It was the hottest day yet and the line was long in front of the Moo-la-dhar Centre at Pasu Pathy Nagar. I’d been waiting since morning when my maalik dragged me by the nose to this awful place full of sweaty cows and dirty humans. All for the sake of a Moo-la-dhar tag.

Earlier, he had milked me dry before giving me a breakfast of protein pellets and water. Yuck! Someone had told him I would yield more milk with this diet. Oh God, how I hate it. I wish I could go back to the days of lazy grazing on green grass. How I miss the tasty oil-cakes, punnakku , I used to munch on when I was small! Why humans give punnakku a bad name, I will never understand.

A loud moo shook me from my reverie. My maalik led me to a bored looking character seated behind what they call a cowmputer. Gorakshakan, his name tag said. Nice name, I thought, for such a thuggish type.

“Name?” growled Gorakshakan.

“Gomatha,” I mooed meekly.

“Father’s name?” he snapped.

“Bullhead,” I replied. He looked up. “What kind of a name is that?”

“Well, that’s his name,” I answered proudly. “He’s of European stock.”

“And where’s your mother from?” Gorakshakan asked with barely concealed irritation. I could understand that. It’s not easy to sit all day long among mooing cows, not to mention the liberal quantities of gomutra and gomaya they dispense.

“China,” I replied coolly. And before he could ask I said: “Her name is Cowmein.”

The man laughed, showing off paan-stained teeth. I even caught the glint of a gold tooth. “Aha! Imported stock. You’re not a citizen of this country; you’re not eligible for Moo-la-dhar,” he declared.

My maalik panicked. “No, no, she’s not imported, her parents were immigrants. She was born in Gobichettipalayam, Tamil Nadu,” he said nervously. “Here’s her birth certificate.”

Gorakshakan examined it closely and seemed convinced. “These are the kind of breeds that pose a danger to our homegrown ones,” he said. “But we’ll process the Moo-la-dhar for her anyway.” My maalik was relieved.

As for me, well, he took my hoofprints on a contraption on the floor, grumbling all the while about how worn-out my hooves were. What else do you expect from a 15-year-old cow, I thought to myself. He then imaged my eyes mumbling something about how cows with foreign genes had beautiful eyes. And then the questions continued.

“How old?”

“15 years”

“Breed?”

“Mixed Eurasian.”

“Sex?”

You’re called Gorakshakan and you don’t even know that cows are female? I wanted to ask him. Instead I said, “Female,” and snorted.

“Colour?”

“Brown and white.” Like he couldn’t see for himself!

He then inspected my horns and measured them. For a flash second I felt like driving them into him but my maalik held me back.

“How much does she yield?” he asked my maalik . “5 kg a day,” he replied without batting an eyelid. Liar, I thought. The highest I’ve yielded is 3.5 kg a day.

I now summoned up the courage to ask Gorakshakan a question: “Bhaiyyaji, why this move to give Moo-la-dhars to us?”

“To ensure that your maalik doesn’t sell you to the nearest butcher or pack you off to Bangladesh. Basically, to protect you,” he replied.

I thought of my poor old grandmother who had languished in the barn in her old age, uncared for. Forget punnakku , her maalik would not even give her hay. “Why waste attention on an old cow that yields no milk?” he’d say. “I’d rather die than suffer like this,” my grandmother would whimper, tears filling her eyes.

“Moo-la-dhar is also meant to keep track of alien breeds such as yourself. We prefer local breeds that trace their genes to ancient times,” Gorakshakan hissed darkly.

Aadhaar robbed humans of their privacy, and now it was the turn of us cows. What next, I thought to myself, as Gorakshakan extracted a small polyurethane sheet from the printer and walked up to me. “That’s the tag,” he said, proudly waving it before my eyes. “We’ve put a number on you with all your biometric details.” And then I felt a sharp pain as he fixed the tag on to my ear.

Ambling back home I thought about the irony of having a naamakaran and ear piercing at age 15, when I already had one foot in the grave. Such are the times.

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