As he speaks, a steady stream of people comes in and collects bottles of cow urine distillate—for themselves, for parents, for wives. Many have cancer. The doctor gives me the names and phone numbers of eight patients he has treated and cured—all using cow urine. I call them.
One woman’s name is Katherine, and she had been given up for dead at a hospital. “The doctors called me a body, not a person. Can you believe it?” she asks, clearly outraged. “Told my kids to come and take the body.” Her children, too, had given up hope. Funeral arrangements had been made. As a last resort, Katherine’s brother, who had heard about cow urine, gave her a teaspoon the night they brought her home. When she opened her eyes the next morning, they gave her more cow urine—a teaspoon twice a day for about a week. “This was six years ago,” says Katherine. “I am still alive.”
Another man is a tailor whose wife had cancer. She, too, was cured because of cow urine therapy, he says. The third is a lady from the United States who gave cow urine to her Indian father-in-law. “He had been bedridden for years. After seven months of this treatment, he could walk to the post office and back,” she says.
My mother-in-law hears me speaking on the phone to the cow-urine-therapy patients. Maybe this will cure my joint aches, too, she says. She struggles with sciatica and depends on giant bottles of Move Free that her daughter, a pediatrician in the United States, buys for her from Costco.
So one morning my mother-in-law and I go to the clinic and purchase some pills and powders that will help her joint aches. The cow urine doctor tells her to take one packet a day.
Like me, my mother-in-law is naturally inclined towards alternative medicine. She distrusts allopathic drugs and prefers to go the natural route. When the doctor gives her packets of powders, she asks what they contain.
“Cow dung,” he says. “Dried cow dung along with other ayurvedic herbs.”
She doesn’t blink. “Somehow the South Indian mind doesn’t think of cow dung as dirty,” she tells me later. “We have grown up around cow dung.”
I nod. It isn’t really true. My husband and others in my family are South Indian, but they don’t necessarily warm to cow urine, and I highly doubt cow dung will go over well either. I think it has more to do with my mother-in-law’s personality and her openness.
The man throws in a free bottle of cow urine for me to try.
I don’t plan to tell the rest of my family but I do happen to mention at dinner that the Sanskrit term for cow urine is go-mutra. My children burst out laughing.
“What’s so funny?” I ask. “Anything beginning with a go has to do with the cow in India. Places like Goa, Godavari, Gomukh, Gokarna are linked to the cow as are human names like Gopal, Govind, and Gokul—”
“And go-mutra,” they chorus, giggling.
That night, I stare at the small bottle of cow urine—go-mutra—wondering whether to sample it.
What will my husband say? What will my sister-in-law say? I know the answers. They will be horrified. They will think I am mad. Where are the randomized, double-blind clinical trials, they will ask.
Ram and his only sister, Lakshmi (a physician), have rational, scientific bents of mind. Lakshmi’s husband, Krishnan, is an internist. Amazing doctors, both—healers in the true spirit of the word. They have a thriving private practice in Fort Myers, Florida. We depend on them for all of our medical needs. So does an ever-expanding circle of people.
Every time they visit us in Bangalore, they are literally stopped on the street with medical questions. Our building doorman has a question about why his wife isn’t conceiving. He shows all of his wife’s blood reports to Krishnan, who scans and sends them to his golf buddy, a gynecologist. The gynecologist is in the midst of a golf vacation when the tattered scanned copies arrive. But he responds, as doctors do for colleagues, and Krishnan prescribes medication for the doorman’s wife.
Word gets around. The building plumber approaches my sister-in-law. His daughter has a kidney stone, or so he thinks. She isn’t eating enough. And so it goes, every single time. Housekeepers, gardeners, security guards, and the odd plumber approach them for free medical advice, which they give patiently and generously.
After our meeting with the cow-urine doctor, my mother-in-law and I bring the cow-urine bottle and the powder that he gives us into the house. My mother-in-law lines up the cow-dung powder beside her Tylenol and Move Free bottles.
I finally open the cow-urine bottle after a particularly heavy lunch.
“Take one teaspoon twice a day,” reads the label.
