“I just followed your husband’s lead. He didn’t speak to anyone about caring for AL’s calf and neither did I. I did talk with the secretary of the whole society,” I tell her. Perhaps I can get him to instruct his staff to take special care.
Sarala shakes her head. “Doesn’t work like that, Madam,” she tells me. “He may do it. But do you think the woman or man taking care of that particular cow pen is going to care, caught up as they are in the daily and hourly urgencies of tending to these animals? I wouldn’t.”
A bottom-up approach, in other words, would have been better.
“That wastrel husband of mine knows nothing,” Sarala continues. “Why didn’t you say something, Madam? You should have slipped fifty or one hundred rupees to the staff and told them to take care of our little one. They do that if you ask for it. They will even brand your calf with an iron so that you can identify it when it grows up. That is painful for our baby so we don’t need to do any branding. But, at least, you should have told them to look after it.”
“I thought your husband would do all that,” I reply. “How would I know?”
We bicker with each other—feeling bad, laying blame.
“I didn’t sleep at all last night,” says Sarala. “I was thinking about the calf the whole time. Look at its mother.”
AL is mooing loudly and apparently has been for the last hour. She looks hither and thither, searching for her calf. Had he been around, he would have mooed in reply. AL doesn’t stop.
A milkman I have never seen approaches AL with his pail. Selva has left town, says Sarala. He hates it when they give away animals. He runs away. They have hired a milkman to do the job today. All of them are exhausted and sad. But the cows need to be milked.
Sarala walks along with the milkman and stands in front of AL, “making nice,” as she calls it. She rubs AL’s forehead and ears, speaking softly. Two of AL’s teats are not working. They need to call the vet. Sarala plans to take AL to the grassy meadow inside the army compound. They are worried that AL will develop a fever. This is what happens to cows when they are sad.
Studies about animal emotions are frequently conflicting. Everyone has a view. Some studies have found, for instance, that cows with names give more milk. The idea is that naming a cow changes the farmer’s behavior towards it, makes it more personalized, and reduces the stress on the cow, which in turn leads to increased milk production. So it’s not just people who get more attached with a name, as I feared with Alfie. The cows are affected, too. In 2011, a researcher at Northampton University in the UK found that cows have complex social and emotional lives. Their heart rates went up when they were separated from the herd, and they formed bonds with certain animals. Cows even have best friends, the Northhampton study indicated.
Sarala agrees. “Cows are like humans, she tells me. They form relationships. They feel pain. They can’t speak. That’s the only difference.” Sarala continues in this vein, verbalizing my thoughts, wondering out loud if the calf slept last night and how it is faring without its mother. “If the calf goes to suckle other cows, they will kick its face with their hind legs,” she says. “Poor thing, it has to receive this abuse at first before it can latch on to another cow-mother.”
Not all scientists climb onto the “animals have emotions” bandwagon. The usual criticism is that humans anthropomorphize animals, attributing human qualities to them. As I study the research on cows and emotions, I learn that calves separated from their mothers quickly forge new connections with other cows. The mother will miss the calf for some time but will adjust far quicker than a human mother who has been separated from her baby. I know this with dogs. When a litter is given away, the mother dog perhaps mourns for a while but life returns to normal soon enough. This knowledge gives me hope that AL will cope fine without her calf.
Still, I take home my milk feeling terrible. No matter how much I tell myself otherwise, I cannot help thinking that I have failed—betrayed—the newborn calf and its mother. Have I committed a sin? Should I not have gotten involved?
The next day, too, AL moos loudly for her calf. I wake up to her mooing and observe her from my balcony. I fill up the bucket with fruit and vegetable peels and take it downstairs. Usually I divide the contents of the bucket between several cows, who all look at me as I cross the street. This time, I head straight for AL and dump the entire contents of the bucket at her feet. She stops mooing and eats.
After breakfast, I decide to go back to the cow shelter. I am not sure what I am after, but I want to check on the calf. I phone Sarala to ask if she wants to come with me. Milking over, she accepts eagerly.
