A bovine nostalgia

" Buffalo kills woman" A small write-up in an obscure corner of the local news section of our daily caught my attention.It was a shuddering piece of news print about how an impertinate buffalo ran amock in a crowded area killing a 60 year old woman in Hyderabad.
Suddenly I drifted back into memory lane thinking of my princely acquaintance with the bovine creatures.
I was around 12 or 13 years of age when we had just shifted from a crowded city place into the outskirts of the city in our newly constructed bungalow. Our colony boasted of having large pieces of plotted land with freshly laid tar roads. Large water pools could be found abundantly among the plots. This was freshly accumulated rain water with a deep red hue. There were 20 to 30 houses built in our colony with around 100 odd residents. Almost all of them were government servants. My father was working in the State Legislative assembly in a key position and was quite influential with the powers to be. He was the automatic choice of the colony residents as their President of the welfare society. I had many friends in the colony but always nurtured a special affinity with the non studious types. My very special ones were the cowherds and buffalo grazers since they allowed me to ride the huge animals and trained me in the art of producing gruntling noises used to communicate with the four legged variety.
I was always given the privilege of washing the buffalos in the colony pools after which I would plop myself on top of the wading animals and go for long rides till they reached the cattle shed.
On one such occasion which mostly fell on Sundays I was washing the animals with gay abandon in a pool right near the community hall where a General Body meeting was being conducted by the colony President or in other words my father.
I was in the water with only my underwear havingly neatly kept my clothes on a huge boulder.
I saw my father coming out of the community hall and with unbridled excitement started calling Appa ! Appa ! My father took no notice of me thinking me to be an urchin imitating his son, but the other members of the meeting took adequate trouble of convincing him of my true identity.
He slowly came towards me and shot a red angry look. He quizzed me about my clothes and I proudly displayed my common sense of having kept my clothes dry on the boulder. Without even a formal announcement ,he came and took my clothes away to home. My house was a good 1/4 kilometer from the pool. My royal journey back to home in my undies was on a buffalo and I was received fairly decent with just two tight slaps and three beltings.
Since then I always have a reverential attitude towards all cattle and understood as to why the cow is held so sacred in India.

Nagi