White Gold

               If you think ‘white gold’ is platinum mixed with bhaangar, read no further, this article is about milk.

               Do you remember milk in bottles with shiny, striped aluminium-foil caps? Chances are you also remember milk-booths, queues, rationing and traffic manners. Chances also are you have grey hair and wrinkles for we haven’t had those in the market for a couple of decades now.

Ever since plastic sheets married machines and Dr Kurien worked upon his Amul miracle, sachets were born, and ‘shortage of milk’ became an extinct phrase. From Jhunjhunu to Dinjaan to Tambaram young men learned about cold-chain distribution. (For some reason, women’s groups never insist that there’s gender discrimination in areas like delivering newspapers and milk. Wonder why.)

In Palolem, because my grandparents owned two buffaloes, our kapey-udak (coffee, in case my anglicized bhav-bhayn don’t know what that is) had a dot of milk in it. Those who didn’t have horned pets learned to like black-brown beverages. Or barter a big bunch of bananas for half a tambyo of white gold when needed. Or pay for it in money-order money. Since Goan sweets, unlike Bengali ones don’t need doodh, it was never really missed at chavath, tulsi lagna, shigmo or at haldi kukums.    

Fellow Goans know more about New York than Nashik, and they’re as ignorant about the concept of doodhwalas cycling to the house carrying cans filled with fresh, frothy, milk. In Punjab, during the curfew-bound ‘80s, our milkman and his brother did the morning delivery rounds alternate months: in between jail-residency for murder and other crimes. I learned something about feudal rural Indian culture through them.

The Man (you’re going to read lots about my ghov through this column) believes that buying milk is a form of exercise. Home delivered milk is a naa-naa. In Mumbai, two hours before sunrise, the milk-vans make the rounds. Before the sound of the truck brakes reached our window, he’d have finished his routine of sss, yoga and walk so he was ready to pick up the packets on his way back for breakfast. (‘sss’ means shit-shave-shampoo, a term picked up from friends in the Defence Forces).

In Sangolda, the poder also delivers the doodh. Since The Man’s house rules don’t permit home delivery, we collect it from our friendly local grocer who also sells matches, rubber-chappals, coconuts, chocolates, cigarettes, wafers (potato-chips in case you’ve lived abroad and don’t understand the term).

Which milk to buy: early, we had a choice of two, whole and toned. Then came the different kinds and quantities of fat you paid for, and the brands. The Man wants to homework before he settles on a brand for everything he buys. So we buy differently-labled packets, different companies (co-operatives, actually, mostly). I’ve read milk being ‘enriched’. Would that mean something without that special ingredient (say, D vitamin or some mineral) is ‘impoverished’? Nowadays, since we have tetra-packs with homogenized milk and since the variety available is as much as that on the shampoo rack in any well-stocked store, we have stopped experimenting. Reason: unlike we make an excel sheet and give marks for taste, thickness, how well it converts into curd, etc, and keep filling up the cells and compare, we would be wasting our time, because we forget all those things the moment we buy the next pack of the white gold.

The price of milk. White gold has never been cheap. Earlier the availability was a problem, now it can readily be bought. The fact that milk was a ‘must’ for pregnant and lactating moms and for growing children was not considered a fact. Many generations grew up with nachnnya satva and coconut milk and fish in their diet. Whether they, and others who lived their lives on idle-sambar suffered from terrible malnutrition, is for a nutritionist to point out. Just last year, a litre of milk cost about the same as half a kilo of onion. That was during the artificially-inflated crisis that hogged television headlines and gave Arnab a sore throat for several weeks. The price of the bulb that makes you cry fell, but milk... that rose and rose. Since now milk is considered an essential commodity, one budgets for it. Thanks to advertisements on television, ‘smart’ housewives now dilute the milk and then add Complan/Horlicks/Bournvita to increase its nutritional value. Others convert it to curd so that friendly micro-organisms can add to its inorganic chemical content.

Price rise or not, the days of milk shortages are definitely over.