The cow shelter, set up by the leaders of the cow protection movement, was run by volunteers. They diligently groomed the cows, collected their urine, patted their dung into cakes, made their beds, covered them with blankets at night and slept alongside them in their sheds. The prospective volunteers who applied last week did not even ask for food, which was when the insiders began to worry that the cow shelter would soon have more humans than bovines and the purpose of their initiative would be lost. No cow needed more than one servant—that would be extravagant. Soon, the outsiders had begun to bribe the watchmen to let them in for the night. The leader would do the rounds at random hours, sometimes in the middle of the night, to check on the watchman, among other things that needed a good checking.

‘Don’t you know we have a zero tolerance for corruption? You will pack your bags and leave in ten minutes,’ the previous watchman had been ordered.

The watchman did not defend himself. He did not feel guilty either. He rationalized that he had followed the Gita. He was dutiful towards those in need and had protected them. What else is a watchman’s duty?

A young graduate, one of the first to be trained in the field of industrial psychology, and turned down by several cotton mills, arrived at the cow shelter.

‘Let me in. I am a cow psychologist.’

‘What is this “cow psychology”?’

‘I am trained to understand the emotional lives of cows.’

‘Which cow?’

‘All cows.’

‘I have lived with Dulari for twelve years, yet there are times when I don’t know what’s going on in her mind,’ said the sceptic among them. The rest of the committee which decided who to take in and who to reject, was excited. They ignored the sceptic and offered the psychologist a room, minimal but independent. There were no cows in it. In the first month, he had already diagnosed four cases of trauma.

One of the cows was in the habit of running into a wire fence each time she was called ‘mother’. He said that this was because she was seven years old; the man who called her ‘mother’ was seventy-seven and he would proceed to milk her right after.

‘What if your mother was seven and a seventy-seven-year-old man called her “mother” and then fondled her breasts?’

‘How dare you insult my mother?’

‘Exactly what I am saying. Imagine what the poor animal must be going through.’

‘Main uska khoon pee jaonga (I would suck his blood).’

‘We should not allow men over seventy near our cows.’

‘I am seventy-three and I’ve never molested any cows. Let the cow psychologist ask them. If any cow accuses me of having ever looked at her with an evil eye, I will renounce everything and retire to the Himalayas.’