Cowboy Raja

Our home had a verandah in the front, to the right, as soon as you enter the house through the small, twin, green wooden doors. The verandah served a multitude of purposes. It was closed on three sides: the back, and the left and right sides. The front had a big 6×10 opening that had a geometrically shaped grill, made of metal bars, probably 10mm square steel rods. You can easily sit in the verandah on a chair and watch everything and everyone go by in the street. Often my uncle or elder brother would carry bicycles into the house and park it in the verandah. On the south wall inside the veranda, we had the electric main with fuse and main switch. The grill in the front opening served as a tie-post for the cows that belonged to our friendly neighborhood milkman.

Before the widespread adoption of pasteurized milk in bottles and plastic containers, everyone in our neighborhood always bought fresh milk, milked from the cows, that was sold by our milkman, through a small shop next to our home. The shop is nothing more than a five foot by five foot opening, which was about another five feet deep, with no lights or electricity or any kind of convenience. If my memory was correct, there was a small awning on the top, and it had small green wooden double doors. This was the castle of our milkman Raja. Raja was quite a character. He always wore a white dhothi (a large piece of cloth tied around the waist, a traditional south Indian dress for males) and white full hand shirt, with sleeves folded. Most of the time, he wore a white turban, thick black glasses and sported a big black mustache. He owned several cows and had a few assistants to herd, feed, and milk them. Back in the day, and probably even today, having cows and making a livelihood from selling milk, is considered unattractive since a city dweller does not want to herd cows, take care of them, clean their droppings and milk them. However, the image of a western cowboy conjured a cool and awesome image. Hence, my niece and I, as we always like to coin nicknames for colorful characters, christened our milkman as Cowboy Raja.

Every day, without fail, my mom would collect all the vegetable scraps from the day’s cooking and combine them with the starch left over from boiling rice in a tin container. Cowboy Raja’s assistant would provide such tin containers to a few families in the neighborhood who volunteer to donate the scraps, and collect them when the cows arrive. Cowboy Raja sometimes would walk with the cows, or come in a bicycle while his assistants would bring them, without fail, around two PM. Typically, there would be three or four cows and the assistant would tie a few of them to the grill in our verandah. We often would stand inside the verandah, sneak our hands out through the gaps in the grill, and touch the cows. The assistant would mix some feed along with the contents from the collected tin containers, make a feed, and distribute to the cows in wooden vessels. The cows would happily eat them, and the milking would start. When the first squirts are pulled from the udder into the cylindrical tin milk containers, it would make a nice chirpy rhythmic, “tringg..tringg” metallic noise that would quickly fade into a dull “burrr..burrr” as the milk starts filling up in the container. The most distinctive thing I remember is the fake straw calves. Cows generate milk once the calves are born. Cowboy Raja would raise the calves to sell them later but often the calves die due to complications. If the calves are alive, they would accompany their mommy cows and get a few sucks from the udder first when milking starts. They would then be whisked to the other side while the assistant milks rest of the milk from the mommy cow. The saddest part is when the calves die. To keep the mommy cow thinking that her calf is alive, they would make a calf lookalike, albeit a very crude one, out of straw and sticks. These straw calves would come with the cow caravan and kept next to the mommy cow so that she continues to generate milk. It is sad to see mommy cow fondly tries to lick the straw calf thinking it is alive and drinking her milk.

Once milked, the milk would then be transferred from the cylindrical containers to a steel bucket in Cowboy Raja’s shop. My mom would give me a stainless steel vessel, with some cash, and I would go walk past the cows to Raja’s shop. There I would ask for a quarter liter of milk. Raja had aluminum-measuring cups of various denominations. I always wondered at the big one-liter containers and thought who would need such a large quantity of milk. Raja would dip into the bucket, measure the milk, and pour it into my stainless steel vessel. For posterity’s sake, he would measure a few additional milliliters in a small measuring cup and add it to our vessel. You would leave a happy kid, as you got a bit more than quarter liter. I wonder what happened to Cowboy Raja, his cows and his family as everyone buys milk from supermarkets now.