The Milk in Many Lands
Looking at places through the lens of milk
One of my childhood memories that sticks out is of a cow being milked in the front yard of our house.
We lived, not in the countryside, but in one of India’s largest cities, Chennai (then Madras), in an old brick house with a smallish front yard. The houses facing or adjoining ours were also big, old houses with larger and shadier front yards. In the evening, the milkman came along with his cow to his customers’ homes. The cow would be milked in the yard while one of us watched to make sure that the milk was as fresh as fresh could be, and not adulterated with water or anything else. In our household, my grandmother usually sat on a chair in the veranda to supervise, and I would stand or squat on the floor beside her.
The milkman’s deft fingers streamed the milk from the cow into his long, tubular slate grey metal containers. These also served as measuring cups; notches etched into their inner sides indicated the number of ollocks of milk they contained. The milk would be transferred to the vessels of those purchasing it. This was an arrangement: a cow was brought daily and milked before our gaze.
I learnt that milking was an art. Squeeze an orange, and the juice comes. But milking was more than squeezing the cow’s udder. To start, the milkman took one teat between his thumb and…
