Editors Note: This is part one of a two-part story.
I spit to my side a big globulous sort of loog and sat back against the brittle tree. The back of my hand slowly wiped the excess vomit from my mouth, my digits hot and queasy as they wiped themselves in the short green turf.
“Joshua . you okay?” said Bhagwan, the anthropologist/social worker who’d bused me two hours through desolation and then walked me another out into Rajagi National Park.
“Yeah. Now, I am.” I took a drink of water, washing the putrid concoction of gastric witch’s brew from my palate. “It was that milk.” Another gag.
The water swashed around for a bit and then I spit again.
Removing more of the matter of funk from my mouth. Rays of riotous sun dried up the beads of sweat drawn on my forehead, baking them to an arid existence. An alluvial fan of frontal bone salts collected in a wipe-away delta above my brow. I scooted back under the shade of a bigger tree and looked over at the puzzled water buffalo checking me out in between his big monotonous chews of grass.
“Maybe it would be good to go back, Joshua?”
“Nah, just give me a sec.”
As I took deep breaths I thought and daydreamed over the sip that would make me sick as people do in those post-vomitous nightmarish views. The first little cup of tea had been brought by the small boy out of the mud-brick, thatched-roof house.
He was eager but his toddling trot caused a quick stumble that found a loss of grip on the glass. Boy instantly started crying, his mother giggling and patting his head telling him in Urdu perhaps something like, “There, there, little one. It is no use crying over spilt milk.” You know, like mothers do.
I looked over at my little pile of chai and bile drying up fast in the grassland waves of heat.
Wiping the tears of strain from my eyes, I thought it funny that I was the one who ended up crying over the spilt milk, but just not that particular puddle the child fretted over.
The breeze came across the tip of my nose and brought hope and my earnest inhalations seemed to bring some sort of reprieve.
The grassland faded away in the distance, with crunchy little balls of scrub-brush popping in the heat like corn kernels in a frying pan.
“All right, let’s go. I’m fine.”
“But Joshua, maybe it would be best if . ,” he said with his nervous beady eyes fluttering behind the wiry spectacles.
“No, really I’m fine. Really.”
I wanted to end the pity. I mean, the white boy did a little vomiting; he didn’t give birth or anything.
We walked on to the next group of huts, down the soft dust path, through the waist-high wheat harvest-to-be grass and over bridges made of fallen trees. My mind wandered in the sun and the steps that I encroached while I brought up a laugh at my stupid ass for not having more common sense.
I remembered and thought of the second cup the boy had brought which made it to my grasp.
The kind young fraternity adjourned from their playing to sit and watch while mother kept offering us food. I thanked them and Bhagwan translated. The little boy smiled and nervously rubbed his chin, proud of his hospitality. As soon as it hit my mouth I found foul about.
I had leaned over to my colleague to say, “Man, is the milk in this tea good?”
“Oh, you are not used to.” He laughed and pointed to my right. “It is fresh. It has a different taste than store milk.”
Over my shoulder I found the damned ugliest cow I’d ever seen.
This thing had rear hip bones jutting out through its mangy leather like an orphaned boy’s shoulders in wet clothes. A tail waving away a squadron of big-bodied flies and dried runny crap was crusting down its leg like barnacles on an obsolete tugboat.
Leaning back, I looked to where milk would come from and saw something with shriveled, udder-ous fingers. The milking receptacle hung low and swung side-to-side, banging into the joints of the beast, the group of papilla looking more like an old surgical glove crammed full of red, overcooked hot dog meat.
When my eyes returned to my audience the little boy smiled and drew closer, sitting next to me.
It is in these indigenous situations that it’s so hard to be rude, damn near impossible I tell you. The nasty Tibetan butter tea had been haunting me for the past month with its cellulite rancor of taste bud disgust.
Now, it would be chai tea made with yellow chunky milk from a cow that looked like a textbook-picture case of “abstain,” with some sort of caption below it stating, “Warning: Do not drink from this indisposed spigot at all costs, save for little brown-eyed children’s obliging accommodations.”
I drank up and smiled like I was wearing pajamas at Christmas morning’s opening of a hefty twenty pack of bloomers from Auntie Crazy-a-lot. “Mmm.tighty-whities and the putrescent nectar of bovine mother.”
As we visited a few more villagers, I belched and felt better and those memories of that milk seemed to fade.
A man from the farthest village we would visit out in the jungle came rushing to us, telling the tale which I would not understand for a few translated moments of the leopard that crept in through cover of night and got one of his herd.
The leopard, though, was foiled as his adolescent prey became entangled in the barbed-wire fence and awoke the Gujar family in the growls and hisses that exist in perilous battle of cat versus rusted steel burs.
The leopard ran as the torches and attention came out like army ants through the constellation-filled night.
To be continued April 23.

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