The Day I Stopped Drinking Milk — Sudha Murthy
Preconceptions about a book can be remarkably durable. I had owned a copy of Sudha Murthy's The Day I Stopped Drinking Milk for some time before reading it, having filed it away — without much examination — as children's literature or, worse, a biographical account of a dietary inconvenience. It took a Netflix adaptation of her storytelling to dislodge that assumption, and what I found on the other side of it was considerably more interesting than I had expected.
What the Book Actually Is
The subtitle — Life Stories from Here and There — is modest to the point of being misleading. This is not a conventional memoir, nor is it the kind of inspirational autobiography that moves in a straight line from origin to achievement. It is, instead, a collection of vignettes: short, self-contained accounts of people Murthy encountered, places she visited, and moments — some mundane, some quietly extraordinary — that accumulated into her understanding of the world. None of the stories overstay their welcome. Each lands its observation and moves on.
What distinguishes the book from a curated Wikipedia entry of Murthy's life is precisely the absence of that kind of official architecture. She is not presenting credentials; she is recounting experience. The difference in register is felt on almost every page.
The Story of the Three Ponds
Among the book's more unusual entries is an account of three ponds that Murthy visited — each carrying a local history that exists, as far as the documentary record is concerned, only in the memory of the communities around them. Whether these histories are precisely accurate, or whether they have been shaped and embellished across generations of retelling, is a question Murthy does not fully resolve — and wisely so. What matters, she seems to suggest, is less the verifiability of the account than what its persistence reveals about the people who continue to tell it. If the events described are even partially true, they represent occurrences with few parallels in recorded history. If they are not, they represent something equally interesting: the human tendency to construct meaning around place.
The Gorilla
Towards the end of the book, Murthy recounts a study involving two gorillas — a mother and her infant — placed in a container that was gradually filled with water. The mother initially worked to keep the infant above the surface. As the water rose to her own nose, she instinctively reversed course and used the infant to elevate herself.
Murthy draws from this a conclusion that is deliberately unsentimental: that when survival is genuinely at stake, the instinct for self-preservation tends to override even the deepest bonds of care. She does not moralize about this. She presents it as an observation about the nature of living things — human and otherwise — and leaves the reader to sit with its implications.
It is the kind of passage that benefits from being read quietly. The lesson is not comfortable, but it is honest, and honesty of that particular kind is what separates the best personal essays from the merely pleasant ones.
A Note on Expectations
The Day I Stopped Drinking Milk is the sort of book that rewards readers who arrive without fixed assumptions about what it is. It is neither a children's book nor a conventional biography nor a self-help manual, though it carries traces of all three. What it is, more than anything, is a record of an attentive person moving through the world — noticing things, asking questions, and occasionally arriving at answers that are harder to forget than they first appear.