"Don't you worship a cow?"
I got stuck in my throat…; I wanted to say many things in reply but I couldn't.
"No, not like that… in my country people do not eat beef… because cows give us milk, help us till the rice fields and so forth, they are very useful…"

Amitav Ghosh's memory of a conversation in a small, isolated village in Egypt, from his book In an Antique Land, may sound funny, but it also hits home