One morning, as I stand waiting for the milk, I take out my cell phone and have a long, imaginary conversation in Tamil, which Sarala speaks, with a bank manager who is harassing me about my home loan. I plead to this imaginary man not to raise the interest rates. I tell him that I will definitely pay for the month in two days. Money is short because of a medical emergency, I say. Next month I plan to make it up. While I am having this loud “conversation” entirely for Sarala’s benefit, she is talking to the other ladies, seemingly oblivious to my pleas.
In the end I hang up, sigh theatrically, turn to Sarala, and explain the whole imaginary situation again with renewed vigor. “I have a home loan that is hanging like a noose around my head,” I end.
Sarala smiles sympathetically. “Everybody has problems,” she says, as she has said before. “You have high-rise-size problems. I have hut-size problems.”
Finally, I think. She equates herself with me. I am not merely a gravy train.
My husband has a different view. He is shocked that I am contemplating buying a cow.
“The milk lady across the street needs another cow to supplement her income. I thought I would buy her one,” I begin.
Ram raises his eyebrows and gives me the look. I have to back off. He already thinks I’ve gone nuts. Well, I was always nuts, but in India, being nuts seems easier. I am, after all, doing a dance-therapy workshop, meeting with schoolmates who are into neuro-linguistic programming (NLP), and looking into past-life regression just because I am curious about it. On top of it all, I have started seeing a shrink.
“You had to wait till we moved to India to see a shrink?” asks Ram. “Why didn’t you do this in New York where everything is so much more standardized?”
“Because things are cheaper here,” I reply. “I pay, like, five dollars an hour.”
“But why do you need to see a shrink?”
I sigh but don’t answer. Ever since I received my undergraduate degree in psychology, I have been subject to questions like this. Indians—or should I say, my family—view psychology as a nebulous pursuit, just above the work of witch doctors, shamans, and astrologers.
“Can you read my mind?” was the question I got when I told friends and family in India that I was studying psychology. It got old really quick. I had hoped that things would have changed in the twenty years that I was away, that therapy would now be viewed with respect.
“You know, I am so tired of Indians being so skeptical about psychology, therapy, and counseling,” I tell my husband. “All my friends in New York see shrinks. Why are we Indians so suspicious of it?”
Ram has no answer. Neither do my brother, father, mother, or in-laws. They all think they have failed me somehow when I tell them I am seeing a therapist.
“Whatever it is, why don’t you talk to us?” asks my dad earnestly. “Are you having any problems at home?”
“Pa,” I say, exasperated. “I just want to see what therapy feels like. Is that so bad? I studied it and now I want to experience it. And here in India, I can afford it.”
My therapist, Uma, operates from a home in the nearby neighborhood of Frazer Town. I rather wish she had a proper couch where I could lie back and talk about all the Freudian stuff I learned in college. I have to make do with a plastic chair instead. I go once a week. Amidst the din of India, it is great to sit in a quiet room and talk about my feelings and angst, about people and their quirks, about the lack of privacy and the chaos that surrounds me, and about how sometimes I cannot sleep because I am obsessing about milk.
“I have started having pretend conversations on the phone,” I say to Uma one day.
She doesn’t even raise an eyebrow.
“Who with?”
“Mostly banks and mortgage brokers,” I reply. “I make up these imaginary phone calls to signal to the people who work for us that I have money troubles.”
“How do these conversations go? And how often do you have them?”
“I had one yesterday when I was with my milk lady. Usually, I just plead on the phone. Maybe I’ll say, ‘I am so sorry for not paying this month’s bank loan, sir. Please don’t increase the interest rate.’ Things like that. So they feel that I have problems, just as they do.”
“And why is that important to you?”
“Well, the inequalities of India really bother me.”
“In what way?”
“Well, I have many saris in my closet. My maid and cook probably have five expensive saris. The worst part is that they wear saris everyday and know how to enjoy saris. They tie them well and wear matching flowers in their hair. I’m worried that they will feel terrible every time they fold my clothes because they can’t afford clothes like mine.”
“So what do you do?”
