A garbage truck hit the cow, I learn. It swerved in the darkness to overtake a bus and didn’t see the cow standing on the road. The driver didn’t stop. Sarala, Selva, and Naidu are in the midst of a crowd of people. Everyone is talking, offering opinions. The onlookers want justice; they want compensation.
Sarala’s family wants that, too, but knows it is a futile quest.
“Hard to find the garbage truck driver who hit and ran. He would have washed off the blood from his vehicle and parked it back.”
“Even if we find the driver, what is the use? The animal is dying.”
“How will the driver pay for the dying cow? He is probably a poor man, too, like us.”
“The government has to pay,” says someone.
“Why will the government pay? They will say that it is the cow’s fault. Or the milk woman’s fault for allowing her cows to roam on the streets without a leash.”
“Why don’t you call the doctor?” I yell across the road.
Sarala cannot hear me.
“No use, Madam,” says the security guard next to me. “The animal should have been spot-out [died on the spot]. Its legs are gone. How will those folks afford a surgery to fix its legs? And even if they do get leg surgery, the animal won’t walk properly. It will become a liability for life.”
Thoughts fly around my head. What should I do? Should I call a vet? I don’t know any vet. Should I call Sarala’s vet? I don’t know his number. Should I pay for surgery? How much will it cost? Will it work? Should I get involved? Maybe I can get the vet to at least put the animal out of its suffering.
“Tell her that I will pay to help the animal,” I yell.
One of the guards runs across the road, cuts through the crowd, and conveys my message.
A teary Sarala crosses the road. Through the crowd, I can see the animal. It is still.
“Look at our bad fortune, Madam. The cow has just given birth to a calf. So unfairly, he has hit it and gone.”
“Call a doctor. Let us call a doctor,” I urge.
Sarala shakes her head. She has already made some calculations. “The doctor can’t do anything. The cow is dying.”
“Why not try?”
She shakes her head again. “Too late,” she mutters.
Her stubbornness is crazy.
“Why not kill it then?” I say, hoping that I can get a stronger reaction rather than mere resignation.
Sarala looks shocked. “How can we kill it, Madam? We are just praying that it dies soon.”
She walks back across the street. I don’t accompany her. I turn around and go back into the elevator. Filled with useless rage and sadness, I snap at my family. What should I have done? What could I have done?
The cow dies—on its own. It took half an hour but at least they didn’t have to kill it. “I just held its head on my lap and stroked it, Madam,” Sarala tells me tearfully an hour later when I come out again. “Naidu wanted to strangle it but I didn’t let him. Why play God? One of the army men offered to shoot it. I couldn’t allow him. What if the cow miraculously survived? What if the bleeding stopped on its own? Then at least we could have tried to get splints for its legs or looked at some naatu vaidhyam.”
Selva hired a truck to transport the carcass to the butchers. They paid him some money for the animal, he tells me. He needed the money for cow feed. One of the other cows is going to calve anytime.
“Have you insured your animals?” I ask Sarala, though it’s probably the wrong time to bring it up.
She scoffs. “All that is for rich people like you. For poor people, God is the only insurance.”
The street-cleaning ladies are helping Sarala wash the blood off the road. They bring buckets of water, toss it on the blood, and scrape it with coconut-thimble brooms. The bloody water rushes to the side where it is absorbed into the drain. The bloodstains are visible for days, and indeed months and years—for those who know to look for them.
Sarala has a high fever when she shows up the next morning. Her face is puffed up from the crying. Her eyes are bloodshot. She can’t speak. Naidu and Selva are more composed but they, too, can barely talk. All of us are quiet.
Selva squats on the ground, milking a cow. I awkwardly place a hand on his shoulder and crouch beside him.
“It is okay, Selva,” I say.
I remember what I have heard my parents say during condolence visits. “Your late husband will get reborn as your grandchild. Don’t worry, at least he got to see his son married and meet his daughter-in-law.”
I adapt it. “Don’t feel sad, Selva. One of your cows is calving soon. The cow that died will get reborn as this calf.”
