My husband wants to name the cow after his sister. It will be both an act honoring his sister and the gleefully teasing act of a younger brother. I think it would be cool to have a cow named after me, but I want to make sure my sister-in-law is okay with it.
I call her in the United States and ask permission. Sure, she says.
“How about Anantha Lakshmi?” I ask Sarala the next day. “Is that taken, too?”
She ponders. I wonder why. “Okay,” she says finally. “Let’s call her Anantha Lakshmi.” Blissful-Lakshmi.
I like it.
I take a deep breath and bend over to whisper the name three times into the cow’s wide black ear.
“You are Anantha Lakshmi,” I say. “Anantha Lakshmi is your name. Anantha Lakshmi.”
The cow twitches her ear and listens.
Months later, during our regular, desultory morning conversation, I ask Sarala for the name of the cow that got hit by a corporation truck.
“What was the name of the cow that got hit?” I ask.
“Her name was Anantha-Lakshmi,” says Sarala. “Same name as your cow.”
“Actually, it will soon be your cow,” I finally tell her. “My family and I plan to donate the cow to you for my father and father-in-law’s eightieth birthday.”
Sarala beams. “You are doing a good thing, Madam,” she says. “It will bring good luck to the family. Nothing higher than a cow donation.”
Both birthdays are still a few months away. So, technically, I am at least temporarily the owner of a cow.
Have you ever owned a cow? It is quite wonderful. I can say this, of course, because I am not doing the dirty work. I have subcontracted the cow’s entire care to Sarala and her family. My family does only the fun parts. My kids accompany me across the street with gusto these days. They want to pet the cow. They bring their friends. All the Japanese kids in our building are fascinated by the cow, but they cannot pronounce her name. So everybody has taken to calling her “AL”—short for Anantha Lakshmi.
AL is patient. She doesn’t stomp, shake her horns, or swat the kids with her tail. Beyond paying for AL’s monthly feed and collecting the milk every day, though, I am distracted, preoccupied elsewhere. Our dog, Inji, has fallen sick. We take her to the vet, Dr. Morton, who tells us that she has a kidney problem. Sarala gives me advice about how to make Inji feel better. She tells me to feed the dog cow urine every day. Inji will not go near it. She detests cows. My Labrador is getting sicker every day and there is nothing I can do about it.
Sarala is preoccupied, too. She wants AL to get pregnant but she wants to make sure that the calf is female. Male cows don’t give milk. Bulls are good if you have a field to plough, Sarala tells me. In the dairy community, male calves aren’t valued, a contrast to the rest of Indian society, where female infanticide is still a problem.
“There is a new technology, Madam,” Sarala says one day. “It can separate the bull semen so that we can get a female calf—guaranteed. Why don’t you look into it?”
That evening, Ram and I take our dog to Dr. Morton again. She has been shivering with spasms and has stopped eating. It is the fifth time in two weeks that we are at the vet. After examining her, Dr. Morton sits us down. With kind eyes, he explains that we may have to do kidney dialysis. And even then, he cannot be sure that they can save her.
My husband and I gape at the doctor. What is he saying?
Inji is just three years old. She is a healthy, happy Labrador who likes to eat, not the sort of dog to contract a life-threatening illness. But then, isn’t that what all parents—and that is really how I relate to my dog—say when their child succumbs to the lethal march of an illness?
We have many questions. How did she contract it? we ask.
An E. coli infection caused the kidney problems. How does anyone contract an infection? asks the doctor in return. We take her for walks outside. She sniffs other dog’s shit. (In India, dog owners aren’t required to pick up the poop.) There is stagnant water with mosquitoes on the road.
How long does she have to live? Dr. Morton sighs and speaks in generalities. Other dogs have lasted a few months . . .
A few months? That is the outer limit? Ram and I are shocked. Dr. Morton refers us to Cessna Lifeline Veterinary Hospital, with its rotating team of vets. The next month is a whirl. All four of us—Ram, Ranju, Malu, and I—go to the vet every evening. They put Inji on a table and give her IV drips with a cocktail of medicines. She gets weaker. She eats very little. She lies in the sun. When I take her for a walk, she zigzags like a drunk.
