The Milk Lady of Bangalore: An Unexpected Adventure

by Shoba Narayan

Overview

The elevator door opens. A cow stands inside, angled diagonally to fit. It doesn’t look uncomfortable, merely impatient. “It is for the housewarming ceremony on the third floor,” explains the woman who stands behind the cow, holding it loosely with a rope. She has the sheepish look of a person caught in a strange situation who is trying to act as normal as possible. She introduces herself as Sarala and smiles reassuringly. The door closes. I shake my head and suppress a grin. It is good to be back.

When Shoba Narayan—who has just returned to India with her husband and two daughters after years in the United States—asks whether said cow might bless her apartment next, it is the beginning of a beautiful friendship between our author and Sarala, who also sells fresh milk right across the street from that thoroughly modern apartment building. The two women connect over not only cows but also family, food, and life. When Shoba agrees to buy Sarala a new cow, they set off looking for just the right heifer, and what was at first a simple economic transaction becomes something much deeper, though never without a hint of slapstick.

The Milk Lady of Bangalore immerses us in the culture, customs, myths, religion, sights, and sounds of a city in which the twenty-first century and the ancient past coexist like nowhere else in the world. It’s a true story of bridging divides, of understanding other ways of looking at the world, and of human connections and animal connections, and it’s an irresistible adventure of two strong women and the animals they love.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781616208677
Publisher:	Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill
Publication date:	01/15/2019
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.20(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Shoba Narayan writes about food, travel, fashion, art, and culture for many publications, including Conde Nast Traveler, the Financial Times, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, Town & Country, Food & Wine, Saveur, Newsweek, and House Beautiful. She writes a weekly column for Mint Lounge, an Indian business daily, which is affiliated with the Wall Street Journal. Her commentaries have aired on NPR’s All Things Considered. Narayan is the author of Monsoon Diary: A Memoir with Recipes, and her essay "The God of Small Feasts" won the James Beard Foundation’s MFK Fisher Distinguished Writing Award.   

Table of Contents

Prologue xix

Part 1

1 The Cows-and Humans-Come Home 3

2 Bangalore 15

3 Milking the Milk Story for My Neighbors 26

4 Farm to Table, Udder to Butter 39

5 The Myths Around Milk 51

6 Are You Happy? 65

7 Embracing Humility, Humanity … and Guilt 75

8 If You Don't Like the Milk, Change Your Cow 83

9 Land of a Million Cows 94

10 The Scatological Remnants of a Cow 102

11 Cow Manure for the Garden 114

Part 2

12 My Milk Woman Has a Proposition 129

13 A Cow as a Birthday Gift? 139

14 Cause and Collateral 151

15 To Market, to Market, to Buy a Fat Cow 158

16 The Cattle Fair 171

17 Buying a Cow 188

18 A Calf 202

19 The Cow Hotel 214

20 Finding a Bride 223

21 Three Weddings and a Passing 234

Postscript 243

Acknowledgments 245

Selected Reading 251

Editorial Reviews

An absolute joy to read. Through her close encounters with the bovine kind, Narayan shows how Indian traditions are incorporated into her contemporary way of life.”
—Library Journal, starred review

“Sincere and laugh-out-loud funny . . . Narayan’s rich and evocative writing transports readers to the busy streets of Bangalore and a fully formed picture of modern India.”
—Kirkus Reviews

“Filled with the vivid colors, sights, and sounds of a vibrant and ancient culture, Narayan’s in-depth treatment of cow mythology is a beautiful ode to her motherland.”
—Booklist

“Lovely, lighthearted . . . a journey through cultural mores and female friendship, as well as a look at the spiritual and historical part that cows play in India; an easy read that you can’t help but love.”
—Refinery29

“Anyone with the slightest interest in India or cows will find Narayan's memoir, with its myriad insights, a delight.”
—Shelf Awareness

“The relationship that forms between Shoba Narayan and her milk lady is wildly funny, and completely real. It’s so rare to find friendships like this that cut across class.”
—Arun Venugopal, host of WNYC's Micropolis

“Narayan imparts well-researched, intriguing, and sometimes humorous facts about the complex role of cows in Indian culture.”
—New York Journal of Books


“Shoba Narayan offers a surprisingly fresh understanding of everyday life in the land of the sacred cow, overflowing with the daily contradictions and ironies that India so richly offers up to the discerning eye, in a wonderfully eloquent generational saga, intertwined with milk, dung and Uber.”  
—Raju Narisetti, CEO, Gizmodo, and former managing editor of The Washington Post  

From the Publisher

2017-11-14
A culture writer and cookbook author leaves New York City to reconnect with her roots in this humorous and heartwarming story about cows, Indian culture, and the strength of female friendship.Despite being born and raised in India, Narayan (Monsoon Diary: A Memoir with Recipes, 2003, etc.) spent most of her adult life in New York. With her parents and in-laws beginning to age, she decided to pack up and relocate her entire family to Bangalore as a way to be closer to her older loved ones and to reconnect herself and her children to their cultural roots. Everything about their new home seemed different from the familiar comforts of New York, but one thing stood out more than anything else in her new world: India's sacred cows and the people who care for them—particularly, a local milk lady named Sarala who grazed her small herd of cows across the street from Narayan's new home. When Narayan decided to take the plunge and buy Sarala's fresh milk after doing weeks of intensive online and anecdotal research on the subject, the two formed a fast friendship based on their deep personal connection to their shared Indian roots, love of family, interest in food, and, most of all, desire to find just the right cow for Narayan to purchase for Sarala. At once sincere and laugh-out-loud funny, this memoir chronicles a genuine bond between two remarkable women that transcends class, culture, and privilege. In this beautiful examination of the differences between Eastern and Western cultures as told through the eyes of a writer who is uniquely qualified to comment on both, Narayan's rich and evocative writing transports readers to the busy streets of Bangalore and a fully formed picture of modern India that includes cow urine tablets, bus crashes, and many different kinds of milk.A witty and tender story that endears readers to Indian culture and one of their most sacred symbols, the cow.

Kirkus Reviews