October 23, 2015.

Stepped into morning darkness, bumped sideways into a smelly cow; lady did not mind, did not butt, moved on with a head shake; maybe she was not a Hindutva; not a lady RSS shakha pramukh. Every morning, six off-brown, unwashed cows, strung in twos by coir ropes, string down Adinath Marg urged on by a sleepy youth with a twig; fellow dreaming a job at car repair kiosks littering Link Road; hai-hai-hai, he nudges; cars with Rambhakts at the wheel, ever breaking traffic lights, halt ...these are cow moments, cow times; the moo era. Ladies do not seem to have had a wash for long years; gobar stains on their sides. Two break ranks on Yogi Nagar Road; wait near the paan shop under a copper pod; piss and shit; humans do it a few feet away; a middle-aged files in with long, green grass and a bamboo basket of sweet millet (?) balls; men and women stand in queues; they buy the grass and food balls for a tenner; feed the reluctant cows, bored and disgusted with grass and balls; they might be cursing their cow fate; public finger cow tails; place touched fingers on their foreheads before hailing a waiting auto...din achcha jayega (the day will go good), achche din, they say... business for all.... In Borivili (W), cow stands are brisk business; a second stand has come up near the Don Bosco Church with the cows tied to a peepal; a third one can be spotted at Shanthi Ashram with the lady managing cows selling a spread of farm vegetables; cow lovers after kissing cows buy vegetables. Paul Noronha and Vivek Bendre told me some time ago of cow urine; a washed bhaiya from Palitana, Rajasthan, with a sacred thread peeping from inside a white vest, is ready Goregaon mornings with bottles, tapping urine when his two cows decide to urinate; public waits for the urine; some doctors say it cures cold to cancers; friend Paul has seen the cow being shaken by the bhaiya for additional supplies of urine. Paul Noronha and Vivek Bendre are prone to pumping their tellings. Bahar Dutt in her column Green Line in Mint, the best Indian business paper, disagrees: It is common for most commercial tabelas, or milch farmers, to pump oxytocin, a hormone, and incidentally a banned drug, into cows and buffaloes. The indiscriminate use of oxytocin is one of the dark secrets of the dairy industry. Unsure if cows, grass and maize balls can be styled dairy. When me was 9 in Calcutta, a priest bound me with a white sacred thread, offered me gomuthr (cow urine), me drank it, became a Tamil Brahmin. Gomuthr supplies came from a Bihari bhaiya earning a fresh dhoti. Me perhaps was the first Hindutva cow or is it bull.