It is noon when we reach the shelter. All the calves are rearranged. I wonder if I can find our calf. We poke around and find him a few yards from his original location. He is sitting down desultorily. He doesn’t jump and bound towards us when he sees us. Cows aren’t demonstrative like that, says Sarala. Instead, our calf stays in his place, staring unblinkingly at us. He looks okay. Thank God!
We bend down and give the calf the goodies that we have brought: jaggery, bananas, coconut shreds, grass, hay. A thin, dark woman in a cotton sari walks up. She is part of the staff at the shelter. I offer her a box of sweets that I have brought—a clumsy attempt at a bribe.
“Please take care of this one,” I say, pointing at my calf.
The woman stares at me. “They come one day and go the next,” she says. “Some people bring the calf just a day after birth. How will it survive? It will catch an infection.”
“Ours is seven days old,” Sarala tells her. “Please put a red thread or a rope around its neck so we can identify it as it grows.”
The woman takes the sweet box wordlessly and walks away.
Satisfied that the calf is okay, we walk to the main enclosure. A massive vaccination exercise is going on. A veterinarian holds an injection in his hand while four men—actually two boys and two men corral the cows, one after another. “It is to protect them against foot-and-mouth disease,” says the vet. “Once they contract that, we cannot do anything.” They grab each animal with a rope and bring it to the wicket fence where the doctor waits. He inserts the needle into the rump of each struggling cow. Animals in fear all exhibit similar responses. I’ve seen it in my dog and I see it here with the cows. Each cow arches away from the hypodermic-wielding vet, its mouth frothing with saliva and the whites of its eyes visible. The intensity of its response—the wild, fearful, frothing reaction and crazed eyes—is out of proportion to the simple pinprick of the injection. Then again, the animal doesn’t know that beforehand. As far as it is concerned, capture leads to bad things, ranging from a ride in a tightly packed van to a butcher’s block to an injection. Uncertainty is what the animal is reacting to, not the injection.
We are loath to leave, and yet we need to go. In an hour, my kids will be home from school and Sarala has put aside innumerable responsibilities. We go back to see the calf again. I kneel down in front of him.
Crows fly above in circles, dispensing malaise and hope in equal parts. A camel watches us from a distance, its head fluffed and coiffed like a cool socialite.
“I am sorry,” I whisper, kneeling beside the calf. Even though I have renounced his name, I can’t help calling him Alfie. I stroke his back. I hate goodbyes. Always have. Goodbyes are guilt on steroids.
“You are going to be okay.” The words sound hollow, even to my ears.
He looks up. His eyes aren’t accusing, merely inquiring. Calves are like cows, except a hundred times more innocent.
“You are going to be okay,” I repeat.
So saying, I get up and walk away from Alfie, who I am abandoning—no getting away from that—at a cow shelter outside Bangalore.
20
Finding a Bride
I’d like to tell you that we thought about the calf every day. We didn’t. Sarala and I talked about Alfie for a while—often in the beginning and then occasionally. Life goes on. The silk-cotton tree’s leaves fall. Its pods split
open. Squirrels and parrots eat the cottony puffs inside. Saucer-like seeds float to the ground. A few months pass.
One day I walk by the statue of Mother Mary at the entrance to the narrow gully where Sarala lives. On a whim, I go into the tiny lane and ask people for Sarala’s house. I have never been here. They tell me that she has moved to near the Tamil Sangam. The next day, when I get my milk, I ask her why. She says that they needed to move to a better home so that they could find a bride.
Sarala is looking for brides for her middle two sons. One is in the Indian army and the other works for an IT company. They are well educated, she says. She wants an educated daughter-in-law, “with at least a master’s degree” for her thirty- and thirty-four-year-old boys. Part of the reason they are having trouble finding brides for their middle two sons is because parents don’t want their daughters to be married into a dairy-farming household.
