The vanishing milk shops

We never had many milk shops in Islamabad because the capital’s initial settlers, the Babus from Karachi, were guzzlers of the amber brew, but Rawalpindi with its semi-rural ambience had one or two in every mohalla from Banni Mai Vero to Baee Number Chongi. Urbanised countrymen in whose diet milk was still staple had regular evening sittings at these shops to drink a bowl of hot milk topped with a portion of cream crust. Medical opinion had not yet turned hostile to this first beverage of Nature that our Urdu primer rhyme advised us to thank Providence for: ous Malik ko kyon na pukarein/jis ne pilaeen doodh ki dhaarein (why shall we not proclaim the Lord who gave us streams of milk to drink). Milk meant instant energy and those who drank milk lived longer. Hakeem Siyahposh who lived in Mohanpura and used to vend his aphrodisiac powder to wayside crowds near the railway station based the power of his potion on the magic of milk. He supported the myth that 40 drops of milk formed a drop of ghee, 40 drops of which formed a drop of blood, of which an equal number converted into what we Punjabis call Jat Da Kharrak.

But this metamorphosis could not materialise without the help of his potion as milk was soon destroyed in the stomach by the gastric juices. He would demonstrate this by boiling a pan of milk on his stove and then squeezing the juice of a lemon into it. The milk would curdle. Into this mass of whey he would pour a tablespoon of his pink granules. And lo and behold the white lump would turn again into the cow’s own real milk. The wit in the assembly who suggested administering the potion to the cow instead deserved the cold stare he got from the Hakim — a tall imposing figure dressed in black all over in an alpaca suit with matching satin bow, much like Hollywood’s highwaymen, a mendicant Arsin Lopen...

Milk shops served as meeting places for men wanting to get away from domestic tedium to exchange views on political matters that in the early fifties were just beginning to enter the vortex in whose eye we now fit so justly. There would be a radio playing a geet or ghazal in the voice of Aniqa Bano or a Punjabi song by Allah Bux Hazravi. The shop would be crowded for the evening news at quarter past eight that Shakeel Ahmad read after Jahan Ara Saeed’s English bulletin. For the more loyal clientele there would generally be a copy of the local Urdu dailies, Tameer or Kohistan, to browse through while the milk in the huge iron cauldron was being slowly churned with a long flat spoon to keep it from settling in the shallow bottom and allow the layer of cream to thicken around the circumference. Interesting pieces of news were read loudly, among them government statements that were still trusted.

Lalla halwai’s milk shop in Saddar Bazaar’s Brownlow Street was a popular haunt. He was an item of confection himself, a giant ‘gulabjamon’. A man of few words he would eye the steaming milk with half-closed eyes depositing his massive behind on the jute matting that had flattened and become one with the wood of the low chowki through years of silent suffering. He would hold the heavy ladle lightly in his fingers, dip it in the centre of the wok, fill it up and raise it a yard above and empty the contents in an unbroken stream that made a slurpy sound and created a tumult of froth on the surface of the steaming milk. Watching that ritual condensed one into a kind of ‘qalaqand’.

In summers Lalla usually wore a sleeveless vest over a checkered lungi; in winters he wore a shirt with silver buttons with a big pocket bulging with contents he hadn’t ever emptied. A milky kindness softened his eyes darkened by the fumes of smoke rising from the slow fire beneath the cauldron. He welcomed his regular customers with a nod of his oily head as he poured milk into big earthen bowls with the ladle. One ladle measured a quarter of a seer. Most customers drank two measures topped with a thick portion of the cream crust which was added after the sugar had been stirred by the waterfall method.

Milk may be bad for the heart but is good for the bowels if you take it hot before retiring for the day. The gentlemen who came to Lalla’s shop had that remarkable look of relief on their faces that our loo-phobic yuppies and their diabetic daddies have lost in the rat race for success. Lalla’s clients would occupy their customary seats on the wooden bench, stools and morhas that every evening were placed around the shop front. There was no hurry. Time was in abundance that is so scarce now. Lalla put sugar in the bowls from a rusted tin mumbling instructions to an old man who sat behind him doing small chores to save his master from avoidable movement. Very few wanted their milk to be less than two spoons sweet. In more lavish mood one asked for a portion of jalebees sunk in the milk. A very old man who tottered to the shop every evening had a son in Aden who was working there as a tailor. That was the first case of economic exile we came to know of in our neighbourhood. The old man told stories of Aden’s wealth that other customers heard with curious attention wondering why one would leave one’s old parents behind to seek fortune overseas.

Lalla didn’t know where Aden was. His world lay quietly steaming in a utensil before him. Milk, I believe, is a simplifier; it reduces you to your basics; returns you to your infancy. Aden? Lalla couldn’t care less. The only time he was seen displaying an emotion was when Liaquat Ali Khan was assassinated. Railway guard Atiq Husain, the father of Kabir Ali Wasti, our local politician, had gone to attend that Company Bagh meeting. He returned raving and ranting and pulling at his beard, array maar diya, zalmon ne maar diya! Lalla stood up. A sob convulsed his huge frame reaching down to the empty ladle in his hand.

