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So when my mom was worried about the star she discovered in my right eye and was scared, Father took some proactive measures and found that Dr. Modi (no relative of Naren) was on one of his circus visits to Nellore in 1953.
So he took me along and we reached the venue of his itinerant tent pitched on the vast football grounds of the V. R. College.
And I found that we were standing at the tail of a mile-long queue...this somehow reminds me now of the stories I read about the Hyderabad fish-prasadam treatment offered free for asthma patients from all over India by the Bathini family...early in the mrigashira fortnight the secret asthma medicine is stuffed in a muriel fishling and dumped into the throat of the welcoming patient and his mouth firmly closed till it is swallowed.
Of course controversies abound in any free public venture of this sort.
And the line in front of Dr. Modi's tent was moving fast...instant gratification.
Father had his specs on from his youth. Indeed my mom says that when he came down to have a look at her...to see and to be seen during their bride-seeing ceremony, one of her older grandies asked Father if he was blind...and asked him to prove he could see without his specs...
So, Father was not only my escort but also stood before me in the waiting line...to consult Dr. Modi on his specs power...
Once inside the tent, I found Dr. Modi peering through his ophthalmoscope into every eye that was presented to him. His was a spot decision...he would keep saying "next, next, next" except once in a hundred cases when he would ask his Sister to usher this case into the green room of the tent...and keep saying "next, next, next..."
The goats that were segregated from the sheep were 'operation' cases...now I know that he was doing cataract surgeries on them.
When our turn came, both Father and me were asked to get lost and go to the 'boy' manning the tent. The duty of this boy was simple...there was a huge mound of a yellow ointment. He would scoop a fistful from the mountain and push it into the waiting hands of the patient and ask him to exit through the other door.
But Father was a fond parent and asked Dr. Modi about the star in my eye. And Dr. Modi smiled and said:
"Vitamin A deficiency...let him eat some butter every morning...Next...next...next..."
Dr Modi's ophthalmoscopic butter treatment for the star in my right eye landed our family in an early life crisis.
Muthukur had only cows, or excuses for cows, in 1953. The Great Bengal Famine was but a decade old and was succeeded by several AP famines and droughts in the 1950s. All the cows were owned by the rich Reddys of Muthukur, and their milkmen supplied cow milk to the households early every morning. They said it was cow milk and we believed it...for buffaloes were few and far between, in contrast to today's Hyderabad scenery where herds of buffaloes are showstoppers at every major arterial road including in the hi-tec city which was supposed to have been a vast buffalo farm before it turned hi-tec for want of space in the heart of the city.
The cows at Muthukur were as thin and ribby as I was then.
Muthukur had only cows, or excuses for cows, in 1953. The Great Bengal Famine was but a decade old and was succeeded by several AP famines and droughts in the 1950s. All the cows were owned by the rich Reddys of Muthukur, and their milkmen supplied cow milk to the households early every morning. They said it was cow milk and we believed it...for buffaloes were few and far between, in contrast to today's Hyderabad scenery where herds of buffaloes are showstoppers at every major arterial road including in the hi-tec city which was supposed to have been a vast buffalo farm before it turned hi-tec for want of space in the heart of the city.
The cows at Muthukur were as thin and ribby as I was then.
Butter was not available for love or money...Kurien's Amul Revolution was 3 decades into the future.
My grannie told my mom that the way to get butter out of milk was to first curdle it, pour water into the jug of curds, and spindle the damn thing away vigorously with twining hands for half an hour and more till something white separates as a mass attached to the wooden spindle, or the palms itched, whichever was earlier.
Since mom was busy in her kitchen tending to the urgent hunger of half a dozen school-going mouths, the duty of churning butter out of cow milk was dumped on Father's laps...literally. Mom said that in any case he was doing nothing during his half-hour sandhya vandan in the mornings, so why not do it productively.
Father was game for it...I was his only son...
But discovered that all his furious effort for all that while resulted only in a pitiable thimbleful of so-called butter which refused to be scooped out...it stuck to the wings of the spindle like glue...the fat was scooped away by hands by the Reddys before they let their milk out.
Grannie then advised my mom that nobody she knew ever got any butter out of Reddy's cow milk and so we should switch over to buffalo milk.
Mom was game for it but Father put his foot down...initially...as it always turned out.
Father's argument was that cow milk is healthy not only for easy digestion but also for the brain...it was one of those food fads based on color and race.
After all Muthukur cows were white (unlike the emancipated American ones that were brown...how now brown cow?)
Whereas buffaloes of Muthukur, tethered to their master's pegs, were as black as coal...some coal that is in the Supreme Court.
And inquiries revealed that buffalo milk was twice as costly as cow's...but rich in fat, proteins and lather.
So, there was an intense discussion on the trade-offs between cows and buffaloes.
Mom won, as usual...
And in a couple of days Father reconciled not by the economics but by the fact that his early morning coffee tasted wholesome now...a case in which the collaterals win over laterals.
And Father found that the churning took only half the time and muscular effort, but also yielded tangible results in the shape of a fistful blob of butter.
Everything was going fine except that I disliked the buffalo butter...try it...and you will find it as tasteless as blotting paper.
Amul Butter is something I devour nowadays given the chance which I am not given what with my cholesterol counts.
But Amul transforms what was insipid into what is sipid by the addition of salt and preservatives that taste better than the servatives...
And so I declined the butter treatment of Dr. Modi.
Mom suggested that the butter accumulated each day could be fried in her kadai and turned into ghee and we could stop buying yellowing and musty ghee from the market.
And I got two spoons of ghee instead of the regulation one spoon...the others were supplementing their lubricants with gin-gelly oil (now extinct).
Turning butter into ghee is a refined art as I came to know painfully. One day while mom, busy 'doing' the four hurricane lanterns of the family, asked me to look after the kadai on her chulha and keep a watch over the frying butter. And I kept a determined watch doing nothing about it.
When mom returned from her works she discovered that, instead of ghee, I got her something more akin to coal tar....I forgot to turn the chulha down.
But mom wasn't to be put down....those were costly days.
She merely scraped all the coal tar sticking to the kadai and did some witchery and turned it into what we called: 'goku' that was tastier than ghee...solid brittle tiny flakes that we broke up and mixed with rice and gluttoned vying with one another...
...Posted by Ishani
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