“What to do, Aunty?” he says. “I don’t think I can eat beef anymore.” He pauses and amends. “For at least a month. After seeing all that blood.”
I am speechless. Because they care for cows, I had assumed that Sarala and her family were vegetarians. Then, I think to myself: that’s like expecting every animal-loving farmer not to eat meat.
Sarala walks up to us. “He is very attached, this boy,” she rasps. “What to do, Madam? It is our misfortune. Bad time.”
“It will change. You will get another cow,” someone says. “For all the good service you are doing for these cows, God won’t let you down.”
“That cow’s ayus [life span] was short. God wanted to take it away.”
“Maybe some big gandam [obstacle] was to hit your family and affect your grandson. The cow absorbed all those evil vibrations to save your family. It died for you; on your behalf,” says the lady standing beside me. “It sacrificed its life for you.”
“My mind is all bejaar [messed up],” says Sarala.
This is how they talk, the urban poor who grace my home and life; their speech is as hard and abrupt as their lives, leavened by a humor that sprouts “like a lotus in a dirty mud pond,” as an oft-quoted Tamil proverb says.
7
Embracing Humility, Humanity . . . and Guilt
“Do you want to milk a cow?” I ask my younger daughter, Malu, who by now is ten.
“Yes,” she says. Malu says yes to everything. Unlike her older sister, a teenager, who has learned to say no.
I don’t remember what prompted the milk discussion. Maybe it was a documentary we were watching. Or maybe it was my reading about Michelle Obama instructing the White House staff not to make her daughters’ beds so that they could grow up doing chores.
So we set off one morning, Malu and I, to milk the cows across the road. Malu is clad in shorts and T-shirt from Target. We are in high spirits. Look at me—just like Michelle Obama, I think with a glow. She makes her kids make their beds; I make mine milk a cow. Both of us want to keep our children grounded. My plan is to throw my daughters into the deep end of India: in deep dung, if it comes to that.
We cross the street to milk Sarala’s most gentle cow. The plan is to wait till everyone has left with their milk before trying our experiment. To our surprise, Sarala is holding a calf’s rope loosely. We coo over the brown calf. It is not yet used to humans. Malu gingerly strokes the calf’s forehead. The calf backs away.
“Hey, hey,” Sarala says in the scolding voice that her entire family uses when talking to cows.
It used to bother me in the beginning to hear Selva, Sarala, and Naidu chide the cows into submission.
“You have to talk to them like that,” says Sarala when I ask her why she is constantly admonishing her cows. “These cows are too smart. They can guess who is boss in an instant. If you give them a little room, they will take charge and be the boss.”
The calf tries to take charge by nuzzling its way towards the milk. Sarala holds the rope in an iron grip.
“Look at her. So greedy,” says Sarala admiringly.
Malu is excited and very nervous.
Selva stares at us, completely baffled: this giggling mother and daughter. I have already coaxed him into letting us try milking.
Selva gives us a bottle of oil. Rub it on your hands, he
says.
We stare at the grimy bottle but do as he says.
Our bodies are not as flexible as his. We are unable to squat on the ground like he does. In our honor, they have placed a dirty upturned bucket beside the cow. We go near Chella Lakshmi, the chosen cow. Sit, Selva commands. Malu sits cautiously on the upturned bucket. The cow stamps and swings her tail, which hits Malu. She screams.
“Why are you screaming? She is only swatting flies,” says Sarala in the same scolding voice, a shout really, that she uses with her cows. It sounds like a rebuke. To my shock, Malu calms down immediately.
Selva squats beside Malu. Without a word, he rubs the cow’s teats with oil for a minute, squeezes and pulls; squeezes and pulls.
Malu glances at me as if to say, “You do it first,” and abruptly gets up from the bucket.
I take a deep breath and sit down gingerly. I touch the cow’s teat. It swats me. I pull back.
Sarala brings the calf near the cow. “Sometimes these cows can be so stubborn,” she says. “They’ll hold back their milk and only let it down when they see their calf. Especially the new mothers. They won’t let us milk till their calf has been fed.”