Her treatments last an hour each day. We all take turns standing beside Inji as they prod and poke her, hook her up to machines. When the vets are free, I chat with them. I tell them about Sarala and ask them if there is a way to guarantee a female calf.
One vet, Dr. Chavan, smiles. “Your friend is a dairy farmer, isn’t she?” he asks. “There are techniques to guarantee a male calf,” he says, “but they are very expensive.” He mentions something called “flow cytometry,” which sorts the sperm. He gives me the contact number of his friend.
Inji gets worse every day. She goes into surgery for the dog version of dialysis. It doesn’t seem to help. I wake up in the morning, dreading the sight of her tired, prone body and feebly wagging tail. I occasionally wish that Inji would die in her sleep (though I am later ashamed to admit that), relieving me of decisions about drugs that don’t seem to work, freeing me from days and nights at the clinic. After several weeks of this bleak routine, I just want the whole thing to be over. Not my husband.
People react in different ways to health crises. You learn new things about your spouse and children. Ram, who doesn’t even like Inji as much as I do, will not give up on her. He is like a maniac—going on the Internet to discover new medication for chronic kidney failure in dogs. He consults four vets (including one in the United States) about urine cultures and blood reports. That’s when our fights begin. We argue over medical protocols and dropping creatinine counts. I want to let Inji finish her life at home, without needles, in peace. He accuses me of pulling the plug, of copping out.
“If one of us has to get cancer, it had better be me because I’ll give up on you after a few weeks, just like I am giving up on Inji,” I tell him tearfully, because the truth of who I am is now revealed.
“Ask the vet if we should try ciprofloxacin,” he replies.
You want to know about grief? Let me tell you about grief—not the spousal grief so beautifully captured by Joan Didion in her book, The Year of Magical Thinking. This grief is the kind that is felt by a whole family that watches a beloved pet lose life’s last battle. Grief is the sound of IV drips, the coldness of a metal stretcher, and the smell of antiseptic mixed with urine. Grief is a woman spending four hours a day at a vet clinic, watching her once-frisky dog lie still on a metal stretcher and get two bottles of Ringer lactate solution mixed with streptopencillin, B complex, vitamin C, and a cocktail of drugs.
Grief is a husband and wife screaming at each other about appropriate medical procedures. Grief is a man telling his wife, “Why do you have that morose face? Wipe that face off your face. We can still save her. We can change the antibiotic. The creatinine count is still not that low.”
Till you experience it, you think that grief is one emotion. It isn’t; it is many emotions packaged into one. It’s like standing at the top of a tall building and having the floor fall out. There is some of that shock. There is the rage that comes with the “why me” question. There is a bitter taste in your mouth that never seems to go away. There are the questions that sprout up at the oddest moments. Questions like “What is a good way to die?”
She has been seriously sick for five weeks, our dog. Is that too short a time or too long a time to watch her suffer? Is it good that her illness has given our family time to adjust? Or would it have been better if she had suffered a stroke and died the next morning without suffering?
We know the end is nigh.
The night
before Inji dies, she and I lie beside each other on the orange couch in our living room. She is too weak to move after a month of not eating. She does not shut her dilated, golden eyes the whole night; neither do I shut mine. I watch my beautiful, beige Labrador, with her still-silky coat, suffer spasms all through the night. The E. coli infection that has eaten through her kidneys has finally lodged inside her brain. The shivering that had started six weeks before has turned into violent paroxysms. Let go, child, I whisper to her, as she drools bile and saliva, as her body rattles so hard I hear the emptiness inside. I want her to die; I want the decision not to be mine. Her eyes never leave me, even as I go to get her some water from the kitchen—water that spills from the sides of her mouth. Is she scared? I don’t know. I am.
At around 3 a.m. Inji starts frothing at the lips. She has stopped drinking, even water.
The next morning, we take her to the vet. It is over, Dr. Morton says. He has been tracking her since the illness began. Ram and I drive back home with her. We are silent. We follow our usual routine of calling four vets before deciding that the illness has won. My husband, the man who never gives up, finally concedes defeat. He calls my sister-in-law, Priya.
