Shoba Narayan - The Milk Lady of Bangalore

ALSO BY SHOBA NARAYAN

Return to India

Monsoon Diary: A Memoir with Recipes

The Milk Lady of Bangalore

An Unexpected Adventure

SHOBA NARAYAN

ALGONQUIN BOOKS OF CHAPEL HILL 2018

For Ranju and Malu,

who delight in telling people

that they own a cow.

You can catch the tail of a cow and walk all the way up to the heavens, says the priest.That is why a cow is so important in Hinduism.

HINDU PRIEST , paraphrasing from the Garuda Purana

Contents

Ayurveda classifies milk and every substance, for that matternot just on its taste (rasa) but also on its qualities (guna). This five-thousand-year-old indigenous healing system has analyzed milk in a dizzying array of ways and has come up with injunctions. Among them:

• Dont drink milk, which is a coolant, along with horse gram, which has heating properties. Not that you would impulsively come up with such an ideaOh, lets drink a glass of milk after chewing some horse grambut just in case you did.
• Dont drink milk after eating pineapple and sour-tasting fruits like berries. Probably because it will cause the milk to curdle in the stomach. I tried blending pineapple with milk. It didnt hold together.
• Warm, fresh milk straight from the cows udder is like ambrosia. If you cannot for some reason drink raw milk, boil it. Drink it warm, not cold. Dont pasteurize or homogenize it. These processes help companies preserve and transport milk, but reduce the milks intrinsic goodness.
• Young maidens should anoint their breasts with herbal butter to improve shape and size. Victorias Secret, take note: maybe lace some butter into your push-up bras?
• Milk from a black-colored cow is best because it balances all the three doshas (imbalances) of the body. Milk from a red-colored cow balances vata, the air element that causes arthritis, gas, and bloating. Milk from a white cow is the worst: it causes kapha (mucus). What about milk from patchy black-and-white cows such as the Holsteins? Open to interpretation, I guess.
• Milk drawn from a cow early in the morning is heavier in consistency, since the cow has rested through the night. Hindu priests use this early-morning milk for their rituals and drink the lighter, evening milk after the cow has frisked around a bit. If you dont have access to a frisky cow, could you vigorously shake the milk can to simulate the effect?
• If you want to use milk as an aphrodisiac, choose milk from a black or red cow that has eaten sugarcane stalks. The cow must have given birth to a calfbut only once. It helps if the calf is the same color as the mother. The horns of the cow should point upward. The udder should have four nipples, not three. The milk should be thick, and the cows disposition, calm. If you find such a cow, milk it in the evening; mix with honey, ghee, and sugar, and drink up. Have a nice night!

Prologue

Sarala, my milk woman, needs a cow. She tells me so when I chide her for giving me less milk one morning. It is 7 a.m. The school buses have left. I am standing outside my Bangalore home, waiting in line for fresh cows milk. Saralas youngest son, Selva, squats nearby, milking his mothers favorite cow, Chella Lakshmi.

I have known Sarala for ten years. I see her when I cross the road to buy milk. She asks me for many things but, so far, not a cow. Sarala is not sure how much a Holstein-Friesian cow will cost. She thinks it will be one thousand dollars or so. She has it all worked out. She will repay my loan through a supply of free milktwo liters daily, which costs about one dollar a day. Within a year or two, give or take, the loan will be repaid, she says.

When I look dubious about her rate of return, she offers an explanation. I need you to buy me more cows. How will you do that if I dont repay your loan? she asks.

Then she lays it on thick. You know, the family in the apartment below yours wanted to buy a cow for us. They like to do that, these Jains. Good karma, you see. But the timing didnt set. When they were ready to buy, I didnt have space in my cowshed. When I had space in my cowshed, they didnt have the money. It didnt work out. You are lucky. Else why would I approach you instead of them when I need a cow?

As a kicker, Sarala gives me naming rights to the cow that I buyas long as the name ends with Lakshmi, the Hindu goddess of wealth. Otherwise, she says, the name wont set.

If you had told me years ago that I would write a book about cows, I would have done the Elaine. I would put both my hands on your shoulders and push you hard, yelling, Get out, as Elaine so often did to Jerry Seinfeld. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, I was a harried, working mother living in New York City. I liked dogs, not bovines. The only cows that I noticed were the wildly painted, acrylic sculptures of cows that had popped up all over the city, and those only because tiresome tourists would accost me on the street to have their picture taken in front of a pink or purple cow. Even then, I didnt link cows to India, the homeland I had left.

If you had told me then that this cow story would come to me, I would have laughed in your face. Not unkindly, but laced with a scorn I couldnt have hidden. Freshly graduated from journalism school, I would have said that waiting for stories to come to you was passive and fatalistic, so Old World. This was America, where you went after what you wanted, where you changed your destiny, made things happen.

I am older now and I dont have the boundless confidence of youth, the eternal sunshine of the unsullied mind. I realize now that opportunities sometimes present themselves in forms that you dont initially recognize as a story. I didnt know then how much Sarala, my milk woman, had to teach me about living in the moment and about framing misfortunes in a way that makes for resilience.

No, I didnt plan to write a book about my relationship with a cow. It literally walked up to me.

Cows are a clich in India. They make headlines and are displayed on billboards. Sometimes, they eat billboards. They are the subject of parodies and exclamations, and like most stereotypes, epitomize an underlying reality: cows are indeed holy in India. Cows appear in the Rig Vedaone of Hinduisms oldest texts, written around 1200 BCand in every Hindu text since. The cow makes an appearance in the magical and imaginative Purana (ancient) literaturewhose stories encompass the collective myths and legends of a culture. Cows play many roles in these Hindu myths: warrior-princess, mother-to-the-world, primordial fertility goddess, fulfiller of all wishes, sacrificial mother, and harbinger of immortality.

The cow in India is a quagmire of contradictions and controversies, and also a symbol of the countrys sometimes polarizing politics. That said, this is not an explicitly political book. It gives some amount of context about why the cow is so important in India. It isnt, and doesnt wish to be, a magisterial work on all aspects of the cow. Well, it sort of wishes to be a magisterial work on all aspects of the cow, but isnt one.

With these caveats, read on.

Part One