I hold my nose and down a small amount straight to the back of my mouth and swallow. It tastes spicy, hot, and potent, like ammonia. Clears my sinuses right out. I feel like puking but control it. I think about honey, chocolate, and samosas. I try to distract my mind till the nausea passes. And then I brush my teeth.
As for my mother-in-law, the cow powder eases her pain, she says. After just three days of taking the medication.
Again, I can hear Ram’s voice in my head. Are you sure these are really cow urine pills? he will ask. What if they are chemicals masked as cow urine medication? And even if it is authentic cow urine, what if there are side effects, just like with Western medications? Or what if all this improvement is a placebo effect?
This is the paradox of alternative medicine, isn’t it? You have to believe in it in order to enjoy its benefits. My mother-in-law and I certainly are true, if covert, believers in these cow byproducts. But maybe we are just drawn to anything natural. If you tell us that eating dirt will help improve health, we will happily try it. At least you know what you are eating, instead of with those pills with unpronounceable names.
How did ancient humans learn that cow urine had a beneficial effect? Did some early Homo sapiens have excruciating joint pain? After trying out all the usual shoots, leaves, and roots that the clan ate to alleviate pain, did he or she hit upon the animal kingdom? “Maybe I’ll try some cow urine?” he may have thought. Or perhaps some monks noticed the goats prancing around all night after eating coffee berries and decided to eat the same in order to study all night. Maybe ancient man noticed that the grass grew verdantly on the spots where the cows urinated. “Heck, this stuff is causing vegetation to grow more lush. Maybe it will improve the health of humans, too.”
How did they test the effects of the urine of different animals? Did everyone in the nomadic tribe try the urine of cows and realize that it cleared out the sinuses? “Okay, let us now try horse urine and see what it does.” A thousand people tried horse urine. Isn’t this a clinical trial, albeit in the time before patents were filed?
Actually, the cow-urine clinic in Indore has filed two US patents (patent numbers 6410059 and 6896907) for drugs based on cow-urine distillates. But I don’t need any of this scientific-sounding language or the numbers of patents in order to imbibe the stuff. Cow urine, for me, is like weed or acid or any of those other drugs that I definitely did not try while I was an art student in Massachusetts. It is like taking your first shot of vodka unbeknownst to your parents, like jumping through the window for a night out with your boyfriend while your folks assumed you were fast asleep. Cow urine has that whiff of danger and transgression—a substance, an action, that would be roundly condemned by the “adults” in our family.
Even at my age, maybe that’s where its true attraction lies. When I finally tell my brother that I have tried cow urine, he wrinkles his face and practically disowns me. Then he suggests I must have suffered a genetic mutation.
A week later, I meet an acquaintance on the street. “You look fabulous,” she says. “What have you done to yourself?”
11
Cow Manure for the Garden
Our garden is dying from the heat. Our building complex has flowering shrubs, birds of paradise, a smallish lawn, and a few trees. The gardening committee—of which I am a member—fields suggestions. A neighbor proposes that we grow Indian hemp. All the garden waste—leaves, twigs, fallen flowers—will get easily brok
en down into compost for the garden. Another resident recommends cow manure. It is the oldest form of fertilizer, she says. An ashram nearby makes organic manure from cow dung. Why can’t we duplicate their technique? I suggest a middle ground and offer to buy cow manure from a known source. It isn’t Sarala I am thinking of. Rather, it is the mother ship of native cow excrement located an hour outside Bangalore. The place bills itself as the largest shelter for indigenous cows. Off I go.
I had expected a few cows and even fewer keepers. There are about a thousand people fussing over four hundred cows. The cows are sanguine and beautiful, with raised humps and sleek coats. A family clad in finery stands before a majestic Hallikar cow, feeding it bananas, bending with folded hands to get its blessings and showering it with pink hibiscus flowers.
“It is amavasya [new moon day]. Lots of businesspeople shut down their businesses and come here on this day to venerate the cow. Especially Jains. It is part of their religion,” says B. J. Sharma, who founded the cow shelter upon the advice and instruction of his spiritual guru. India has many such cults.