Every family has a different go-to person for different crises. You call your mom for certain things, your dad for others, your siblings for something else. Priya loves all animals and babies. She is the first person we call that evening. She and my brother come over.
We call Dr. Morton and ask him to come. We don’t say why and he doesn’t ask. When he arrives, we ask if Inji has any chance to recover. He says no. “If I don’t anesthetize her now, she’ll be dead by tonight. But she’ll be in pain the whole day.”
We briefly debate whether to pull the kids out of school and end up bringing home our elder daughter, Ranju, now in high school, but leaving Malu, a middle-schooler, out of the whole thing.
At noon, Ranju puts Inji’s head on her lap. My mother pours Ganga water into Inji’s mouth. My father looks dazed. Everyone weeps.
Our friend, Sriram—a dog lover who simply shows up, as friends do in times of crisis—says, “Watch her eyes. It helps you gain some closure.”
So I stare into my dog’s eyes, searching for signs of pain or fear. Her eyes remain dilated. Death will occur in a few seconds, says the doctor as he injects her.
In the Vedic period, there was a name for the people who killed the animals used for sacrifices. They were called samitrs (quieteners). I read about them in a book called Violence Denied, by Jan Houben.
I find myself reflexively whispering things similar to what the samitrs would say to cows before strangling them.
“You are going to live in an auspicious and spacious place, surrounded by nourishing food and drink. You are going to listen to sacred utterances that enhance your spirit. Till the sun shines; till the moon rises; till the ocean has tides; your body and mind will be nourished by love, life, and light. Your fur will exude the fragrance of affection. Your eyes will have the light of someone who has been loved. You are the abode of all the gods. The life of all beings depends on you. Sins will not touch you. Be of good cheer. Go with a peaceful heart. Peace be with you.”
I see the light go out of Inji’s eyes. With my fingers, I close them. Most of us are sobbing now, bawling. But Ram hasn’t shed a tear. That will come later. He has not accepted this yet.
We drive in a motorcade to Kengeri, an hour outside Bangalore, where an organization called People for Animals rescues wildlife that has been cruelly treated by humans and rehabilitates them. They have a pet cemetery on a woody knoll. We bury Inji there with full honors and rites (four pallbearers, sprinkled rice according to Hindu tradition), her favorite foods (milk, bananas) to feed her on her way to the heavens, and a jasmine garland.
Who are you? Are you the kind who grieves intensely and quickly, or does your grief take time to reveal itself and leave? Does it ever leave? As I watch the palpable grief in the people I love, I tell myself that I am different from them, stronger. Not true.
I tell myself I am over it. I say this during those moments when I feel Inji behind me as I boil milk in the kitchen. I say this when I insert the key into my front door and feel my body tighten with pleasure in anticipation of the overjoyed welcome my dog gave me—tail wagging, body shaking from side to side. I still smile when I open the door. And then I stop.
“It has been six months,” I tell Sarala. “I miss Inji every day.”
She nods sympathetically.
“Animals touch your heart in ways people don’t realize,” she says. “We have birthed and lost so many cows and calves. It is hard every single time.”
18
A Calf
A few months later, my cow is pregnant. Sarala announces this one November morning in the matter-of-fact tone that she uses to ask if I want extra milk.
“The cow is pregnant, Madam. Your cow.”
I am delighted. Over the next few months, we ply AL with goodies: watermelon rinds, pineapple peels, mango seeds, fresh greens, grains, jaggery water—all of which are to bovines what pop-tarts and pizza are to kids. We want to make AL feel good before her delivery. This is an Indian tradition. Pregnant women, too, are feted and fussed over. No references are made to whales or waddling. Instead, people send over special snacks and handmade delicacies. Feeding a pregnant woman, it is said, assures a seat in heaven.
Sarala and I examine AL every day. Sarala says that the cow’s face has softened, acquired a maternal character. AL gets her special pregnancy food from multiple households in the neighborhood. My kids canvass the neighbors for orange peels and coconut scrapings. No bones, no meat, no eggshells—nothing nonvegan. Our cook, Geeta, adds another element. No leftovers that have touched our lips.
