Once, for the thousandth time
A cow wandered into
The narrow lane leading up to
Bai’s house in our village.
In our village, most cows have their horns.
I am afraid of them.
My grandmother though,
Reads the paper slowly, and the only word she has practice writing
Is her own name-
Bai rises to the occasion,
Playfully catching the cow’s tail, merrily clucking it the way home. The cow, understanding its own steps in this dance, complying respectfully.
It is only at the end of the lane, that she lets the tail go. I sit there, amazed at this cow transforming with Bai’s touch. She tells me later that the best way to befriend a cow is to just gently but firmly hold her tail . In this lineage of women,
My grandmother is the last to live this open secret,
After her, we will touch phone screens, flight tickets, the forbidden hands of strange and restless men-
But never a cow’s tail. Never need to. This is what the education was for.
I watch Bai in her pink sari, cheerfully escorting the cow out of our lane-
The cow, understanding, complying gracefully.
This strange conversation, never to be had again by any more women in our family.
My grandmother inhabited a childhood where girls needed to know how to milk a cow, herd it home, help it birth, help it nurse. For years, when the children were young, she kept a cow at home.
My father says we are a family that does not keep pets, when I try to get him to agree to a puppy. He says they are dirty and unhygienic. He forgets the milk in his 8 year old belly came from their pet cow. Now when he thinks of cow milk, his thoughts turn to the dangers of unpasteurized milk, the possibilities of bovine tuberculosis.
Today, I wake up to find a pigeon scrambling against the pigeon net I had installed precisely to keep these birds out. It was the same day my ex-boyfriend had asked me to meet him again, and I had said no, as I watched the wire mesh go up in the balcony. The pigeon, like my lost beloved- is scrambling against a net when there are other ways out. His stubbornness is exasperating. Try to show him the way and he will only surge wildly against the very thing keeping him trapped. He goes into hiding, where he cannot be seen or reached. I have no option but to wait out his stupidity and wonder how anyone came up with the genius idea of using pigeons as messengers, or men as significant others. Whatever navigational wisdom his ancestors might have possessed, this bird has lost the inheritance of it. A little too close to home.
The pigeon [ I decide is a he] sits, and I get to work on my laptop. That’s when my neighbour tells me our caretaker, Kaka can handle these things, can take out a pigeon with his bare hands. It has happened many times before.
Kaka arrives and I watch him have a conversation with the pigeon, like my grandmother would. Within minutes, he has reached up, grabbed the scrambling pea-brain, held it firmly in his hands, soothed the agitation by cupping its neck- and then unfolding his hands he throws the pigeon back upwards into the sky. Gracefully throwing this offering back into the face of the blue sky. Returning a lost thing to it’s place.
I ask him where he learned this. How does he know how to handle an agitated, desperate bird?
Kaka has no answers, only a big laugh that he takes with him into the escalator. For him, this is nothing out of the blue.
For me and the pigeon though, I’m sure it is.
I think of Kaka’s and Bai’s hands. How they were the last in their generation whose hands knew how to touch and return the wild things.
How our hands are spent so far from each other, so close to the alphabet on a touchpad. The alphabet our grandparents do not know by heart. The alphabet they sent us to learn. The alphabet in whose learning, came the forgetting of so many other things. The alphabet we will pass on to our children. The alphabet in which I will store my memories of the other alphabet that has no letters. The other alphabet that I did not learn.
a real place 