Two small stories from different parts of India.
Where do all the sick cows go?
It’s all fun and games until you get attacked by a water buffalo.
The monsoon caught me on my way out of town.
The rickshaw driver was already pissed off, because he’d agreed to take me to the Animal Sanctuary without really knowing where it was, and somewhere around kilometer eight of the journey, he realised that he wasn’t overcharging me enough for the distance. When the rains came bucketing down on top of us, rocking the wobbly little vehicle back and forth like a goldfish in a maelstrom, I think he’d finally had enough. If we hadn’t reached our destination mere seconds later, I’m fairly sure I would have ended up turfed out onto the roadside regardless.
He departed in search of a chai stand, promising to be back for me in an hour for the return fare to Pushkar. A relatively small Hindu holy city, Pushkar is currently suffering from a severe infestation of young British backpackers*. I wanted to get out of town for a day, and I’d heard there was a place nearby that might be able to answer a question that has been bugging me ever since I got to India:
Where do all the sick cows go?
Far less waterproof than it looks.
You see them often on the streets; bloated, injured animals, inadequately nourished, eating cardboard and tottering by on limping legs- with their ribs sticking out, huge despite starvation. They are holy, and therefore cannot be killed, but they are also innumerable and often inconvenient on the narrow streets, and so most are not well cared for. Simply being sacred is no guarantee of other people’s reverence.
The Tolfa animal hospital is located about fifteen kilometres from Pushkar, long after the city has faded away into a bevy of lush green trees and verdant hills. When I arrived on its grounds, it was lashed by the rain and mostly underwater; sheltered beneath my crumpling umbrella, I staggered through pools of mud in the general direction of a building. Here, then, was my answer, for there were numerous sickly bovines about. Some wore bandaged hooves. There were also dogs, more than I could count, in varying states of disrepair.
Some people do look after the cows, especially when there’s no other way to pass one in a dark alley.
The red-headed woman who ran the facility’s administrative side turned out to be unexpectedly British, and told me a bit about the place: ‘We have room for a hundred dogs and there are about a dozen cows at the moment.’ She added that they were almost always full to capacity, and occasionally verged beyond it.
How are the sickly cows treated, then? It’s simple- the Tolfa group has at its disposal one large ambulance. If a mistreated cow is noticed in town, they are called out, and this ambulance picks up the cow and brings it to the hospital. From there, however, things can become more difficult. ‘Sometimes the cows have owners who complain if we take them,’ one staff member told me, ‘so we cannot risk taking them from near the main market area.’
After the cows are taken for treatment, there are further problems. ‘Obviously, we can’t euthanize them,’ the red headed lady told me, ‘we’d be shut down instantly. So we often have to keep them here and manage their pain as well as we can until…’ she trailed off, leaving phrases like slow and painful death to my editorializing imagination.
Pushkar can be just a *little bit* touristy.
The difficulties involved in running an animal hospital in India are considerable. ‘There’s always something,’ the woman said wryly, pointing out that every season in India has its own challenges- it’s either blisteringly hot, dangerously cold or inconveniently wet, and each phase of climate makes the animals sick in an exciting new ways.
But it’s important work. The rabies-curbing aspects of the project alone have almost certainly saved many lives, containing and controlling a dangerous dog population that would otherwise be perfectly free to spin wildly out of control- and doing so humanely, with sterilizations and vaccinations.
Indian cities are built on their animals, I reflected, as my rickshaw driver trudged through the leftovers of the dying storm and insisted I come back with him. On the road back, we almost hit a deer; it stood in the road and the rickshaw driver plowed merrily toward it at full speed, confident it would get out of the way in time. It did, by barely a hair.
Indian cities are built on their animals. It’s good to know that somebody looks after them.
Flipping Pushkar the bird.
Baking in the dead city
Ladies.
I was faced with the Sophie’s Choice of travelling India. Due to the vagaries of the Indian transit system, I had an unexpected extra day of trip at my disposal- to be spent in either New Dehli, Agra, or Varanasi. Three big, bad, belligerent Indian cities.
I chose Varanasi, because it’s the Hindu city of the dead- and really, who can resist such a moniker? According to Hindu beliefs, it’s one of the seven sacred cities, and thus capable of granting moshka– final release from the never-ending cycle of reincarnation- to anybody who dies in its depths.
Ribbing one side of the brown and murky Ganges, Varanasi is hot as hell and features very similar occupants- beginning cripples, praying sick, dead bodies being eaten up by flames at the riverside burning ghats. There is an Old City and a New; the old is an endless warren of twisting, curving, writhing allies, dirty and dank and covered in cow manure. The New City is a crazed crisscross of impossibly busy roads, roasting under the open sun.
A Sadhu (holy seeker), in the rain.
I had passed the twenty six hour train journey from Pushkar to Varanasi by reading a book on feminism in India, which, as is the way with most feminist literature, made me feel vaguely guilty about having a penis. Still, it filled my head with a vague desire to learn more, and when I discovered there was a well-known union of women running both a school and a bakery in the middle of Varanasi’s old city, I decided to go and investigate.
The charity was called Learn For Life, and was apparently managed out of a shop called the Brown Bread Bakery. I was vaguely confused by the presence of two Brown Bread Bakeries on the same street, side by side, and I wasn’t the only one- several clumps of tourists were pingponging between the two, frowning into their guidebooks, trying to work out which was the Lonely-Planet recommendation and which, presumably, was the impostor. Shrugging, I picked one at random and stepped in.
