We Sell Them the Milk

People ask me if owning land changed things, and I always give them the same answer, which is yes, obviously, and also not even slightly, and both of those are true at the same time, which is a very Haryana kind of answer if you think about it.

Here is what changed. Twelve years ago, under a government scheme nobody in my family believed would actually go through, I got two acres. Actual paper, actual stamp, my name spelled correctly, which itself felt like a small miracle given how often clerks manage to misspell it. I built a shed. I bought two buffaloes on credit from my brother-in-law, who still brings this up at every family function like it's a debt I haven't finished repaying, which, fair enough, I haven't. Now I have eleven buffaloes and a dairy operation that does well enough that three families in this village buy their milk from me every single morning.

Here is what didn't change. Those same three families do not invite me to weddings. I want to say that slowly, because it's a genuinely strange sentence to have to say out loud. They walk to my shed at six in the morning, hand over their steel cans, exchange pleasantries about the weather, ask after my buffaloes by name, because yes, they know their names, and then three months later there is a wedding procession going right past my house, band and all, and I am standing in my own doorway watching it go by like a man watching a train he was never going to be allowed to board.

My son thinks I should be angrier about this than I am. He's twenty-two, he's read some things, he uses words like "structural" now, and I don't disagree with him, exactly. I just think anger is a fuel you burn fast, and I have eleven buffaloes to milk twice a day regardless of how I feel about anyone's wedding invitations. There's a kind of comedy in it, if you let yourself see it that way. I have found that letting yourself see it that way is the only thing that gets you through a Tuesday.

Last year the panchayat needed milk for a large community function, some minister was visiting, big tent, marigolds, the whole arrangement. Guess whose milk they used. Mine. Forty liters, paid for promptly, thank you very much. I was not invited to attend. My milk was. I told my son this and he didn't know whether to laugh or throw something, and honestly, that's the correct response, both at once, because that is exactly the joke and exactly the insult and I don't think you can fully separate the two anymore, not in this village, maybe not anywhere.

I'm not going to pretend I've made peace with it in some noble, quotable way. I haven't made peace with it. I've made an arrangement with it, which is different, smaller, more like a business deal than a resolution. They get their milk. I get their money and, apparently, the enormous privilege of watching their weddings from a doorway. Some mornings that feels like an insult I'm too tired to properly register. Other mornings I genuinely find it funny, in the specific way you find something funny when the alternative is letting it ruin your whole day, which I do not have time for, because the six a.m. buffaloes do not care about anyone's caste, or anyone's wedding, or anyone's feelings. They just want milking.

So. We sell them the milk. That's the joke. I'm still working out if it's supposed to be on them or on me.

Translated By: Nishesh Kainth & Gowthamm Mandala