The entire clan gathered for the housewarming ceremony, complete with priest and feast. Vic appeared in Nike shorts and was promptly instructed to change into the traditional Indian dhoti (sarong). My four uncles, one of whom was Vic’s father, wanted a cow to inaugurate the apartment. They bribed the local milk woman, who produced a cow. Using hay, bananas, and jaggery (clumps of unrefined sugar made from date palm and sugarcane), my uncles coaxed the cow up two flights of stairs and straight into Vic’s new digs. When he came out of his bedroom clad in a dhoti, Vic encountered a large, slightly angry Brahman cow, and a mildly disapproving Brahmin priest, staring straight at him.
“Can you repeat Sanskrit mantras after me?” asked the priest huffily.
“What is that animal doing here?” asked Vic.
Vic’s dad rang the bronze bell to signal that the proceedings could start. Nobody paid Vic any attention. All eyes were on the cow. The priest was instructed to lengthen the mantras to allow time for the cow to give a nice shit.
“We need the cow dung to fall in the house,” said an uncle. “It is beneficial.”
“No way. Not in this modern apartment,” said Vic.
“Silly boy. Cow dung is where goddess Lakshmi resides.”
Vic tried the proverbial “over my dead body” approach but the priest’s Sanskrit mantras drowned him out.
Nothing happened. The cow stood patiently, lubricated by periodic treats of sugarcane stalks, jaggery, and sweets. One of my uncles had a bright idea and whispered to the others. Two of them took up positions on each side of the cow. They glanced at each other and bent in unison to massage the sides of the cow in an attempt to get it to shit. The surprised cow snorted but was given more sugar to calm it down. After a few minutes of massaging, the cow gave a loud bellow and released enough methane gas to light up a small town. Just as we were recovering from the odor, it dumped olive-green dung, which splattered all over Vic’s white marble floor.
My uncles grinned delightedly and began applauding the cow.
Vic stared at his new floor and began muttering “What the fuck! What the fuck! What the fuck!” in time to the Sanskrit chant of the priest.
The priest sped up the proceedings after that.
Once the ceremony ended, a significantly lighter, fairly sugared-up cow trotted down two flights of stairs. The daughters of the family, including me, were pressed into action. Armed with brooms and a plastic dustpan, we were told to scoop up the dung into a large bucket. It smelled (or stank, depending on your proclivities and sensitivities) to high heaven. My uncles wanted to dilute the cow dung with water and sprinkle it all over the house “for purity,” but Vic finally put his Nike sneaker – shod foot down. He wouldn’t hear of it.
That evening, there was a flaming row between Vic and his father. The details are hazy in my mind, but the theme remains vivid, perhaps because this happens repeatedly in India: the war between five thousand years of tradition and twenty-first-century modernity, the conflict between the Western-educated mind and the Indian soul, a debate that touches many aspects of life ranging from marriage to child-rearing to house-warming and cows.
Elders defend arranged marriages to their US-educated grandchildren. Haircutters defend folk wisdom, such as when to have a haircut, to skeptical software engineers. Don’t cut your hair during the waning phase of the moon, they say. Things grow better when the moon waxes. A father defends the use of cow dung to his furious son. Vic was aghast that his father continued to follow “mindless superstitions” that had no basis in science.
“How do you know that it has no basis in science?” asked his father.
And thus the argument began, all over again. It has continued over decades at every family gathering.
Vic couldn’t be persuaded to enter the apartment again. He returned to Boston, married a woman named Emily and has lived there happily ever after. His father, who wanted no part of Boston or beef-eating Emily, occupied his apartment, which perhaps was the point of the whole exercise.
“These modern young people don’t understand the value of our traditions,” said Vic’s dad. “We have immersed ourselves in cow products and cow dung for five thousand years. If it was bad for us, you think we would be the second most populous nation on earth?”
One day, my neighbor Rachael and I collect a few of the building’s children to teach them about composting and recycling. We stand in front of the giant terra-cotta composting container, surrounded by buckets of just-collected household organic waste. In front of us are a group of dubious-looking kids carrying a basketball.
When I bring up cow manure, the conversation quickly degenerates to exclamations of “Gross!” and “Ewww.”
“What’s wrong with cow dung?” says Rachael. “Our farmers have used it for centuries. It is part of Indian culture.”
Oh no, and here we go, I think. What begins as a composting lesson is quickly deteriorating into a debate on what constitutes Indian culture, played out ad nauseam between generations, including online and on television, without conclusion.
“Cow urine and cow dung may be part of our culture but that doesn’t mean that we have to wallow in it,” says a nine-year-old.
“Nobody is asking you to wallow in it, smart aleck,” I reply. “All we want you guys to realize is that ancient Indians discovered many things about their environment that could well be true.”
“Or not,” says a teenager. “If cow dung is so great, don’t you think some enterprising pharmaceutical company would have bottled it and sold it for a ton of money?”
“Maybe they will,” I retort. “Indians have used coconut oil for their hair and skin for generations. And now, just because Gwyneth Paltrow raved about coconut oil, all you girls are applying it to your hair?”
