at an unnatural angle. There is so much blood. Yet it is alive and in agony. People appear out of nowhere, as they do in India. It is one of Sarala’s cows. The security men at the army gate know it. Someone is charging down the road towards Sarala’s home.
A crowd gathers around the bleeding cow. The few vehicles on the road stop. Some people pull over and join the crowd. Others move on.
For a few seconds, I stand completely still on the terrace. I have a clear view. That is the problem. Blood. So much blood. Like a river. Why isn’t the cow dying?
I don’t want to go down.
“I’ll be right back,” I tell Ram and go down.
Sarala, Naidu, and Selva come running. They are carrying gunnysacks. The crowd closes ranks like the closing of lotus petals for the night. I can tell that they are lifting the injured animal on the gunnysack. They pull it to the side.
I stand outside my gate. Part of me wants to cross the road and console Sarala. But the vegetarian in me stays rooted to the spot. Thankfully, the crowd hides the animal from my view.
Sarala is wailing. I cannot make out her words but I can hear her pain.
The men beside me are talking. There is the mechanic from the bike shop next door, the ironing man who takes my clothes and gets them ironed (not dry-cleaned, just ironed), the security guards from my building, the watchman in the bungalow down the road.
The Milk Lady of Bangalore Page 6