The West’s new Russophobia is hypocritical

LONDON: With two weeks to go before Vladimir Putin hosts the G8’s first summit in Russia, criticisms are pouring in from western thinktanks and politicians. Some are legitimate, but many are wildly prejudiced. Russophobia is back. In the latter category was a speech by the US vice-president, Dick Cheney, in Lithuania. His denunciation of Russia’s lack of democracy was the harshest US attack since the fall of communism, though it turned out to be a lesson in double standards. Cheney went on to Kazakhstan and praised its president, whose elections are more flawed than Putin’s.

Cheney’s speech was designed to be provocative, a warning to Moscow not to take good relations with the Bush administration for granted. Two conservative senators, the Republican John McCain and the Democrat Joe Lieberman, have even urged Bush not to attend the summit unless Putin cleans up his act.

Three factors lie behind the new negativism on Russia: Putin’s creeping autocracy; Moscow’s international independence; and its growing role as a gas and oil supplier.

Putin’s weakening of democracy is undeniable, as the Foreign Policy Centre points out in Russia and the G8: a summit scorecard. He has tightened controls on the media; made it harder for new political parties to be registered; and raised the threshold to enter parliament from five per cent of the vote to seven per cent. By abolishing constituency contests in favour of party lists he has made it virtually impossible for independents to run.

Deplorable though these moves are, they continue the trend towards recentralisation of power in the Kremlin that began over a decade ago under Boris Yeltsin. They do not justify a sudden change in western attitudes, especially as western governments approved Yeltsin’s use of tanks against the Russian parliament in 1993 and his biased control of TV coverage in the 1996 elections. Without some self-criticism, western politicians who today attack Russia’s faltering democracy carry little conviction.

Russia’s independence in foreign policy is a new factor — and may be the real reason Washington is uncomfortable with Putin. His reaction to the Cheney tirade was significant.

Unruffled, he made only three mentions of the US in his state of the nation address a few days later. One was a flattering reference to Roosevelt’s new deal as a partial model for Russia. The second was a coded attack, without naming names, on US global ambitions and unilateralism: “We see what’s going on in the world. The wolf knows who to eat, as the proverb goes. It knows who to eat and is not about to listen to anyone, it seems”. Finally, he mentioned the US as just one in a list of several countries and regional groupings that Russia should consider important, including China, India, Latin America and the Asian Pacific. By contrast, he described the EU as Russia’s ‘biggest partner’.

This is an important shift. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union left the US as the world’s only imperial power, some western policy-makers view Moscow in condescending terms — as though Moscow needs the West more than vice versa. Flush with oil and gas money thanks to soaring world prices, Putin is signalling that this is wrong. A strong supporter of ‘multipolarity’, he no longer feels Russian relations with Washington have primacy. And he obviously enjoys having the Bush administration plead for his help over Iran.

Energy exports are Russia’s new strength, but it does not follow that Russia is bound to use them irresponsibly. The Russophobes seized on Moscow’s sudden cut in gas to Ukraine this winter as a red alert. They talked of Russia using energy as a lever, a weapon or, in Cheney’s words, ‘a tool of intimidation and blackmail’. The gas cut was a clumsy move in a negotiation over price. It was not directly linked to politics. But the blow to Russia’s image was done, and the cut was quickly reversed.

For energy to be sold it has to be bought. As a major supplier, Russia is as concerned about monopsony as western consumers are about monopoly. It makes commercial sense for Russia to look for new customers in China, Japan and India, as well as to seek to buy shares ‘downstream’ in energy distribution companies in Britain and other European states. None of this is sinister. A single mistake during the Ukrainian dispute should not outweigh Moscow’s long-standing reputation as a reliable energy supplier, even during the high-tension early-Reagan period of the cold war.

Some suggest Europe should create a kind of ‘energy Nato’, under which the West would minimise purchases from Russia and create an expensive new system of pipelines within the EU so that any country cut off by Russia could receive emergency supplies from its neighbours. This is nonsense. Far better for the EU to develop long-term contracts with Russia at all points along the energy stream and create a network of integrated delivery and mutual benefit that no one would wish to disrupt.

Margot Light, a specialist on Russia, recently pointed out: “Russia has discovered soft power.” Other countries have long used economic, cultural and diplomatic strength to gain political advantage abroad, but Russia’s predecessor, the Soviet Union, hastily resorted to the hard power of military force in the absence of other levers.

Now that Russia is adapting, the change should be welcomed rather than seen as a new ‘Russian threat’. As Putin put it in a Moscow speech this week: “The principle of ‘I’m allowed to do it but don’t you try’ is completely unacceptable.” There are tensions between Russia and several former Soviet republics, but these are natural. Relations between a one-time metropolis and its newly independent ex-colonies usually take decades to stabilise. Based on their own recent record, western European states should not demand unrealistic speed. They ought not to provoke or entice countries into an anti-Russian camp. Those who want Russia expelled from the G8 misunderstand the group. It was not set up in the cold war to spread democracy, but as a group of countries concerned about low growth, inflation and trade disputes. With the awareness that carbon emissions and climate change pose big dangers, it should be widened to include India, Brazil and the big non-democracy, China. Instead of picking on Russia, let’s turn the G8 into the club of leading polluters, and try to get some behavioural change all round.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service