I, again, stumbled upon the thing I was looking for almost by happenstance. The religious market was a small doorway in the midst of a bunch of shops. It went for a fairly long way once you got inside though. It was cool- lots of stalls with bright shiny swaths of cloth. A lot of them had a 10 by 10 ft floor, and in several of the stalls, whole families of women and children were camped out surveying piles and piles of cloth. It was all very cozy. There were small shrines for sale, and lots of religious icons. I wandered through trying to look like I didn’t want to buy anything, because I didn’t. The market did that thing that I was talking about earlier, where you go in one alley and pass through a bunch of organically grown shops that are part of larger blocks and lanes and then you come out through a fence into someone’s yard which is also a restaurant. I wandered back through and tried taking a few different turns to come out a different way. Around my last turn, I thought “The religious market has started to smell like a barn. A barn? Why the heck does a religious market smell like a barn?”

That was when I stumbled onto the Jain animal sanctuary. I was glad that I had decided to hit the religious market, because the only way to get into the sanctuary was through the market, as far as I can tell. The undependable guidebook told me that no pictures were allowed, so just in case the book finally happened to be right about something, I left my camera in my bag.

From one end of the serpentine religious market, I walked through a big tall turquoise archway and into a large courtyard. There was one large pen with 100+ cows, cages with chickens, geese waddling around, and several stalls with rabbits in them. I can’t imagine any of them were incredibly happy with their cramped conditions, but I suppose happiness is relative. Better to be mildly unhappy and in a cramped pen than really unhappy and on a plate. At any rate, everybody looked well treated and healthy.

It was feeding time for the cows. One guy was walking around giving each cow a mushy pill, I assume with vitamins and stuff in it. Some other guys were taking handfuls of grass and giving it to the cows. I wandered along the walkway beside the cows. There wasn’t a whole lot of room: with the cows’ heads reaching into the walkway for their food there was basically enough room for me to walk straight between their noses and the wall. I could feel them breathing on me. It was really intimidating to walk by all those pounds of animal. The cows were huge. I can see why a predator might think twice before heading in for the kill. I felt very squishable. I wanted to know how to say “I don’t eat you, don’t beat me up” in cow. While I was just sort of standing there trying to look like someone who doesn’t eat cows and, in fact, like someone whose very best friends are cows, a guy walked up and handed me some grass. Huh, ok. I took the grass and started feeding the cows. I tried feeding the cows individually with handfuls of grass, but they weren’t into that. So I took the grass and started spreading it out along the feeding shelf on the other side of the wall separating me from the cows. Once I figured out how to feed the cows, the guy kept handing me grass and I kept feeding them. When we ran out of grass, I stuck around hanging out with the cows for a while.

There was a line of cows in front of me eating, and there was one cow in the back not eating. I have this theory. I think the cow at the back must have been visiting from America, and was being polite, because she was waiting at the back of the line like an American; like I usually do. She didn’t want to muscle into the fray, so she was waiting her turn at the end of the queue. But after a few minutes she got shoved aside. An Indian cow came trotting over and butted her way around the polite cow and through the line of eating cows to get to the food. She was a great fat auntie cow and knew how to use her girth. Probably the polite cow was thinking aw crap. That’s how you do it here. Man, I’m hungry.

The other day I was waiting in line. I was the next one up. Literally right up at the counter. Some guy comes up and steps in front of me, reaches around where I am standing and shoves his money across the counter. And he didn’t have just one ticket to buy, he had this long transaction. I was really pissed, and I wanted to kick him in the shins. But I did nothing, because where I am from that doesn’t happen. I just don’t know what the proper response is, I can’t react immediately. It is so deeply ingrained in me that people don’t act like that.

And there was a bag check to go into this store. Mobbed. I was working my way to the front, and some woman kept hitting me in the head, waving her stupid purse around, yelling Sir! Sir! trying to get the clerk’s attention, for all the world like she had the right to get her bag checked first, before the 15 people who were there in front of her. I passive aggressively stepped in front of her every chance I got and prevented her from getting her bag checked before mine.

When you wait in line here, a lot of the time the next person in line stands beside you up at the counter, like they are with you or something, so no one slimes their way ahead of them.

Back at the Jain sanctuary I said bye to the cows, gave the polite cow a pitying, empathetic look, finished checking out the rest of the compound, and headed back out through the religious market. I put a few hundred rupees into the charity box on my way out.

I saw the grass guy as I was leaving. He was standing at the entrance to the market with big piles of grass. I think that people can buy handfuls of grass to give to the cows, and earn religious points for it somewhere. Like saying hail marys or something. I have seen people in the street with handfuls of grass and a cow on a rope doing the same thing. My grass guy smiled and waved, I waved back and headed off down the street.