A Wandering Cow
Personal blog/ Fiction. By: Kamal Rajput
“Gai humari Mata hai,” said one of the friends, huddled in the group of three, drinking milky tea at a roadside tea stall.
Delhi is full of such tea stalls. You can find it in every nook and corner, sometimes under a tarpaulin, sometimes on carts under the shadow of Metro bridges, and sometimes right outside the offices’ complexes. The tea sellers keep big, glass jars with baked and fried items, which many Delhiwallah enjoy along with the tea which is cooked for way too long. It was evening and many visited such stalls for tea, friendly bantering, and exchanges of current political views or just out of habit. In Delhi, tea is not a beverage, it is a habit.
I must tell you, for the good part of my life, I was blithely unaware of the fact of how milk was produced. I, always, thought that the cow is a milk-producing animal, and its udder will remain full, all season, all year round, till the time its death. Anyway, one question in the biology paper helped to dispel this bogus notion that I had been carrying around, about the lactating timeframe of a milch cow, which is twelve to fourteen months after the calve is born.
It was a strange Saturday afternoon, I had completed the blog I was writing, completed the painting last night, and I was again falling in the abyss of searching randomly on internet what can be my next project. It makes me unsettled if I am without any creative work. After spending an hour, a futile attempt, I decided that I should go out for a walk. I put on my canvas shoes, ventured out towards a Shopping Mall nearby, a tall building that can be seen from distance ahead of blue-canopied Metro station.
I came across a cow, with horn as huge as Minotaur’s, and it instantly caught my attention. I was on phone with a friend, and I switched on the Phone's camera started clicking the pictures from left, right, and center, of course, maintaining my distance. The cow looked at me dubiously for a few moments, dismissing me as a non-threatening entity and happily kept swishing its tail and returned to masticating the garbage flung around.
After a cup of tea at the Mall and posting my work, I returned back home with thoughts of milk. The second friend, who knew the next phrase quite well, didn’t take seconds to reply, and said, “aur humko kuch nahi aata hai,” while swallowing the mutti along with warm, milky tea. The taste of tea comes only on these carts where the tea sat on the stove for hours releasing all the tannins. Overcooked. Perfect for the palette. Yum! Mast! The tea seller opened another packet of milk and emptied it into the pan for the next batch.
So Paneer, Curd, Desi Ghee and all Indian sweets have the same ingredient. Milk. Not just any Milk. Milk from a cow. Not just an ordinary cow, but a holy cow. A cow is a holy animal is a commonsensical awareness one should born with!!
It was dusk when I returned home. May be another cup of tea would help me to put into a deep study mode or help me to concentrate to find the reference for the new project.I remember, how the leftover chapatis had been kept aside in a bag which my mother took away during her walks and fed to a cow. A moving, wandering, abandoned Cow. But why it was abandoned?
So after squandering away another two hours, YouTube vlogs, and scrolling on Pinterest, my face slacked by gravity and my eyes loopy. I decided to pick up the pictures of this cow for my next painting. I was very much aware it's not a very good reference, the size of my canvas was quite small so the details won't appear.
Anyway, when the painting appeared on the linen I was happy, sad and sipping on a cup of hot milk, with crushed Almonds, Walnuts and Cardamom.
But a strange awareness begins to settle down inside of me, have I purloined the milk from a cow? Also, have I robbed more than necessary?
Actually, how many of my small, quick decisions had turned, pushed people to impregnate more bovine?
The third friend was in the corner, quiet all this time, swallowing milky, sugary tea down his gullet. It was dusk, and an orange glow spread across the horizon. People returning home. A car honking on the crossroad, a bourgeois on a bike moving zig-zag cutting the crowd. the traffic raking the dust — not that the city is any less dusty — and it began to settle down. The third friend's hand moved left and right around his face and he covered his cup tightly with his palm and coughed, “aur saand humara baap nahi hai? "
Kamal is a Delhi-based artist. A writer and a painter. He is a Corporate Employee by day and an Art enthusiast by night.
Instagram: @a_bohemian_guy