This story took place in the first year of my sister’s course. During the first semester exams, the area witnessed heavy rain for about 4 to 5 days. Due to the rains, the grounds of the campus and the area around the hostel were completely flooded. With cows on the campus, their primary source of nutrition had vanished.

One of my sister’s friends forgot to lock the room door on the day of the chemistry exam. When he returned, he looked around the room to check for his belongings. Bed, clothes, books, cow, cupboard. A cow!

Truth to be told, there really was a cow in a corner of his room eating away at his books. The first book to be nibbled page by page was PW Atkins Physical Chemistry, an essential chemistry textbook. It seemed like the cow knew how to eat a book as it was eating it page by page. It had started with the cover and was on page 176 by the time my sister’s friend reached. It was of course imperative to get the bovine out of the room.

Looking at the commotion, a small crowd had also gathered and the cow refused to leave despite multiple attempts. Poking with a broom didn’t help either. What was worse than it had switched over to eating Richard Feynman’s Lectures on Physics and these three books were collectively worth INR 2500. My friend clearly didn’t want to bear that sort of damage. Finally, someone grabbed the cow’s tail which somehow got it to leave and out of the hostel.

The cow definitely found these two subjects easier to digest than students. It was a wild day. They even found white cow dung a few days later.