Every now and then, she goes for a few days to her native village, Arni, to scout out girls who will be comfortable with the rhythms of her family and the cows. Not that they will need to be intimately involved with cow rearing or dairy, Sarala clarifies. The elder of the two sons is posted in Kashmir.
“Will the girl go up North? Near Pakistan?” I ask.
“Why not, Madam? We will just send a cow or two with her. It will make her feel at home. Plus the North Indian hay and grass is probably fresher and stronger than the grass here. The cows will come back as beauties.”
“Sarala, you are only thinking about the cows,” I caution. “You just said that the brides these days don’t want to be mixed up with cows.”
“Yes, yes,” Sarala says, scowling. She still resents this new reality even as she is resigned to it. “Selva should not have all these problems when we look for a bride for him.”
The family is trying to get Selva out of milking. They want him to take a proper job with an office and a salary. It will be a double whammy for Selva if the girl’s family finds out that not only is his family in milking, but that it’s his job, too.
“The parents think that we will put their daughters to work—cleaning up cow dung and washing the cows, you see. They don’t want their daughters to be doing such menial work. Now everyone wants to work in an office, even girls in my village,” says Sarala with a touch of pique.
Milking is not an easy profession. Sarala accepts that. The physical labor is daunting: both tedious and smelly. You wake up to feed the cows at 4:30 a.m., milk them, refill their water buckets at 1 p.m., clean up their dung, milk them in the evening, and put them to bed in their cowshed.
“We want Selva to have a better life. All through his childhood, we tried to talk him out of this milking life,” she says. “We actually got a policeman to beat him up to make him take a different job when he was a teenager. Even construction. But the lad flatly refused. He loves those cows and wants to make a livelihood from them.” She smiles approvingly, almost in spite of herself.
Sarala is in a quandary. She is consumed by the bride-search for her sons. They have relocated to live away from the cowshed, so that potential brides and their families won’t see the cows, which are still tied in front of their old home. Yet at the same time Sarala resents the bad rap that dairy farming is getting in the matrimonial circuit.
“It is good karma, after all, to work with cows,” I say.
“Karma is all very well but it doesn’t fill your stomach,” says Sarala, knowing that after years of this futile bride-search, she must come to terms with the new reality. When all her customers have left, Sarala and I take a walk. “There must be some connection between cows and our family. Else why would we be in this profession generation after generation—my father, grandfather, my husband, and now my son? We must have taken something from those animals in past lives and so we must spend this life doing service to them.”
There is one glimmer of hope. The following week, Sarala plans to go to her village and meet a family with two sisters. She is optimistic about “finishing off the matchmaking” and is hoping to set it up so that the two sisters can marry two brothers—her sons. It will reduce family quarrels.
Suddenly she asks, “Do you want to come with me?”
I don’t know what to say.
“If you come, we can go in your car. I can reach Arni and return in one day. I don’t need to find someone to take care of the cows. Otherwise, I have to pay someone. It will also give you a nice chance to see the country. Breathe some fresh air.”
I nod, trying to figure out if I have the time for a road trip.
“You have two daughters,” says Sarala. “If you help me get my sons married, the gods will shower their blessings on you. Your girls will find good husbands.”
What mother can resist setting off a chain reaction, however nebulous, that will end up in a good spouse for her child? My friend Jana says that in the Jewish faith, if you arrange a match, you are assured a place in heaven.
“Distance from Bangalore to Arni,” I type into my computer. It takes four hours. Sarala says that if we leave at seven—“after sending your kids to school,” she adds considerately—we can reach Arni by eleven, meet the prospective brides’ family, have lunch somewhere else, and return.
“Why not have lunch at the girls’ house?” I ask. “We can eat and talk. Get to know them a bit.”
“Oh no,” says Sarala, shaking her head vehemently. “We never eat at the brides’ house till the marriage happens. They will think we are freeloaders. Don’t worry. There are other good places we can eat. Clean, vegetarian.”