“The cow is a holy animal, Madam,” she says.
This notion of contamination by saliva is common in Indian dining etiquette. Every Indian language has a word for it. In Tamil, we call it echal. In Hindi, they call it jhoota, or geela. The closest American approximation is double-dipping, when guests dip their tortilla chip into the dip again after taking a bite, thus befouling the dip with their spit, as it were. Think of this to the nth degree, and you’ll get an idea of the Indian concept of impurity through saliva.
Our cook believes that giving the “pure” cow our saliva-contaminated leftovers is a sin. She looks through the cow bucket and vets every discard. Once, I casually threw in a string of jasmine. The flowers had faded but I knew the cow would eat them. “The string will tie itself around the cow’s intestines and may kill it,” said our cook disapprovingly, pulling out the offending string of jasmine.
The kids and I want to see the cow deliver. We keep telling Sarala to phone us when it happens. She agrees in theory but cannot guarantee it. “Some cows will deliver at night,” she says querulously when we bring up the subject yet again. “Even I won’t be present. They’ll undergo all the labor pain and deliver the baby calf by themselves, poor things.”
One morning, after the milking, Sarala leads the pregnant cow into the army enclave. I follow. Grazing on the fresh grass inside will relax AL, she says. At around 10:30 a.m. on the following day, the security guard outside my building phones me. My cow is in labor, he says.
I race downstairs and see a crowd gathered at the gate of the army enclave. AL is on the main road inside. I push my way through to where Sarala, Naidu, and Selva are standing beside AL with gunnysacks. AL is snorting a bit, blowing mist through her nostrils. But beyond that, her face is the same. She is not screaming like human women do in labor. She stands, then sits, then changes position—to push, I presume. The whole process takes thirty minutes. AL delivers a sprightly, healthy calf right there on the main road inside a clean army compound.
The calf arrives swathed in membrane. It lies on the ground. Two minutes later, it lifts up its head. AL licks the calf all over to remove the protective sheath and clean her. Ten minutes later, the calf hobbles up. Mother and calf nuzzle and bond. Sarala and Naidu pour water
on the tar road to wash out the blood. They clean the area with brooms and sprinkle cow-dung water all over. Finally, they scoop up the newborn calf in the sack and walk the tired new mother to the cowshed down the road. We all admire the calf’s beautiful white and black markings. There is just one problem: the calf is male.
Does Sarala view her cows as gifts of nature or as gravy trains? The answer is both. She juggles both perspectives on a daily, almost minute-to-minute basis. This gift of nature, this calf, as I find out, is to be gifted away.
Sarala gives the new cow-mother a healing diet for three days. She mixes cane sugar with grains and cornstalks. The concoction will cool her uterus and remove the remaining placenta, she says. She sends Selva to a farm two hours outside Bangalore to collect the corn stalks. Sarala thinks that the new mother needs this extra nutrition. As compromises go, it is a small but important one. Sarala doesn’t need to give the new cow-mother a special diet. It is not as if the cow will demand tasty cornstalks or throw a tantrum (although cows do). Selva would probably prefer not to ride two hours to pay for and bring back piles of prickly cornstalks. Naidu probably will complain about aching joints and extra work because Selva isn’t there to pick up the slack. But they do it, not because they need to, not because they even want to, but because . . . they can. It is possible—nobody is sick that day, they aren’t short of cash—so they go the extra mile for the cow.
“Does the cow have a mouth to tell you its pain?” asks Sarala. “After all, we are women, too. It is up to us to take care of them.”
The affection that Sarala feels for her cattle is genuine and is part of the reason why I find her, and her ecosystem, so compelling. Most urban encounters with nature are fleeting, optional, and impersonal. We go bird watching, visit the zoo, and grow vegetables in the garden. Truly immersive experiences involve living with another species within their natural habitat for long periods of time. Urban dairy farmers allow me to get a glimpse of such a relationship without having to leave the city, or even my neighborhood. They allow me to witness the intersection of nature, people, and the economy up close and personal, yet in my own comfort zone. That has, I realize now, been a privilege. Plus, I have fallen in love . . . with cows.
The Milk Lady of Bangalore Page 17