“But this calf isn’t this cow’s child, is it?” I say.
“No, but it is better than nothing,” Sarala replies. “Go on, do it.”
I squeeze and pull. To my delight, milk squirts out. Not a lot. Still, it comes out. I glance at Malu before continuing the motion. A small stream of milk falls down into the bucket placed under the cow’s udder.
Selva stands beside me, judging my performance with a frown of concentration. “You are pressing her teats too hard. She will clam up,” he says. “You have to massage and coax her to give her milk. It isn’t an abrupt pull like how you are pulling. It is a sweeping, massaging motion.”
All these instructions are making me nervous. I must have pressed too hard or pulled too hard. Whatever the reason, the cow lets out a huge volley of dung. It splatters on the ground. Small pieces ricochet off the ground and land on Malu and me.
My ten-year-old screams like she has been shot. I grab her and move to one side. The cow shakes its head and takes off. The stainless-steel milk bucket topples on the ground. Thankfully, it is nearly empty. The little milk inside it pours out on the ground. Out comes a small mouse from a hole in the sidewalk. It slurps up the milk. A crow flies down to sip on the milk.
Malu stares at the receding back of the cow, the rodent, and the crow. She is speechless. Selva has taken off after the running cow. Sarala comforts the calf that is distressed that its proxy mother is running away.
“Look at that mouse. Isn’t she cute?” says Sarala, attempting to soothe and encourage Malu. It has no effect. Malu insists on going home and taking a shower. I send her back home and ask Sarala about the calf’s mother. Why didn’t she bring the calf’s mother to the milking spot?
“That is the cow that was run over,” says Sarala matter-of-factly. “This calf is an orphan. I am trying to get the other mothers to accept her and give her milk. One of the other cows has adopted this calf and loves to give her milk. But Chella won’t take in a newcomer. If she accepts this calf, though, the calf’s future is secure. Because you see, Chella Lakshmi’s milk is the best.”
Playing matchmaker between orphaned calves and cows is the hardest part of her job, says Sarala.
Like Sarala, nobody who works for me has any savings. One sickness can set them back. If my cook Geeta’s husband gets sick, she has to go pawn her jewelry to get some money. Geeta came to me the other day. She is a warm, dramatic woman. My children adore her. She needed to borrow a significant sum of money, she said.
“Madam, my landlord is troubling me. Can I get two thousand dollars as advance?” she asked with the flair of a thespian. Once, Geeta said that she felt like taking rat poison because she and her husband were having marital issues. Her life is one of high drama. There are the usual problems: power cuts, no water supply, leaking roofs, and visiting relatives who expect to be fawned over even though she is a working woman who really doesn’t have the time for it.
“Last week, remember, I had to take a day off to stay home because the whole clan showed up? I felt like my head would burst,” says Geeta. “Coming to work here and relaxing is one thing; staying home and dealing with all the attitude I get from my sisters- in-law is torture.”
Yet she is a cheerful worker, no different from a professional in an office, except a whole lot poorer. Though she won’t take my chocolates, one day she comes in with her own bag of treats. “Madam, my son passed second standard. Here, have some sweets — for joy.”
Part of it is practice. When life is hard, you figure out how to cope. You develop reflexes. Take Shafi, my flower man who delivers strings of jasmine every day. He is a Muslim who knows every Hindu holiday and chooses appropriate flowers for each. Shafi is always smiling. I mean that literally. It is unnerving. He was smiling when he told me that he couldn’t deliver flowers for a week because his brother died. Is that a defense mechanism, mere politeness, or is that his nature?
The rickshaw driver who I hail one morning for a half-hour ride to the mall speaks to me pleasantly about the state of politics and cricket. I casually ask him how many children he has. “Five,” he says. Of which four died at birth. Oh, God, that’s terrible, I say. “Yes,” he says politely. “But I am going to make my remaining son a big man. Educate him. Make sure that he has a real job, not just drive a rickshaw.”