Well, this is confusing.
When I met with the woman who ran the Learn for Life charity- Arti, a plump young Indian lady with a red paper circle stuck to her forehead- she seemed curiously reluctant to discuss the women’s rights aspect of the operation. ‘They [local women] make silks and things and bring them here and we sell them,’ she said, ‘and some of the money goes to the school.’ Her opinions of women’s progress in general were fairly dismissive; ‘I think right now 90%’ of women in India work in some way,’ she said conversationally. And that really seemed to be it.
Well, I thought, not so interesting, but a fair way to pass the time. Wanting to pad the conversation out a little, I asked her about the second Brown Bakery- why were there two?
Abruptly, fury took the woman’s eyes. ‘Michael Smith,’ she spat. ‘That is fake, they have cheated us. They are run by a man called Michael Smith, you go and you ask him.’
I wasn’t exactly expecting such a passionate outburst, and said so. The woman explained that Michael Smith had set up a rival bakery to prey on her charity’s name, and was slowly but surely destroying their business. ‘Ask him,’ she insisted, ‘see what lies he tells.’
Spending the entire day comparing the food at rival cafes seemed like an agreeable way of glutting myself, so I agreed to go to the other Brown Bakery and get Michael Smith’s side of the story.
A nightly Puja ceremony, held at Varanasi’s Main Ghat, the proper name of which defies my spelling.
Outside, there was further confusion in the street- more tourists trying to work out which bakery came with the Lonely Planet’s valuable, profit-assuring stamp of approval. From Arti’s place, a staff member emerged and tried to hurry a nearby group of travelers in, but to no effect- they chose the second establishment, because it had a slightly nicer sign.
At the other bakery, I was disappointed to find Michael Smith was in Dehli, attending to non-specified business. My experience of trying to get hold of management types who are unexpectedly out of the city has never been gratifying, so I was surprised when a member of staff gave me his private number and Mr. Smith readily picked up the phone.
Unrelated picture of awesome mustache.
‘India is not so strong with the copyright law.’ He spoke in a stern German accent** ‘I even registered the trademark, but the court says up to ten years for a case… in ten years my business is destroyed,’ he explained his decision to open up a rival Brown Bakery opposite the first- he had to take action, immediately. And why? Apparently, Mr. Smith and Arti’s husband had originally been working in concert, running the bakery and charity together… until troubles rose between them.
‘I was running the school, they were collecting money from tourists on behalf of the school, they [the school] never received the money,’ Smith said, adding his suspicions that Arti and her husband had used pilfered profits to build their guesthouse. ‘When they open a hotel from the stolen money, I say enough is enough,’ and so Mr. Smith dissolved their partnership, took as many students as he could to a new charity school, and struck out on his own.
I took these allegations to Bohul, Arti’s husband, a pocket sized Indian fellow in a slightly grubby vest. His response was explosive: ‘He’s a fucking liar!’
Bohul’s side of the story was thus: Michael Smith was an investor. ‘He was always saying here’s enough money- he was just giving us unknown sums of money from somewhere… no good records… some foreign guy is managing everything.’ And then Smith grabbed for power. ‘He decided to be everything by himself- he will be the collector, he the manager, he has all the money, he has all the fundraiser.’
‘He even stole 40 kids from our school… why doesn’t he take the other 35 kids? Of course he doesn’t take them, because they’re not sponsored from abroad.’ Bohul’s claim was that rich Mr. Smith had lowjacked his school and charity. The children at Mr. Smith’s new school were only there at the behest of western sponsorship and charitable donation. ‘He keeps the society name, he doesn’t have the registration.’ Arti added that, with their business crippled by an identically named rival, her school was in imminent danger of closing down.
Further unrelated picture of awesome mustache.
Neither school was available for inspection on the day I visited; one was two kilometres away and therefore inaccessible without an expensive rickshaw, the other had no present pupil’s on hand. Bohul showed me a certificate of authenticity… in Hindi, impossible for me to assess.
I asked around with some other locals, and the general consensus seemed to be that the two bakeries had indeed started as one, a partnership, and there had been some money issues- though no one is sure which- leading to their split. The details, though, were just as murky; gossip only said “trouble,” it didn’t say why.
‘You can donate money from the Learn For Life restaurant… straight into their own private bank account,’ Michael Smith said derisively, of the other bakery. ‘They take the money. And of course they don’t make the food to the same, same standards… they don’t bother to get organic grain.’
More from the Puja ceremony, which goes on for a really really long time.
Both owners urged me to spread the truth; tell other travelers, tell Lonely Planet, tell anyone I could. Ultimately, though, the affair is impenetrable- a tangled web of confusing accusations, resulting in Gemini bakeries and a lot of mild vexation for the throngs of tourists caught in between. I suspected the skullduggery might have been mutual, or perhaps a mere misunderstanding from both sides was at play- but it was really impossible to tell without a polygraph. Giving up on the truth, I decided to go for the taste instead.
And as far as that test goes… I’m afraid the food at Michael Smith’s place was better. But then, the impossibly rich foreign investor’s would be, wouldn’t it? So as far as my promise to tell other travelers goes, all I can say is this: Try one at a time, and stick with whichever you like best.
Welcome to Varanasi, city of the dead, where even the bakeries are sordid.
My name is Elliott, and this is an Indian guru who challenged me to a game of chess because he liked me hat.
I did not win.
And then he tried to sell me underwear.
*If you’re not part of the problem, you’re me.
**That is, a German accent.