“I thought you’d be happy that I was using coconut oil,” my daughter chimes in. “After all, you’ve been bugging me to oil my hair.”
“I am happy. Coconut oil, cow dung, it is all part of the Indian experience. The main message here, guys, is that you shouldn’t dismiss everything that is native and traditional as ‘old-fashioned.’ Science may have solved some problems but it also created some.”
“Nobody is saying that,” says my daughter. “All we are saying is that none of this cow dung shit—and I’m not even going to apologize for swearing because it makes perfect sense in this context—is scientifically proven.”
“This is not about cow dung. It is about how you view the world. Indians discovered many things empirically, through trial and error.”
And this, ladies and gentlemen, is how you get stuck into positions. You say something to counter a point of view and then have to back it up, digging yourself deeper and deeper into cow shit.
“So what do you want me to do?” asks my daughter. “Do you want me to mix cow dung in water and throw it in our courtyard like you said you did as a kid? Because I am so not going to do that . . . ”
It is her snide tone that gets to me. “First of all, we don’t have a courtyard,” I reply. “Second of all, even if we did, it is not as if every Indian is pouring cow-dung water on their courtyards.”
“Aunty, you are contradicting yourself,” someone yells. “You just said that you want us to use cow dung.”
Everyone starts speaking at the same time.
“You are twisting my words. Okay, have it your way,” I say. “Use all those chemicals that you buy in Bath and Body Works. Spray yourself with deodorant and perfume all you want. You guys are too young to be using all these chemicals. When I was your age, I didn’t touch cosmetics. I wasn’t allowed to use any of the stuff till I was eighteen.”
“Oh yeah, you just drank milk and sprayed cow dung all over the house. Ma, we can argue about this till the cows come home . . . ”
“Actually, did you know that this whole idea of the ‘cows coming home’ is a Western one?” I ask. “In India, the cows don’t dawdle. They rush home. There is even a time called ‘go-dhuli’ that refers to the cows running home to their cal
ves.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Well, you know that phrase that you just used: ‘We can argue till the cows come home.’ That’s a Scottish proverb, and it suggests that the cows are languid creatures and take a long time to come home. All I’m saying is that this whole idea of the cows dawdling is a Western concept. In India, it is the opposite. When we describe mighty rivers flowing at great speed, we say that the river ‘flowed like a cow rushing towards its calf.’ ”
The kids have lost interest. They go off to play basketball.
It is true, though. Indian poetry uses the cow as a metaphor to describe speed, fertility, maternal instincts, and a nurturing benevolence. The ancient river Sindhu, also known as the Indus (which gives the Indus Valley Civilization its name), is described as the mightiest of all rivers, the one into which other roaring rivers run “like mothers to their calves,” not calves to their mothers, as I first mistakenly thought. Cows are not slow; they are just deliberate. Cow don’t linger; they rush to their calves like a river rushes to sea. India’s ancient poets knew this.
The Sindhu River—who flows flashing and white, with ample volume; whose roar can be heard to the heavens; who bellows like a bull; and who is beautiful like a steed. Animal metaphors all.
Part Two
12
My Milk Woman Has a Proposition
We stand on the sidewalk and talk, Sarala and I and the other ladies—about schools and recipes; cows and power cuts; babies and bath water. A breeze ruffles our hair. Everyone is relaxed. Noisy parakeets circle a fruiting fig tree nearby. Milk from the cow’s udder squirts softly and rhythmically into the large bucket.
Selva carries the bucket of milk to the culvert. We crowd around like bees. Army rookies in khaki half-pants and white vests show up out of nowhere. They thrust their cans to the front of the line. A fight threatens to break out. Sarala placates everyone, speaking in Telugu, Kannada, Tamil, and Hindi by turn.
Sarala has a system. She pours the milk and then adds a little extra; a couple of teaspoons to top it off, as a goodwill gesture—“for joy,” as she says. It is a smart marketing tactic. Most of her customers don’t pay attention to whether she measures their three or four liters of milk correctly using her well-worn, aluminum measuring cup. But if she doesn’t give them the extra kosuru, as we call it, people notice. Today, she fails to spoon out my joy.
“Where is my extra kosuru?” I complain.
“What to do, Madam?” Sarala replies. “We are short of cows.”
This is a preamble to a proposition. Sarala wants me to buy a cow for her. It will cost about one thousand dollars. Her intention is to pay me back. Over the next few days, Sarala and I go back and forth about her loan or “advance,” as people call it here.
The word advance sounds more benign than loan. For a developing economy such as India, an advance makes eminent sense, given the youthful population. It suggests progress and betterment—latent potential turning into reality. You are advancing your twenty-four-year-old, married driver twelve hundred dollars to help him buy a “two-wheeler,” which he will use to transport his family of four. He will return the advance to you in the form of safe driving, daily cleaning of your vehicle, good attitude, and multiple other tangible and intangible variables, and eventually, after a couple of years—you hope—in cash. A loan on the other hand has all kinds of unsavory associations: sharks, defaults, credit, and loan calculators. A loan is cold and cutting. An advance is civilized.
