Usha Nellore
2008-04-23 07:00:00.0
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BALTIMORE -

Harford County officials finally picked up their swords to defend themselves against a stream of invective aimed at their home turf. The tipping point was an e-mail sent by the American Federation of Government Employees to defense employees in Monmouth, N.J., claiming Maryland is notorious for high taxes, the Ku Klux Klan and contaminated milk.

Scheduled to relocate to Aberdeen Proving Ground due to the federal Base Realignment and Closure process, these defense employees allegedly have been fed a steady diet of blogs and Web sites insulting Harford County. John Poitras, president of the AFGE, denied any connection to the e-mail, and James Richardson, Harford County’s economic development director, without meaning to give credence to the e-mail, called the claims about tainted milk “hogwash.”

 I know Maryland is guilty of many deep and dark happenings, but tainted milk is not one of this state’s imperfections. Who taints this milk, what toxin makes it noxious and where exactly in Maryland is this devious plot executed? As a person who has quaffed Maryland milk for at least 25 years, I am curious about the origins of this accusation and whether it could be true.

 Meanwhile, talk about tainted milk makes me nostalgic for India. In the 1950s in Madras, where I grew up, tainted milk was the norm, not the exception. What is now obsolete was then an urban ritual: A milkman bringing his cows, cowbells chiming around their necks, early in the morning to be milked right in front of your house. As a child, the most difficult job assigned to me was to watch our family’s hired milkman like a hawk while he pulled on the teats of his cows and made the white rush of milk sing into his cylindrical containers. The milkmen of Madras were adroit cheaters. My grandmother taught me they had a hundred tricks up their sleeves to deceive their middle-class customers into thinking they were delivering pure milk. So that I could catch our milkman adding water to milk, my family trained me.

I confronted my daunting task with aplomb even when the city was bathed in dew and the morning light was dim. Our milkman always brought three or four canisters with him each slightly different from the others in volume. I would size them up with my eyes and pick the driest, the largest and the cleanest as our family’s container each morning. My grandmother would often leave to complete her household chores after warning me that a milkman is a powerful illusionist, and that if my eyes should turn away from him just for a minute, the dry canister I had picked would be supplanted by another, half filled with contaminated water. I could never believe this was possible because as the milkman squatted on his haunches before the cow, I would squat with him watching his every move.  

Looking back, I think I was a naive little fool. I couldn’t possibly have kept my eyes on the milkman or his canisters because even today, vivid in my mind, I see the trembling udder of the cow and remember the terrible envy I felt for the milkman’s deft ability to pull her teats down in quick succession, the streams of milk never missing his target. My grandmother knew that my fascination for the milking process was the enemy of her determination to keep the milkman toeing the line. She would warn him darkly about God knowing what he was up to as he hummed his favorite Tamil film songs under his breath and tell me his humming was a ploy to distract me from the milk adulteration on his mind.

Could it be possible that this milkman somehow got to Maryland? Perhaps he came on a ship as a stowaway, dreaming of fatter cows than those available in India, and in some Maryland pasture perhaps he sits, contaminating our milk while we go about our duties unsuspecting. Before the “Monmouthians” put a drop of Maryland milk in their mouths, we better inform them of this probability rather than haughtily dismissing it as mere hogwash!

Usha Nellore is a writer living in Bel Air. She can be reached at unellu@gmail.com.