“I hide my new clothes in a trash bag.”
“But won’t they discover it someday when you take them out?”
The shrink’s endless questions don’t help me much. It is my mother who comes to my rescue. She smiles when I tell her about how I hide new clothes to spare my maid’s feelings.
“Make your home pleasant so people feel like working there,” says my mom. “Don’t do silly things like hiding your new clothes.”
I nod. I am used to dismissing my mother’s advice—and you could make a case for the inequality of the capitalist system in general—but on a person-to-person level, her argument actually makes some sense.
My shrink does, in the end, also give me some good advice. Her techniques are different from what I studied in college. She has a point of view. I thought that shrinks are not supposed to reveal that. She tells me to revel in my relationships. Humans like connections with other people; they hate being lonely. Life in India is all about relationships, she says. Don’t fight it. Enjoy it. And drink warm milk with saffron if you can’t sleep.
Still, so many people, like Sarala, haven’t been given the same opportunities that I have. I am just plain lucky. It isn’t fair and it totally sucks.
13
A Cow as a Birthday Gift?
One morning, Sarala brings a bounding Alsatian puppy on a leash. It belongs to Senthil, she explains. “He is crazy about animals. Brings them home. He has collected a pigeon, parakeets, a cat, and now this puppy.”
Sarala’s daughter-in-law, apparently, is furious.
“There isn’t room in our one-bedroom house for the ten of us, let alone this puppy,” says Sarala. “And now we have a newborn baby, too. How will my daughter-in-law adjust to this?”
There is a pause. Might I want an Alsatian? Sarala asks. She knows that I am looking for a puppy.
They want to get rid of the Alsatian but only to a family that will allow them to visit the dog from time to time. “It has to go to a good home. That is the main thing,” says Sarala with finality. She looks at me hopefully.
“Alsatians are police dogs,” I dither, gazing at the energetic puppy barking for milk. “We are looking for, oh, I don’t know, a Labrador or beagle, a softer breed, maybe.”
Sarala promises to keep an eye out. She smiles indulgently at the Alsatian. “See how smart he is already. He wants milk,” she says. “He knows exactly when the milk is ready.”
They eventually give the puppy to an army man who has a large compound for the high-spirited dog to run around in.
Over the next several weeks, Sarala takes me to see several dog breeders. Through her network of connections, we buy a ginger-colored Labrador puppy, much to the delight of my children. We name her Inji, which means “ginger” in Tamil.
Inji, while still just a few months old, refuses to leave our apartment complex. Walking on the road terrifies her: her tail goes between her legs and she simply sits down in stubborn defiance. There are many reasons for Inji’s antiwalking stance—most have to do with me. On one or two memorable occasions, I royally chewed her out on the road because she hadn’t done her business after half an hour of walking. One time, I got so fed up that I dropped her leash in protest. She ran away, banged against a cycl
ist who fell on top of her, and created pandemonium all around. House training my puppy, like many things in my life, has shown me exactly how inadequate I am.
We have newspapers all over the floor and have to strategize about how to get the puppy out the door for walks. It is chaos. This is at odds with what my husband wants from life. Ram wants to name our home Samatvam. This Sanskrit word—the closest English translation is “equanimity”—encompasses much of what he aspires to. Aspires being the operative word here, because actually both my husband and I are samatvam wannabes. We want to project Zen-like calm during crises, which we do, but then we end up losing it for the most pedestrian and idiotic of reasons.
Through the Bhagavad Gita, Hinduism advocates equanimity in no uncertain terms. One of the Gita’s most famous verses teaches that you can control your actions, not the results. Yoga, in its simplest and most lofty sense, means samatvam—“samatvam yoga uchyathe,” as the verse goes: “Yoga means equanimity.”
To this profound assertion, I add my own method of attaining equanimity—get a puppy. Even though in the beginning there is pandemonium, in a roundabout way—and I think Ram would agree—Inji has taught us much about achieving samatvam.
