Who is a Celebrity?

I was born and brought up in a Metropolis like Mumbai.  I had a pretty contented childhood. My early school days were full of fun.

On the way to the school there happened to be a temple. Outside the temple stood a tall lean lady, with a short cane in her hand and a cow in toe. She wore a thick round glass spects. She always carried a sack. The sack was made by loosely knotting four corners of a square piece of cloth, into a big central knot.  The centrally knotted cloth held strands of grass, and vegetable peels collected from the vegetable market. She spoke in a high pitch shrill voice even to the cow she tagged along all the way to the temple. She brandished the cane as she spoke. I and my friends were a little scared of the cane.

Evevery day on the way to the school we spent a few minutes to watch the cow. She just shooed us away the moment we lingered around.

Occasionally my mother gave me 10 paise. Which I handed over to the cow woman. In return she allowed each one of us turn by turn to touch the cow once. Sometimes the cow obliged us by dropping mounds of dung. That is what we loved to watch. We even tried to count those greenish blue bulky flies that hovered around the dung. We loved the buzz. For 25 paise the cow woman allowed us to touch the horns, snout, and tail.

To all of us cow woman was a celebrity. Many of my neighbours had cars. Even some of my classmates came to the school in the car. We saw all kinds of vehicles on the road all the time. Aeroplanes often teared through the sky. Even the trains were too ordinary to draw our attention.

But a cow was a different thing. None of my friends had cow at home. Some claimed they had cows in their villages. We just discounted these claims. We even knew the fact that the cow women resided in a slum by the railway line. That fact did not dampen our perception. Yet to us the cow woman was a celebrity.
____________

You can find more of such writing in digital / KINDLE READER format at

AMAZON /Books / e-books / INDIAN FLAVOUR SHORT STORIES Part - 1/2/3