I have not seen a cow in a long time. The ones that I glimpse when I drive past a Texas ranch at 70mph do not persist in my field of vision long enough to matter. I have seen longhorns up close. You can spot them in small West Texas towns - three or four of them held in an enclosure the size of my one-bedroom apartment. People, particularly those with young kids, pull up in their trucks to look at them, going from 75 to 0 and kicking up a cloud of dust to do so. The wonder-eyed four-year-olds seem taken by the thousand-yard stare of the dreary beasts. The parents point and name the animal for the kids sake. At this point, I want to shake the little ones and tell them those are not real longhorns. They are just the copy of a copy of something that used to be alive. I've seen museum relics that are more alive than those cows.
I live a mile from the Texas Longhorns’ football stadium. In America, you know something is spiritually vanquished when there's a football team named after it. It's the modern equivalent of a hunting trophy.
I've driven from Los Angeles to San Francisco twice. First, along the panoramic, undulating highway, one that hugs the Pacific Ocean. The second time through Interstate 5, which goes through the underbelly of central California. Along this route, the horizon is lined with billboards announcing farmer protests and the water crisis. The electric lines are sagging dangerously close to the ground and shimmering in the afternoon sun. As you approach the midway point of the drive, it hits you, the unfamiliar pungent odor. It smells like a fatal chemical spill. My co-passenger told me it was methane from the cows. They have huge cattle farms in central California. I could not spot a single cow, but I could feel their presence in the air. They felt more alive than the longhorns.
We had a milk woman when I was growing up in India. My mom kept an empty plastic bottle on the verandah before going to sleep, and it was filled with milk the next morning. You can imagine how magical this was for a five-year-old. That was until I learned about the milkwoman. She was old. I often saw her walking her cow to graze - both of them hunched down, one end of a rope in her hand and the other in a noose around the cow's neck. She wore a symbolic white saree - all the toil and sweat of the day was visible on it. Memory works differently when you're a child. The past is fickle, and the future seems infinite, so you're always latching onto new things. You don't notice the absence of something until several years later. Even when you notice it's hard to comprehend or care about. The milk woman was replaced by packaged milk that said "ultra-pasteurized" on the cover. This seemed unremarkable. I did not think about her until I overheard my parents speak about her death. She never attained personhood in my subjective experience. She always remained a character in an action that happened at a distance. A mythic figure that comes back to haunt me when I stare at the contents of American milk packaging.
I never once thought to stand still and memorize a cow. They were just part of the daily landscape. The only time their existence came into sharp awareness was when I accidentally stepped on cow dung. This happened enough times to warrant caution. When I walked at night, I lept across any part of the road that seemed darker than its surroundings. When I was ten, my parents took me to the Western Ghats. One of the destinations on the trip was a farm that raised Swiss cows in a joint project between Switzerland and the state farming board. They looked healthier and fluffier than the milk woman's cow. I imagined they produced milk that looked exactly like what you see on Lindt milk chocolate packaging. I assumed all Western cows would have similar poise and grace. That's what everyone thought about the West in the '90s and early aughts - everything was better, the milk was rich, and the cows were frolicking in velvety green grass - the kind that you saw on the Windows XP screensaver.
I should memorialize the milk woman and her cow. I don't have the money to buy and name a football team. I could start one of those crypto coins named after an animal. Trading them will be called milking. A couple of decades from now, kids will come to know cows as the mythical creature that their currency is named after—the currency they will have to milk every day.