What distinguishes animal lovers is the belief that animals understand what we say and who we are, not just in the superficial listening-to-orders sense, but in the deepest intuitive sense. After several months of getting trained by my puppy, I have gone from skeptic to believer. I think my dog is an excellent mirror of my emotions. When I am calm, she is calm. When I am angry, she is sad. When I am happy, she is happy. And when I am samatvam—as in, when I don’t scold her for small lapses like urinating on my carpet, she blossoms. Her spirit unfurls. Me samatvam; she samatvam. Or is it the reverse?
Sarala adds one more item to the toolkit of “how to get the dog to walk on the road.”
“Animals calm each other down, Madam. Once you get a cow, you will calm down and therefore your puppy will calm down, too,” she says.
I have calmed down, though. In many ways, my interactions with Sarala are healing. I tell her all my problems with the house, with my writing, and with family. I have stopped going to the shrink. That, according to Ram, is Sarala’s biggest contribution to my life. She has turned into my therapist.
Both my father and father-in-law are celebrating their eightieth birthdays in a few months with grand Hindu ceremonies that last three days. The ceremony is called Sathabhishekam and occurs after a man has seen one thousand full moons per the lunar calendar, which I think works out to completing eighty years, eight months, and eight days.
A big part of the celebration is contributing alms to Brahmins. While going through the list of donations with our family priest, one of the rituals that keeps coming up is go-dhaan, or “cow-donation,” which is considered to be very auspicious. Hindus offer many reasons for why they consider the cow important. Some of it has to do with the Lord Krishna, the primeval cowherd, who played his flute and attracted the cows to him. Many of his names are linked with cows, for instance: Govinda—one who brings pleasure and satisfaction to cows; Gopala—one who protects cows.
Krishna grew up in Gokulam (another cow linkage) and is the inspiration for many schools of art, music, and dance in India. There are miniature paintings of him with cows, stories about how he knew each of his cows by name and sight, and how he had 108 herds of cows separated by color and had different names for each type. Hindu Indians who have the means don’t need any persuasion about go-dhaan. My mother, for example, has been wanting to do this for years. Every time I bring up charity, she talks about cow-donation in the same breath as contributing to CARE.
For me, this comes as some sort of cosmic synchronicity. I have gone through a series of mental shifts with respect to buying a cow for Sarala: first suspicion, then curiosity, then a tentative decision to loan her the money, then figuring out if she could and would return my loan, and then moving to my current state—rationalization. Even if Sarala wanted to, it is highly unlikely that she can pay me back such a large amount, and maybe that is okay.
Ram and I have been talking about this for weeks. After his initial shock, Ram, too, has warmed to the idea. He sees Sarala as a micro-enterprise that we can help fund.
“You know, the real thing that we need to help Sarala with is improving milk yield per cow,” says Ram. “In the US, each cow gives five times as much milk as our Indian cows. It has to do with nutrition.”
Ram sees Sarala as an honest, hardworking entrepreneur. Over several weeks of back and forth, we come to terms with “writing off the loan,” as he says.
With our fathers’ eightieth birthdays, a new option has presented itself. Maybe it isn’t a loan but a donation—one that will make all parties happy.
“I am thinking of buying a cow for your birthday,” I tell my father-in-law. My in-laws are visiting from their home in Kerala. My father-in-law sits at the head of the dining table, sipping his morning coffee. The morning light shines through the rafters.
I love my apartment. It has bright-yellow walls and an antique wooden swing, about the size of a single bed, in the middle of the living room. The colors of my home in Bangalore are completely and vibrantly Indian: peacock blue, parrot green, vermilion red, mango yellow, and mahogany brown.
My father-in-law looks up from his newspaper but doesn’t blink.
“Well, it is better than buying you ten packets of Proteinex or Ensure, which is what I was going to buy you,” I say defensively.
My father-in-law has become frail. He’s been an asthmatic for many years, and his lungs are troubling him, making him breathless and dependent on steroids and nebulizers. We are pressing my in-laws to rent an apartment in our building to be near us, setting his upcoming birthday as an informal move date.