Is grief a luxury that the poor cannot afford, caught up as they are in the business of making ends meet? It is clear to me that Sarala loves her cows. Yet, the way she and her husband deal with the recent death of her cow (and livelihood) is very different from what I would expect. Over the next month, she talks about it often, each time with a different explanation as if to make sense of it in her head.
Sometimes one of her customers will tell another the story about the fateful morning. “One of the cows was ambling in the middle of the road when a corporation truck that tried to overtake a school bus hit her. Bystanders pulled the fallen, bleeding animal to the side of the road and called Sarala.”
I glance at Sarala’s face as the story is being recounted. She blinks rapidly.
“I think I must have done some horrible thing in my past life. Don’t know why the good Lord took away one of my babies.”
One of the army wives nods towards Sarala. “Poor thing, she is not eating much. Wasting away,” she says to a fellow customer—a new customer—who looks shell-shocked and horrified at the tale.
Sarala nods and smiles reflexively, as if trying to assuage the newcomer’s distress.
“What to do, Madam?” she says. “We shouldn’t have allowed our cows to wander the streets. Who can we blame? Our planets are not aligned. Our time is not right.”
They tried to revive the cow, she tells the newcomer. Tried calling a doctor even (they didn’t). But nothing could be done. The cow’s leg was gone. How to keep an animal without legs? That would be cruel. They had to “let her go.”
“Can’t you complain to the city government? That one of their trucks ran over your cow?” asks the new customer.
Sarala smiles. “All that is for rich people who live in tall buildings,” she says. “The truck driver will say that it was my cow’s fault to stand on the road. He is probably feeling terrible about hitting a cow. Why torture him some more?”
We all make clucking noises, borrowed from the rooster that is digging the earth nearby. (This is the rooster that wakes me—and my irate French neighbor—at 4:30 a.m. every morning. We both want to wring his strutting neck, furious as we are with his cocky sideways gaze, and dense, hot comb. But he belongs to the recycling shop next door to us. Wish as we might, we cannot recycle him to the next world.)
“The people in our area said that if we went and complained to the police, something would come of it,” says Naidu. “But we decided not to pursue it. Who has the time to go and hang around the police?”
&n
bsp; I nod, admiring how Naidu has turned his impotence with the police into a choice. There is a certain bravado in the way Naidu speaks that comes from years of having converted resigned acceptance into free will—at least in his mind. Instead of cursing how the poor are disenfranchised in the country (which he does sometimes), instead of complaining about how they don’t have the clout to make headway with the city government (which he knows they don’t), Naidu says that it was their “choice” to drop the matter. He has recast the situation into one that he chose to avoid. Is this how rationalization works?
“Cows and me don’t set at all,” says Naidu. “Because I married her,” he nods at Sarala, “I am stuck in this profession.” A hardship he has lamented before.
Set is a word I hear frequently among the people who energize and lubricate my life here in Bangalore. When I refer a driver or chauffeur to a neighbor for a job, he may report back after a week saying that the job “did not set,” which means that it didn’t work out. “Not setting” is a complaint, a failure, an impasse. It can mean that the employer was too strict or too stingy or merely that they didn’t get along. It can mean that complex negotiations with a carpenter about teak wood versus fiberboard, and about whether he will throw in a chair with the table, are all on the verge of a breakdown for mysterious, unarticulated reasons that may have to do with strident tone, the price of raw teak, or the fact that the carpenter’s assistant has just gotten engaged and is demanding higher wages. Any or all of these factors can cause negotiations not to set.
But it doesn’t have to be a negotiation. For my milk lady, naming a cow is a crucial decision. She will give a tentative name to see if the name will set, if good things happen after the naming. If a name doesn’t set, the cow will give less milk. Or get hit by a truck and die.
8
If You Don’t Like the Milk, Change Your Cow
It is a quiet morning. The yellow school buses have left. The roads breathe some before the morning traffic begins, their din louder and more chaotic than New York. (When will I stop comparing these cities, and what is the point of doing so? It only makes me homesick and I am not even sure where “home” is anymore.)
The Milk Lady of Bangalore Page 7