Sharma tells me he was a diabetic for thirty-five years. For the last ten years, every morning and evening, he has been taking two teaspoons of cow urine mixed with an equal amount of water. His blood sugar has stabilized and he has become more active, he says.
A man brings over a stainless-steel tumbler of buttermilk, distributed free of cost to all visitors. “It is made from desi cow’s milk. Very good for health,” says Sharma. We down the liquid in one gulp. Cool and salty, it is delicious for a hot day. Reminds me of the Friendship brand of buttermilk that we used to buy at Fairway, Publix, and pretty much wherever we lived or traveled in the United States.
Urine collection is done manually, says Sharma. Five to ten men wake up at dawn with buckets. They go to the various cow pens and wake up the cows. They have to be fast. The minute one cow wakes and stands up, so do the others. It is like a relay race, or the falling of dominos. Except in reverse. A stack of cows stands up. Immediately after rising, the bovines do their business.
“Otherwise, you tickle their bottom and the urine comes out,” says one of the keepers. “You have to run from cow to cow and catch its urine.”
The urine is distilled in offsite plants and sold at the shelter. I buy a couple of bottles, as well as some cow dung, and go home.
A month later, our garden is thriving. The gardener swears that it is the cow dung that I have bought from the ashram. It is an elixir of life, he says, and then explains that out in the fields a cow knows exactly which part of the pasture needs nutrients. She only urinates and poops in those areas, says our gardener.
“What if she urgently needs to go?” I ask.
Even though my natural instinct is to lap up—literally and figuratively—pretty much every alternative theory that I encounter, this feels too far out. Plus, paradoxically, my other instinct is to be skeptical, just like Ram. Sounding much like my husband, the voice of reason, I argue with the gardener.
“I can’t believe that the cow gets the urge to go and then searches for the exact spot where there is dying grass and then goes and poops on top of it,” I say as we walk amidst fragrant jasmine creepers.
“Isn’t there a lag time between when you get the urge to go and when you actually go?” asks the gardener in return. “When a cow is grazing in the pastures, it is not as if she needs to search for a bathroom. She just ambles to the spot where the ground needs nutrients, stands there and poops.”
Our gardener repeats the same information I learned at Dr. Jain’s Ayurvedic and Cow Urine Therapy about the humps on native cows. This time, though, it’s cow dung that absorbs beneficial radiation from the sun and spreads positive energy. Like most stories about this animal, this statement is hard to prove or disprove, but these beliefs are widespread in India. For instance, one blog reports: “Many people, probably a million, died in the Bhopal gas tragedy but there was a township there where all the people were healthy, the reason being each and every house of the township was smeared with cow dung slurry and there were an innumerable number of tulsi plants growing. In ancient times people used to wash their feet and step on the doorstep smeared with cow-dung slurry before entering the house, which would kill all the germs, and the house remained free of pathogens.”
Using this logic, Chernobyl should have imported cow dung after the blast.
Place a dried piece of cow dung inside your microwave when you defrost your food, says an acquaintance. It will absorb the harmful microwave radiation.
But won’t it impart a bad smell, I ask?
Cow manure has no bad smell, she replies.
And so it goes, on and on with the cow dung and its uses.
Pretty soon, the manure that I bought at the ashram runs out. I approach Sarala yet again. When we first met, I had assumed that she would be the one making all the requests and I would be the one saying no. It isn’t quite working out that way.
“Sarala, I need cow dung,” I say without preamble.
“What kind of cow dung? Foreign breeds or native breeds?” she asks.
“Native cows,” I say immediately.
A few days later, Sarala brings a blue bucket filled with cow dung. When that runs out, we relax our rules and decide to admit the cow dung of any cow into our manure pit. We buy a special, plastic drum for this purpose and hover around the cows when they come near our building. One day, I notice a plastic bag that comes out with the cow dung.
“You see what I told you,” says Sarala triumphantly when I point it out. “These cows are very discriminating. Even when they nose around garbage, they know what to eat.”
“Well, this cow ate plastic,” I reply.
“Yes, but it took out the plastic through its dung, didn’t it? It didn’t retain the plastic in its belly.”
