Holy Cow

That cows are everywhere in India is hardly a revelation to anyone who knows anything at all about this country. Sacred holy animal, meandering through the dessicated mud of the streets, chomping on a thorny branch, munching a hunk of bread, licking hopefully at a split sack of flour. Big cows and little cows in tasteful browns and greys and creams and fawn. A cow with a broken horn lingering outside a marigold-strewn temple doorway. Cows unheedingly holding up traffic on the motorway, a cow hesitating about the wisdom of crossing three lanes of manic motorcycle, truck and van traffic on a city street.

I'm grateful to cows for bringing us here. I wrote a story called Cattle Love and won the tickets from Cathay Pacific. The story was inspired by a woman student, a refugee from East Africa. We went to a farm park and she found the cows and could not tear herself away from them. She said, they are like my cows, I miss my cows so much, we had so many cows when I was young. And I thought that a person can lose a great deal in their lives but if they have lost their animals, then the animals have lost them, too.

Perhaps the person that judged the stories came from here and knows that cows are special. Good for you, cows; lurch elegantly between the market stalls and the rickshaws, look neither to right or left; come to a halt, and rotate your head slowly through a full-circle view of the rubbish heaps and scraps. Find something to eat and move on, taking your own good time. There is plenty of time, on the sacred cow beat.