Holy Cow

45 SINGH A SIMPLE SONG

I could go wherever I pleased, and no one tried to touch the pig or the turkey while they were on my back. I was given candies to eat, and sugar, which I’d never had-they were delicious. In soothing tones, the Mumbaikar spoke Hindi and Bambaiya to me. I piggybacked Shalom and Tom as we sightsaw. We saw temples and skyscrapers; we saw the beautiful Victoria Terminus, renamed but still a symbol of colonial oppression. “This is it!” Shalom cooed. “We hit the jackpot. This country is cowcentric. We are golden gods!” A little girl came up to me with finger paints and put bright colors on my face, made me up to look like the most beautiful Bollywood movie star. I had to check to see if my heart was still beating because I was sure I had died and gone to heaven.

We gorged on sweets made of rice and milk and were given the softest places to lie down. Even the poorest folk, who had nothing, gave us some of that nothing. I had never seen such poverty, and all in a city with the sixth-highest concentration of billionaires in the world. And yet what the poor had, they shared with me even if they didn’t share with one another. Humans can be very generous, though not often enough with other humans.

I had nowhere to go, nowhere I had to be. I just wandered. I didn’t need to find a home, because anywhere I stopped or lay down was my home. This was truly and literally my country. When I looked into the beautiful big brown eyes of the people, I felt I could see my own reflection.

I spent months this way, or was it years? It was like that Lotus Eaters episode in Homer. The three of us-eating, sleeping, eating, sleeping, being worshipped. Shalom had put on like twenty pounds in the time we’d been there. Tom finally looked like a turkey the day before Thanksgiving, plump and juicy. Being worshipped felt good, a lot like feeling loved, though not quite, not quite. It was like a wonderful-tasting, rich meal that left you a little dazed and stupid afterward. Nonetheless, Shalom took to saying, “What a mitzvah. I’m happier than a pig in shit.”