When I moved here, well-meaning friends warned me about the “advance thing,” particularly as it applied to hiring household help. It would be only a matter of time before household staff would ask for advances, they said. Best to come up with a strategy. Collect something as collateral. Register their names with the police or threaten to complain to the cops in case of default. Best of all, simply refuse all requests for advances.
So I did. In the beginning, when I interviewed people to hire, I made loud pronouncements about how I wouldn’t give advances. Instead, I would pay above-market rates. That lasted about a week. Sour neighbors called me up and complained that I was messing with the pay scale of the building. Their help was demanding higher salaries because of me.
“If you must pay more, pay 10 or 20 percent more, not like 50 percent,” said the building committee treasurer, an accountant by profession.
Strapped by a salary bandwidth, I was forced to consider advances.
“Sometimes I feel like moving back to New York so I don’t have to deal with all these advances and salary permutations and complications,” I complained to my brother, Shyam.
“Come on, that’s like Pa saying that he wants to tear down the house because the toilet is leaking,” Shyam replied.
I came up with variations. I told the first woman I hired that I would only give an advance of under a month’s salary. She waited a week and asked for four times that amount. She would return it in a year, she said. By then, I liked her work too much to refuse. My first driver borrowed progressively larger amounts until he owed me one thousand dollars, but he always made sure that he paid back something each month. One day he quit without notice or without repaying the four hundred dollars that was left from his loan. I clamped down and stopped giving advances to the ironing man, vegetable vendor, or flower man. That, too, lasted about a week.
I’d like to unleash a psychologist or a behavioral economist to figure out Indian advances, because you know what? There is no model; there is no uniform. One size doesn’t fit all. What is true is that it is only a matter of days before the cook, driver, housekeeper, part-time cleaner, gardener, or whoever it is you employ, will ask you for a loan. The size will vary based on several factors: need, circumstance, length of employment, and ability to repay. The cynic in me thinks that the people you hire suss you out and ask for the maximum that they can get away with. They intend to pay it back. Except stuff happens and they have to leave town.
People can be both crafty and noble. In his famous essay “Is There an Indian Way of Thinking,” A. K. Ramanujan writes that Indians are adept at holding two contradictory thoughts in our heads. This implies a certain comfort with ambiguity, the gray areas. Children have this ability to hold not just two contradictory thoughts but multiple thoughts at the same time. We call it imagination.
Dualism is not just about quantum theory or world-changing ideas. It works in smaller contexts too. When I argue with Ram, I am usually intent on proving that I am right and he is wrong. India has ground that out of me. I am convinced I am right. He is equally convinced that he is right. Guess what, I tell him one day, we are both right.
He stares at me suspiciously. “Is this you attempting to take the high road or some weird version of it?” he asks.
“No,” I reply seriously. “It is just that there is no one truth. It is all perception.”
The argument doesn’t end but my husband is silenced, at least for the moment.
Living in India, I have learned the art of silence; of letting comments slide without getting all fussed about them. And it’s not just arguments or advances—or requests to buy cows. For example, what do you do when an aunt you haven’t seen for twenty years greets you at a wedding by saying, “You’ve developed a paunch”? Or when your mother-in-law’s colleague walks into your home for the first time and asks, by way of introduction, “How much did you pay for this apartment?”
When I was first confronted with this particular inquiry from a perfect stranger, I was stumped. I blurted out the cost. Nowadays, I am wiser. When this question is asked, as it often is, I talk about cost per square foot and change the subject.
Over time, you realize that people in India ask questions or make unwieldy comments to fill gaps in conversation, or they ask for the price of your apartment without preamble or introduction because they don’t view it as personal. They would gladly volunteer such information about themselves should you be interested. And when an elderly aunt says that you have put on weight, she is tr
ying—however awkwardly—to be affectionate. She has known you since you were a child and merely wants to remind you of how thin you used to be. You should be flattered that she has noticed your weight gain.
Or maybe Indian uncles of a certain age are just ornery, and Indian aunties are hormonal and need estrogen shots. And maybe in these instances sometimes being silent is not the only route. Yes, learn not to take things literally and retain a sense of humor, but also understand when to turn defensive politeness into offensive aggression, matching personal remark for personal remark. In other words, when people call you fat, you call them bald—with a smile and an affectionate hug, of course.
When Sarala keeps asking me to buy bottled water from her son Senthil she doesn’t really expect a response. She just can’t help trying. And none of her other customers will even entertain such entreaties. “These army folks are like vultures,” Sarala will say. “They want the best quality milk but ask them to pay a penny more, they won’t agree. They will say that it is beyond their capacity to pay that much for milk.”
I am the only fat-cat “bungalow customer” Sarala has. It would be a crime to allow such a circumstance to go unexplored. So she tries a variety of ways to prize money from me. Because she tries it so transparently, it is hard for me to take offense. Plus, I really like her.
I can afford to give Sarala the thousand-dollar loan for a cow, but I don’t want her to view me as her sugar daddy, or mommy in this case. So I conjure up elaborate methods to establish my inadequacy. My mother has a simpler approach. She just says no.
The Milk Lady of Bangalore Page 11