So what, you may ask is the Banarasi Initiation Rite? I don't remember who told us this, whether they were local or from out of town, but the story goes that you haven't really lived in Banaras until you've slipped on cow dung and fallen on your butt. There really is so much cow dung everywhere that you'd expect this to happen literally all the time ... but really it just makes for interesting pedestrian traffic as everyone is doing there best to avoid the stuff.
Well, a couple of days ago I was at our local urban dairy** watching the milk man as he was literally milking the cow into my little steel milk bucket --- that's right, I carry my raw milk home in a milk bucket. Anyway, I'm there admiring his work, watching the mother cow who was, while being milked, grooming her overly excited calf. I guess the calf was pumped because she had just been fed before my milk bucket entered the fray. So there we all are - a happy picture of an agricultural scene in very urban Banaras - when the calf in her giddiness slips on a puddle of urine in the uneven road, takes a spill in some - you guessed it, cow dung - and splashes me with the whole mix.
Now, the fact that I didn't fall I think is inconsequential - I'm still claiming this as my official Banarasi Initiation.
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* I'm going to try to start referring to Varanasi as Banaras going forward in our blog posts just because ... well, that's what everyone around here calls it.
** I swear (I think) that I'll be able to get a post about this soon.
1 comment:
To demonstrate just how much this phd stuff is warping my brain, it took me clear until the second paragraph to realize that this post wasn't entitled, "The Banarasi* Inflation Rate." What, you mean there is something in the world that matters that isn't economics? Surely you can't be serious!
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