We leave right after the kids get on the school bus. Ram is out of town. I warn Sarala many times that we will have to be back by nightfall. My Toyota Innova is full. Naidu and my driver Robert sit in front. Sarala and I are in the middle. The back is full of gifts for her family: sacks of rice; woven baskets full of vegetables, fruits, and flowers; and a clucking chicken in a cage. Apparently, it was born in Arni. Sarala wants to take it back to reconnect it to its mother. They may kill it after the reunion, she says. “Let it die happy, after seeing its mother for the last time.”
There are a ton of birds en route: white egrets, pied kingfishers, coppersmith barbets, and parakeets, all uniformly hated by farmers, says Sarala, because they stir up and swallow seeds. Every field has a scarecrow made out of sticks and old sacks. There are beehives, mating dragonflies, and molting butterflies. Village boys jump naked into flowing rivers. Turbaned farmers plough the fields by walking behind two bullocks. We drive through country lanes bordered by ancient trees that arch over the road.
Sarala’s village is ridiculously verdant, surrounded by paddy fields, banana trees, and vegetable patches so green they could put an emerald to shame. A single street with mud houses painted in riotous colors of peacock blue, lime green, and brick red. A backyard garden with homegrown vegetables. Cows tied in the cowshed out back. Roosters crowing, hens clucking, chickens running around like crazy. It is a happy place. Why did they ever move to the city?
Sarala echoes my thoughts. “I don’t know why we ever moved to the city.”
Some ten families live in the village. All are related to Sarala through generations. The main activities and sources of income are farming and cattle rearing. The men farm; the women take care of the animals. During the summers, they pat down dough made of urad (a type of lentil) and specked with broken black pepper and cumin. These papads are dried in the sun, bound, and sold at cooperatives. Families in the city buy them and fry them in oil like fritters.
A platoon of people waits to receive us. We must be the entertainment, I think at first. But really, it is a measure of the affection that they have for Sarala. And the gifts that she brings, too, I suppose.
The first thing we pull out of the car is the chicken, clucking loudly in its bamboo cage. Sarala takes the cage into the backyard and lets the chicken loose. It races towards the group of birds in a raucous homecoming. We carry baskets of vegetables and fruits into the cool, bare interior. Village homes are minimal and clut
ter-free. There is bedding rolled up in one end of the dark living room and braided mats rolled out for us to sit cross-legged on the floor. Someone brings out a mud pot of water and pours us each a glass. A man cuts some tender coconut and shaves off its top before handing us the coconut water.
Sarala and her relatives talk nonstop about the trip and the visit. “Have you told the girls’ people that we are coming?” asks Sarala.
“Don’t worry. It is all arranged,” says her brother. “We are going to see them before lunch. During the auspicious time. Today it is from twelve to one thirty.”
A boy is dispatched on a bike to tell the brides’ side that we have arrived.
At first, Sarala’s relatives view me with mild suspicion: the city lady. None of them speaks English, but my fluent Tamil puts them at ease. Though they speak Telugu at home, they live in Tamil Nadu, so they know Tamil. Soon we are joking like old friends. We drink coffee. Do I want to go out to the backyard to pick vegetables? Sarala’s elder brother, a gaunt man with coffee-black skin, asks if I’d like to see the whole village.
Sarala intervenes on my behalf. “Let her drink coffee first,” she says. “Why are you folks hurrying her like this?”
“First drink your coffee, Madam,” she tells me. “Then I will show you the cowshed.”
The children stare unblinkingly at me as I down my coffee, village-style, with the outwardly curved rim of the stainless steel tumbler not touching my lips, yet perfect for pouring the liquid down my throat. No sipping. That is uncouth and impolite.
Later we walk through the cowshed—Sarala, her brother, and I—where some fifteen cows are tethered. Sarala has names for and stories about each one. These animals have been part of her family for generations, she says; their ancestors are linked to hers, with each bovine generation feeding a human one.
“Do you see the difference between these cows and the city ones?” asks Sarala.
Sure, I say, pointing at their humps. These are native breeds, not the foreign Holstein-Friesian or Jersey breeds.
The Milk Lady of Bangalore Page 19