Art.Suvro.Ghosh

Molly usually chose to arrive late in the afternoon, when the houses cast shadows wide enough for her to fit. She was fat for a cow, no doubt, and unlike the human species, fat domesticated ungulates aren’t overly concerned about their body image or mass index, and Molly wasn’t. Many were convinced she was holy and treated her with devout respect.

She didn’t care about human affairs, including the most common at these times: the commute. Cars spotted her, honked in vain, and took an alternate bylane. Pedestrians, who weren’t particularly religious, tried to squeeze through the space between her body and the open sewer drain. The religious stopped and prayed to her, then followed the established detour. No one thought a cow in the middle of the road was aberrant or a hurdle grave enough to insist on action. Demanding she leave could invite public outrage, so most people didn’t dare. After all, she was a holy cow.

Around 6 PM, when it was fairly dark but not pitch black, she got up. She swished her tail a couple of times, unsettling a few flies, and keeping her tail on her back like a used towel, she let her bowel go. It was always a colossal dump, reaching almost up to her thighs and impeccably slushy. With defecation out of the way, she swished her tail again and this time let her bladder go. Then she left, leaving behind a mountain of fecal ephemera with a lake on top.

The problem with electricity in Calcutta and light bulbs is that they don’t work at night. They’ve got 9–5 jobs. A power cut, affectionately called "load shedding", happens when someone’s power supply or a section of the grid is deliberately and lovingly switched off to ease up on the rest of the electric grid. Back then, and I’m talking about the eighties here, load-shedding ruled the night and the street lamps were perpetually off. It’s worth mentioning that in India, street lamps do work right before the elections and right afterwards. But after that, they stop working like magic. Over the years, people in Calcutta have grown fond of the dark; they’ve stopped complaining and developed superior nocturnal navigational skills. But those skills were challenged when Molly left her gift right in the middle of the road.

The light after six was from passing vehicles, people’s houses, and moonlight, which wasn’t enough for the people coming back from work to see where they were going. Of course, if the power supply to the residences were cut, the street would go pitch black. To make the trek more adventurous, there were open sewer drains on both sides of the road with freshly excavated semi-solid sewer gunk right next to them. If you took an aerial snapshot, it was a narrow street with open drains on two sides, gunk from the drains next to it, and Molly's gift right in the middle.

Although most people managed some steering maneuvers in the dark, some were optically less equipped. Or careless, like kids, for instance. This demographic walked straight into Molly’s masterpiece. You might wonder why they couldn’t use their sense of smell. The truth is, the sense of smell isn’t that useful in the dark, plus you get desensitized to the smell in Calcutta, a great city as it is. Because right there on the street, there are truck loads of poop from other cows, dogs, cats, and humans who were well within their democratic rights. You can hardly forget, more generally and politically speaking, that India is the largest democracy; there are some compromises, so you get habituated to the stink.

Everyone laughed when someone fell. Watching someone wallow in feces is always fun. Once the landscape was altered, everyone was ankle-deep in shit. It was impossible for a foot or a tire not to take some dung home. And everyone did, and by daybreak it was all gone, waiting for Molly to start the cycle all over again.