A Bonus of £1.3 million … (part 2)
The tribulations and travails of Kobylass the Milkman
I used to wonder how such a frail man could carry a 20-litre milk can and traipse the streets of Port-Louis with it on his head. The bidon or can was made of tin, recycled from oil cans used to transport oil and petrol across the seas. There were some clever ferblantiers, tinsmiths, who could do miracles with them. They fashioned the tin sheets into the milk cans, with a cylindrical body fitted with a conical shoulder and a smaller cylindrical head through which the milk is poured in. The bidon is fitted with a tap at the bottom, which the milkman could operate with one hand holding the container on his head whilst opening and closing the tap with the other.
We imagined that he lived in Vallée des Prêtres, about two kilometres away, where presumably he had two or three cows. He would appear in our street every morning, calling out, “Di lait! Di lait!”, and someone, usually a big sister would open the door with a pan, and he would dextrously open his tap with the measuring quart in the same hand, fill it, close the tap, convey the contents into our pan, and repeat the action one more time. We used to buy one “bottle” every day. That was three-quarters of a litre. At fifty cents a litre, this cost the family 35 cents. One satisfaction Kobylass must have had was that after every stop his load was continually decreasing, albeit by a small amount.
He was a dark thin man, with perhaps the can on his head giving him the appearance of being tall and thin. He was courteous but unsmiling; no doubt bent double by the massive weight he had little inclination to work his face muscles.
Sadly, living with a twenty kilogram appendage on your head was not Kobylass’ only ordeal. There was the constant threat of a stop by a health inspector. Obviously the latter would be doing his job of protecting the public against what was called adulterated milk, but it was not unknown for some of them to arbitrarily slap a contravention on some poor hawker, and then demanding a bribe to rescind it. But it was true that some milkmen did interfere with their product, but it was not necessarily out of wanton profiteering. When the milk turned, as was not uncommon, it was the custom to get a refund, and one imagines the poor milk vendor, struggling to make ends meet, adding a few litres of water which would then fetch 50 cents a litre when placed inside the can, to make good some of his loss.
The enemy of the milkman was a piece of scientific wizardry which could reveal in a matter of seconds if the milk was adulterated. It was the hydrometer, a calibrated glass tube with a blob of mercury to make it float upright in a liquid. In pure water (of density 1), it would reach a certain point, but in pure milk, just slightly denser, it would sink by a couple of millimetres less. That was Archimedes’ Principle, which we had learnt at school. So the cheating vendor would be identified.
Milkmen must have been cognisant of Newton’s third: To every action there is a reaction, equal and opposite. We add water and your hydrothingy sinks a bit more, they argued, so counter this by adding a little sugar. And they get away with it. But the health inspector know the Le Chatelier Principle: If to a system in equilibrium a constraint is applied to disturb that equilibrium, forces are developed within the system to nullify its effect and restore the aforesaid equilibrium. This leads the health inspector to take a sample and end it to Le Reduit for analysis in the government laboratory. So the poor milkman always ended up by paying for his sins_ le pot cassé.
There was, however, one winner in this epic tussle. Us children. The local proverb, Bonheur chat, malheur li Chien, or the dog’s misfortune is the cat’s good luck, says it clearly. When the milk turned, although we got our money back, oblivious of Kobylass’ children going hungry, sugar and ilaiti (cardamon) were added to it, and boiled dry, you ended up with delicious, mouth-watering fenous.
