Milky Ways - 1

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In our seaside village in the early 1950s there was no power.

The entire village slept within an hour of sunset and woke up at dawn. Most of us slept in the open round the year except in the rainy months of November and December.

Our tiny house had a flat roof but no regular staircase. But there was an improvised one for the bold but not the beautiful...rungs of a makeshift ladder made up of rods jutting from the outer wall at intervals of two feet for armhold and holes in the brickwork in between for foothold.

Once we monkeyed up onto the roof it was like sitting in the midst of Birla Planetarium...under a glorious sky.

In summer months we saw the delightful Southern Cross (Crux), the constellation closest to the South Pole, just above the horizon. This was missing at KGP and the entire North India.

Milky Way was again a favorite companion.

I wonder why it is called Milky Way....it was more like the grainy sabudana payas.

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Anyway, this blog is not about the Milky Way in the splendid Heavens but about milk itself, cow's and buffalo's, and the waywardness thereof.

In our village those days, cows were driven to the three nukkads where they were milked in front of you. Buffaloes were a rarity. No longer now. Cows have been replaced by fat buffaloes which I suppose are more efficient and economical and ugly enough to epitomize Market Economy

At KGP there was this whimsy that cow's milk is good for the brain and the heart. So, Prof IKK who had poor health (due to chain-smoking) used to get it every morning from a gowala outside the Campus.

One morning the milkman was away and his chokra baccha was doing his dad's duty.

IKK was in a talkative mood and asked the 'son of a milkman' how many cows his father has.

"Gayya thodi hai hamara paas!; eh sab powderse bantha hai jo pappa har maina laathe hai Kolkaththa se aur haldi milathe hai"

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My most miserable experience with milk at KGP was when I wanted to make coffee in my Room in our Faculty Hostel since I was a late riser and used to routinely miss the breakfast hour in our Mess.

In a fit of enthusiasm I bought a tin of Milkmaid condensed milk from the Tech Market along with other paraphernalia.

And tried to open its sealed top with a pen-knife and a screwdriver...the only tools I had at my disposal.

That futile attempt is best described by Jerome K Jerome when his Three Famous Men in that Boat tried to open their pineapple tin:

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"...Then Harris tried to open the tin with a pocket-knife, and broke the knife and cut himself badly; and George tried a pair of scissors, and the scissors flew up, and nearly put his eye out.

While they were dressing their wounds, I tried to make a hole in the thing with the spiky end of the hitcher, and the hitcher slipped and jerked me out between the boat and the bank into two feet of muddy water, and the tin rolled over, uninjured, and broke a teacup.

Then we all got mad. We took that tin out on the bank, and Harris went up into a field and got a big sharp stone, and I went back into the boat and brought out the mast, and George held the tin and Harris held the sharp end of his stone against the top of it, and I took the mast and poised it high up in the air, and gathered up all my strength and brought it down.

It was George's straw hat that saved his life that day. He keeps that hat now (what is left of it), and, of a winter's evening, when the pipes are lit and the boys are telling stretchers about the dangers they have passed through, George brings it down and shows it round, and the stirring tale is told anew, with fresh exaggerations every time. Harris got off with merely a flesh wound.

After that, I took the tin off myself, and hammered at it with the mast till I was worn out and sick at heart, whereupon Harris took it in hand. We beat it out flat; we beat it back square; we battered it into every form known to geometry - but we could not make a hole in it.

Then George went at it, and knocked it into a shape, so strange, so weird, so unearthly in its wild hideousness, that he got frightened and threw away the mast. Then we all three sat round it on the grass and looked at it. There was one great dent across the top that had the appearance of a mocking grin, and it drove us furious, so that Harris rushed at the thing, and caught it up, and flung it far into the middle of the river, and as it sank we hurled our curses at it, and we got into the boat and rowed away from the spot, and never paused till we reached Maidenhead...."

http://www.fullbooks.com/Three-Men-in-a-Boat-by-Jerome-K-Jerome3.html

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More milk tales tomorrow.......

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