“Amma, paalu!” Half-a-century ago, my alarm bell at dawn was the high-pitched call of the milkman piercing the Madras darkness. The house would stir into life with his voice. He would park his cow on the pavement through the garden to the front door, and as the sleepy bovine kept shaking mosquitoes away, clanging the bell on its neck, none of us could go back to sleep as we sat up on our beds.
My father would noisily open the latch of the front door, and a daily scene played out: the milkman put to test for his honesty! I watched from my post on the steps near the door.
He had a long, cylindrical vessel, and before he started milking the cow, he had to show it to my father to check for any added water. The darkness was his ally in his attempts to cheat, and hence my father insisted that he turn the vessel upside down.
The cunning milkman had a few tricks up his sleeve. He consistently fooled my mother — one ploy was making a fast arc with his vessel, swinging it with such sleight of hand that the water stayed at the bottom. My father did a Sherlock Holmes on him, catching him in the act. Hence the change in routine: milkman hands over vessel to father, father turns it upside down, and then the milkman starts milking.
Known devil
“If you don’t trust him, why don’t you change the milkman,” I would argue with my mother. “They are all the same,” she would say with a sigh. “This one is a known devil and slightly naive. We don’t know what tricks the next one would come up with!”
The milkman, however, cheated the cow regularly to make it lactate by showing a straw calf with a triangular piece of wood for a face. I have no knowledge the cow believed his ruse or simply acted gullible and gave milk to avoid getting kicked in the legs by him.
The cow looked obviously bored, and craned its neck to chomp on the tops of the plants my mother had so fondly lined our garden with. She sometimes rushed out to save her plants, and shouted at the milkman. He would pull the cow’s neck the other way, and the bells clanged again.
“Why don’t you give the cow something to eat,” my mother admonished. The milkman would reluctantly pull out some grass from the folds of his dhothi and distract the cow from the tasty tender leaves.
We could hear the sound of milk filling the vessel, while one of us watched the milkman. “If you look somewhere else, he will add water from the other vessel he has next to him,” my father would warn, seeing me yawn.
Enter the cat, the next character in this drama. She was a black-and-white beauty, and the milkman’s alarm alerted her too. She had walked into our lives as a kitten and stayed on, encouraged by the milk and eats I shared with her. She knew her first feed of the day would follow when she saw the cow being herded in at dawn. Her eyes shone in the darkness like the headlights of a car, while the darkness made her invisible.
She made up for her small frame with her voice which got louder by the minute as the milking began. She belted out cries of impatience and nervousness if not noticed, and stood next to me with her tail brushing my feet, knowing my weakness for her. She sometimes tried to go near the cow to lick on the few drops of spilt milk, and got summarily slapped by the busy milkman.
It was my job to pay the milkman, and I sat on the steps of the house, holding the money in my hand. Accounts were settled daily. When he came up to me, to pour the milk into our vessel, the cat’s excitement reached a climax, with vigorous and high-pitched cries interspersed with low-volume pleading meows, as she eyed the milk in the vessel. She was most vociferous when I poured her share into her plastic bowl hidden behind the door. Her tail stood right up as she rebuked me for the few minutes’ delay while I tilted the milk into her bowl.
And then it all ended abruptly, the drama at dawn, as if curtains were drawn when the play reached its denouement. The milkman herded his cow back, the cat slurped on the milk and my parents sipped their morning filter coffee. We all parted ways with a silent pact to meet the next day, to enact the same scenes. As I stretched my arms to a reddening sky, yet another day began!
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