Lord Jagannatha Performs a Miracle for Boney Cow

Here is one of our favorite bulls we were trying our best to save for many months. Because of his extreme skinny condition when he first arrived we called him “Boney Cow” when talking amongst ourselves, and the name stuck. It was not the best name, but it was the easiest way to understand who we were talking about visually. If I asked someone “Have you seen boney cow,” everyone knew who I was talking about even if they didn’t pay attention to all the cows and bulls who come through each day.

Boney Cow on the day he first visited.

This is a picture of him when he first visited us 4 months ago, and a picture from today. He is still skinny, but has improved a lot from his initial arrival when he was nothing but bones.

Immediately upon meeting each other, Sri Rama (the tiny white baby calf who arrived mysteriously at midnight on Rama Navami) took Boney Cow as his best friend and woudn’t leave his side even for a moment.

Sri Rama on the day he first arrived.

Above is a picture of Sri Rama just after he showed up on Rama Navami, and almost immediately Boney Cow can be seen in the next photo eating by his side. They became friends instantly.

Silhouettes of Sri Rama and Boney Cow on the first day.

24 hours a day they would be together, even when they went out to roam the streets they would go together and return together. Every day at 4pm they would come back to our temple together side by side and go straight to their little room to sleep. If Sri Rama couldn’t see Boney Cow for even a few minutes he would start calling out loudly like a calf calling for his mother, and wouldn’t stop till he was reunited with Boney Cow.

For several weeks when Sri Rama first arrived here he would not let me touch him, but when he saw that Boney Cow liked me and let me scratch him he agreed to let me scratch him also, since he trusted Boney Cow’s judgement.

Boney Cow’s situation was complicated by the fact that he was owned by someone from another religion, and thus his fate was not going to be good (he would end up being sacrificed for the Eid festival).

As soon as he started coming here he never wanted to go home, and instead would sleep with all the other bulls and cows who visit the ashram daily. Every 5 or 6 days his owner would come searching for him and pull him back home, complaining that he hadn’t come home in many days. They would then tie him up for a few days, before again releasing him into the streets. As soon as he was freed he would run straight back here and once again wouldn’t go home for many days. This cycle was repeating again and again.

Sri Rama and Boney Cow eating jackfruit.

The first time he had been taken home by his owner, they tied him up for a week and didnt allow him to come outside. We all became sad as the days went by wondering what happened to him. When he was finally released he came straight here. I was so happy to see him again, as every day we were looking for him. I immediately ran up to him and started holding his head and scratching his neck.

After a minute I felt water falling down on my arm, and assumed he must be drooling on me (as cows tend to do), but I ignored it and kept scratching him. Then I lifted up his head and saw there was water pouring from his eyes, like a water tap had been left loose dripping constantly. He was crying out of happingess to come back here after being locked up for a week.

After a minute the crying stopped and he was back to normal. When he had arrived his eyes were completely dry, and after 1 minute of crying again his eyes dried and remained normal the rest of the day. We told him we would pray to Lord Jagannatha to give him shelter in his goshala somehow so he wouldn’t have to go back again.

The actual difficulty in purchasing any of these cows and bulls is not in the cost of the animal which is very insignificant. The difficulty is in finding the owners and convincing them to sell them to us, especially those who belong to other religions and who don’t want to “help a temple”.

After identifying who his owner was, we sent one of our friends from their own community to talk several times about purchasing him so that he could live the rest of his life happily here. Despite trying for several months they repeatedly refused to sell him to us. Finally our friend even offered them twice his value if they would agree to sell him but they were adamant they would not sell to us for any price.

We had lost hope, and were thinking how will Sri Rama take it when his best friend was no longer present with him. If they were separated for even 1 minute he would start to call out continuously looking for him. Sri Rama already had no mother or family, and now he was about to lose his only friend. I began thinking we needed to get Sri Rama to become friends with someone else so it wouldn’t be so hard on him when he lost his best friend.

Ten days before Eid the owner again came to take Boney Cow away, and this time we understood it was the end. This is the festival when people from their community sacrifice a cow or goat, and though its officially illegal to kill cows here it remains prevelant behind closed doors, especially during this particular religious festival. Boney Cow had lived with us every single day for four months and now there was nothing we could do to protect him, and baby Sri Rama was once again going to be left all alone with no friend to watch over him. The owner said he was taking him to give a “vitamin injection”, but we understood it was for another purpose and we would not be seeing him again.

Three days passed, and the annual installation day festival (varshikotsava) of our Jagannatha temple arrived, which is one of the biggest festivals of the year for our temple. Many devotees had arrived and had begun performing kirtan over the loudspeakers. Around noon, just as the kirtan started, I went outside to clean up the cow sheds, when I saw a mother in a burkha had come along with her son. The son came up to me and started saying something, but with the noise of the kirtan over the loudspeakers I couldn’t make out clearly what he was saying.

I assumed he was a cow owner looking for his lost cow, as many cows come to our temple every day for eating. I thought maybe he couldn’t find his cow and was coming to blame us, so I called Butu, my mason friend from their same community, to talk with them. When Butu arrived, to my surprise, the boy’s mother said, “We have come to sell you our cow.”

Pictures from the Varshikotsava festival.

This came as a shock and was completely unexpected. We were standing right in the middle of the annual temple festival, with the kirtan having just started, flows of devotees arriving, and this mother in a Burkha has come to tell us that she wants to sell us her cow, and by the grace of God she is the owner of Boney Cow. We had completely lost hope in any chance of getting him back when their family had repeatedly refused to sell him to us weeks before, even for double his commercial value, but now on their own they had unexpectedly shown up at Lord Jagannatha’s varshikotsava festival to sell Boney Cow to Lord Jagannatha without us having even called them.

I didn’t have any money on hand to pay for him, so I immediately ran to an ATM to withdraw some money. I told Butu to go to their house, confirm with the neighbhors that there will not be any dispute in the future, and then bring Boney Cow back to the temple. After half an hour he returned to the temple along with Boney Cow, and the deal was finished. Boney Cow had been saved by a miracle of Lord Jagannatha. The same people who had refused to sell him for three months had a sudden spontaneous change of heart at the last moment and brought him to the temple on the day of the Lord’s varshikotsava festival.

We quickly put him in the goshala and reunited him with his best friend Sri Rama, who had been sad from several days of separation.

Afterwards my friend told me, “Because I am from the same community, while at their house they told me the truth, that they had planned to sell him this week for the Eid sacrifice, and thats why they took him three days ago.” Boney Cow was literally just a few days away from death, but Lord Jagannatha intervened and performed a miracle to protect His devotee.