“I saw a film in which there was a ton of plastic inside each cow,” I say.
Sarala shakes her head. “If I keep a plate full of the choicest chicken or fish in front of you, will you eat it?”
“No,” I reply.
“The cow’s nose and mouth is ten times more sensitive than a human’s. You think it is going to eat bones and plastic?”
Over the next few days, Sarala brings us more dung and we collect our own. After that, it is a simple matter of following the recipe. The end product is called panchagavya:
5 kilograms cow dung
5 liters cow urine
5 liters water
2 liters yogurt
2 liters cow’s milk
500 milliliters ghee
1 kilogram black jaggery or molasses
Tender coconut water from two coconuts
5 bananas with peels
Mix all the above ingredients. Stir occasionally for three weeks. Then, it is ready to use.
There is an edible version of panchagavya, which I haven’t tasted. I doubt that I could. But I don’t dismiss it, either.
Perhaps ancient Indians were on to something. Or perhaps they found uses for whatever shit they had—literally. Rural Indians use dung to this day. Farmers plant seeds inside cow dung, as they consider it a seed protector and fertilizer. Dried cow dung is used as kindle in fires, burned as fuel for cooking, and applied as a mosquito repellent. It is thrown into ponds to balance pH. According to ayurveda, cow dung can be mixed into poultices and decoctions for malaria, snakebite, burns, and itching. It is coated on the walls and floors of mud houses to strengthen their construction; the adobe houses of New Mexico similarly.
But the most common use of cow dung is that of a purifier—weird and paradoxical, I know, but the practice is so widespread in India, both in the past and in rural areas today, that I’ve got to believe there is some truth in it. The dung is considered to have antibacterial and fungicidal properties. During the winter months rural (and even urban) households adorn their courtyards by sprinkling water diluted with dung on them, drawing beautiful kolam designs across the courtyard floors, and placing in the center a mound of cow d
ung topped with a yellow pumpkin flower. The brightness of the yellow flower contrasts nicely with the olive-green cow dung below it. Naturopath Dr. Sakthy Subramani, who hosts a popular Tamil-language television program, says that both cow dung and yellow pumpkin flower have the ability to “stop germs at the door” and prevent them from entering the house.
As for the smell, you get used to it, I guess. Stop noticing it. I remember the first time I encountered black truffles at a fancy, now-defunct restaurant at Central Park South. The waiter ceremoniously shaved what looked like charcoal on top of my pasta. It had a weird smell. But everyone was raving about it. I suppose it all depends on your point of view. My relatives, for instance, refuse to touch a fungus that has been dug up by a pig. Unfit for human consumption, they will say. Smells weird, even to me. Humans have invented a wide variety of quirky uses for the fruits of nature—from flora and fauna. What seems natural in one culture horrifies another. The same with cow dung.
Whenever my father’s cousin Kicha traveled to the city, where he ate on a dining table instead of on the floor, he carried a bottle containing a greenish liquid. The label read “Mr. Muscle” but it was, in fact, diluted cow dung. He would spray the liquid on the table and instruct the womenfolk to wipe the table. He got away with it—almost. It was the peculiar smell that gave him away. Ever since, every home that he visited had conscientious objectors to his Mr. Muscle bottle. The minute he pulled it out, the hosts objected—strenuously.
As a child, I had several intimate encounters with cows and cow dung. Most fertile of all, in more ways than one, was the housewarming ceremony of my cousin Vikram. It happened in the ’80s, when I was a teenager.
Vikram was the oldest cousin, the one all of us teenage girls had a crush on. Brilliant, tall, lanky, he was every Indian mother’s vision of the ideal bachelor—or at least the mothers in the Tamil Brahmin community I belong to (shortened to “TamBrahm” in today’s slang. Several hearts were crushed when Vikram was admitted to Boston University for graduate school. When he returned to India one summer, he had rechristened himself “Vic” and asked his father to convert their rambling ancestral home into a modern two-story apartment building. A couple of years later, Vic’s apartment was ready—marble floors, white walls, and minimalist furniture.
The Milk Lady of Bangalore Page 10