My father-in-law doesn’t want a thing for his milestone birthday. No golf vacations—he doesn’t play golf. No cruise—he had traveled the world while working in the Indian civil service for two prime ministers, Indira Gandhi and Morarji Desai. Now he just wants to stay home and catch up on all the books that he has been meaning to read over the years. But if I want to give him a cow for his birthday, so be it.
I say the same thing to my father and get pretty much the same reaction. Donating a cow is a good thing. If that makes me happy, why not?
The question is, which cow? The priest says that it has to be a native breed, although we will end up fudging that a bit. But which kind? Which color? What personality? Just as Eskimos have multiple names for ice and Romani have scores of names for clouds, ancient Indians had beautiful names to describe the color of cows. Not just the usual white, black, and brown cows, but also cows that were dhumra (smoke-colored); palala dhumra (the color of smoke that rises from burning hay); vata renu suvarna (the color of dust that is raised by the wind); pinga (reddish-brown); and gowri (yellow-colored cow). Gifting cows of various colors brought a variety of merits. A white cow appeases the god of water, Varuna. A gold-colored cow naturally influences Kubera, the god of wealth. Some are less obvious. Gifting a black cow appeases the lord of fire, Agni; a white one is for Indra, king of the gods. A smoky cow pleases Yama, the god of death. Sanskrit literature is full of instructions about whether to gift a cow that is with calf or not. I turn, not to Sanskrit, but to my native village.
Every Indian has an ancestral village where he “hails” from, as we say. This is the village where you trace your family tree going back ten generations; where your family deity, often of tribal origin, makes its home; and where you make annual pilgrimages to propitiate your tribal god or goddess so that your clan can thrive.
These “antecedents,” as Indians often say, give us very specific idiosyncrasies and unstated enmities, deep-seated but cleverly hidden superiority complexes—each of us believes that the patch of land from which we sprung makes us better than everybody else—combined with a chip on the shoulder towards our neighbors, who we know harbor the same opinions (or delusions, hence the insecurity) of themselves. Stri
p away the politeness; strip away the genuine belief in plurality, the abhorrence of “narrow domestic walls,” as poet Rabindranath Tagore calls it; strip away the garden-party persona and pour a few dirty martinis, and then ask me who I am and I will tell you, somewhat sheepishly, perhaps bolstered by some Carnatic instrumental music, that I am a TamBrahm. Really, the music is key. Django Reinhardt or Manitas de Plata will not produce the same sense of local pride.
My father’s side hails from a village in Palghat, where the deity is the goddess Panchali—she of five husbands. Pretty neat, I thought as I studied Mughal kings with their harems in history lessons. My goddess had the male version of a harem. Every summer my family and I visited our native village to worship the goddess and spend time with relatives who lived there. Before going, my father would call his second cousin Kicha (he of Mr. Muscle fame) to “apprise him of our arrival,” said Dad, but really so that they would have breakfast ready when our train arrived at 5 a.m. My mother always carried gifts: talcum powder, mirrors of different shapes, saris in the latest “city fashions,” and select medicines for bacterial infections. Naturally, we were welcomed with joy.
Still, at first these visits were awkward for my city-born-and-bred brother and me. We grew up in Chennai, which was called Madras when we lived there. We thought we had little in common with these folks who claimed a kinship with us. Over the years, we warmed to the experience and grew to enjoy these trips. They had a rustic simplicity to them, these folks, which put a child at ease. There was none of that stilted city formality. Nobody waited for introductions before speaking to us. They simply enveloped us in a hug and proceeded to talk as if we had never left the village.
The most fantastic cow story I’ve heard came during one of these trips. Apparently, my great-grandmother was trying to get pregnant without success. The family astrologer was summoned. He created charts, threw cowrie shells, and looked at omens. He said that my great-grandmother had sarpa-dosham, or the curse of a serpent. She had probably killed one in her past life, so now the serpent was “eating up all the eggs” that grew in her womb. This was why she was having trouble conceiving. The next morning, the family cow was nowhere to be found. The family searched throughout the village for her. Finally, they spotted her on the outskirts of town. She was standing over a rocky outcrop. Milk was flowing out of her udder and into the holes where serpents lived.
The Milk Lady of Bangalore Page 12