Delhi, 1.may.99

Everywhere I've been in India, North and South, East and West, from the
tiniest village to the biggest cities, in the fields, the beaches and the
roads, in passageways, in alleyways, in highways, in *my* way, entering
shops and emerging from the front doors of private homes, they are there.
The sit pleasantly in the middle of busy intersections, they stand
immobile before crowded market stalls, they go, in fact, wherever they
want to, obstructing roads, obstructing traffic, obstructing flow,
obstructing reason.  And they don't seem to even recognize this unlimited
freedom granted to them by the Indian people, in fact they don't seem to
recognize much of anything at all.  The world for them does not exist.
They are impervious to it.  They are above it.  They are, in short, *The
Cows*.  They reign ubiquitous, enjoying their protected status, wandering
aimlessly like slow wind, being, simply being, and being simply.  The
absolute and universal responsibility falls to trucks, cars, motorbikes,
rickshaws, push-bikes and pedestrians alike:  the responsibility to avoid
the cows at all cost, to allow them unlimited right-of-way.  And since
this amounts to universal deference to the slowest and most unpredictable
objects on the road (and trust me it's something to be less predictable
than the Indian drivers themselves), you can imagine the traffic problems
that ensue.  Often a bull or a gang of calves will somehow decelerate --
if their style of movement can even be said to involve acceleration -- to
a complete stop, standing suddenly still across the exact width of a road,
admitting no margin on either side, and perpendicular to the erstwhile
flow of traffic.  The halted motorists in each direction can do nothing
but honk, and wait, or else eventually get out and entice -- gently -- the
bovine blockages out of the road.  And then on they wander, oblivious,
lugubrious, with all the apparent thought process of a tuber,
non-discursive, homogenous, mild, solid and soft.  They're quite beautiful
when taken individually, though, since they usually come of Brahma stock
(as it should be, the Brahmins being India's highest caste), with
blemishless this hair, imperial humps rising up proudly just behind their
necks, big, wide heads, with even bigger, wider eyes, eyes that have seen
so much, heads that have taken in so little.  Their long legs give them a
stateliness to add to their unhurried steps, and it's not hard to see why
of all the animals in India, they are endowed with the attribute of
holiness.  And, of course, Shiva rode around on Nandi, to which specific
bull shrines have been built all over the country.  It is proper to remove
your shoes when entering these temples, and to touch the testicles of
Nandi's sculpture for good luck.  Many times I have also seen timid young
women clad in gilt-patterned saris approach a bull in the street to rub
its backside, and then follow this action with a Hindu-style sort of
genuflection before gingerly scuttling away into the passing crowd.  The
cow doesn't even notice.  But who are all these cows?  How do they
survive?  They seem so vagrant, so self-possessed.  I've been told by
several people that they are in fact all owned.  Owned and cared for and
milked by people who are forbidden to eat them (McDonalds here serves
something called a "Maharaja Mac" which is made of lamb).  In some places
their horns are painted in bright colors as a method of proprietary
identification, but for the most part, the cows are left to identify
themselves, remembering somehow where is home, and wandering there each
night.  One morning, a friend of mine reported, she saw a group of gentle,
well-off Indian men carefully lifting a sleeping homeless man from his
bed, which happened to be the front stoop of their shop, and depositing
him, still sleeping, onto the neighboring stoop.  They then unlocked the
shop's front gate, and out walked a huge, graceful bull, off to meander
away his day.  But still I wonder:  are there also, perhaps clandestinely,
unowned cows?  Might there be a totally free class of cow, a nomad
cow-caste, wandering at leisure through India, acting as though they
belonged somewhere, and feasting upon the wealth of foliage, paper bags,
garbage and people's crops, along with the rest... but liberated?  Could
there be cows from concealed births in remote pastures, raised in secret
by a forward-ruminating group of domestic cows who are bent upon purifying
their own species in order to produce a eugenic force of soldier-beef with
the stomachs, the fire-in-the-bellies, to fuel their someday bovine
revolution?  When they grow up do they amble off to "spread the moo",
sowing dissent in all the corners of India?  And what happens when they
get caught, these free cows?  "Does anybody know who owns this cow?"  What
could be their fate: domestication? Liberation? Veneration? Immolation?
These are village secrets, and we're never likely to know.  One thing,
however, is certain:  there sure are a whole lot of cows here!