The Case of the Missing Cow

It was a dark rainy night.

Amidst claps of thunder, Ibu Laksmi, the kids, and I piled out of the car and ran into the house, giggling over the amount of ice cream we planned to consume that night. But our laughter quickly turned into hushed whispers as we found Pak Muharam in serious conversation with two Sundanese men we had never seen before. Their faces were rough, dark, and wrinkled, as if hardened by a life spent working outdoors under the hot Indonesian sun. There was something about their expressions and the way they sat uneasily in their chairs that instantly sobered us.

Ibu Laksmi tarried to greet them as the kids and I hid in the kitchen unpacking the grocery bags in silence. She joined us minutes later and I could only hold back a moment before asking, "What's going on? Who are those men?" She held my gaze and replied in a low voice:

"Mereka jaga sapi kita. Sapi kita hilang." They take care of our cow. Our cow is lost."

With the four of us sitting symmetrically around the kitchen table, the seconds that followed must have resembled an amateur artist's character piece on the range of human expression.

Bila, the elder child, immediately went into a state of panicked shock, asking her mother a flurry of worried questions. "What happened? How will I afford to go to school next year?" Ibu Laksmi's normally smiling face remained grave, the bearer of bad news. Fauzan, the younger child, blissfully chose to ignore the bovine catastrophe and focused on more imminent disasters at hand, ones that still had the potential to be averted by immediate action. "Ibu, when can we eat the ice cream? It's melting!" And I looked on in complete bewilderment, trying to wrap my mind around the idea that this twenty-first century family, who owned several entrepreneurial businesses and lived in a thriving metropolis, owned a cow, and that cow was now missing. Why? How come I'd never heard of this before?

As the facts emerged, it turns out that the family had invested money in buying a calf for $400, which, when it grew up, would be worth twice what they had put into it. This return would be used to pay for Bila's graduation from elementary school and her entry fee into middle school. Bila was now ready to graduate and the cow had grown up. However, it was nowhere to be found.

Now, I don't know about you, but at the time, this seemed utterly preposterous to me. Actually, it still seem utterly preposterous. How could a fully-grown cow just disappear? Did it run away or was it stolen? And anyway, what kind of respectable city person saves their money in a cow?! Well, besides maybe a plastic one with a slot in the top for dropping coins. Besides, cows get sick and die, and you have to feed them and clean up after them. It just didn't seem like the safest or most reasonable kind of investment. But hey, I'm an American and I study music. What do I know?

So that's the story. If anyone finds a cow wandering through the streets of Indonesia, send a line my way. I know a little girl who really wants to go to school next year.

Oh, and by the way, the ice cream was delicious.