Ramu was thirty-four years old, though the sun of Tamil Nadu which forgives no one who works beneath it bare-backed, had written fifty-four across his face. His skin was the colour and texture of a well-used cooking vessel, dark, hammered, permanent. His hands, when they were empty, did not know what to do with themselves. They were made for two things only: the plough and the rope.
The rope, in particular, belonged to two bulls named Prithvi and Surya : Earth and Sun.
He had pulled them out of their mothers himself, on consecutive monsoons three years apart, and had raised them on jaggery water and boiled grain and the kind of attention a man usually reserves for a firstborn son. Prithvi was the elder, black as a temple stone at midnight, low and broad and built like a boulder that had decided, against the laws of physics, to move fast. Surya was younger, reddish-brown, lighter on his feet, with a temper that flared like his namesake and horns sharpened twice a year on the village grinding stone until they could part a coconut at a touch. They leaned into the rope together, always at the same instant. Ramu never had to correct one without the other.
In the district, bullock cart racing was older than memory, older than the temple at the centre of the village, which was itself older than anyone’s grandfather. Twice a year, on the hard mud track that ran along the dry bed of the Vellaru river, men stood behind two-wheeled carts no heavier than a cot and screamed their bulls into a fury, and the bulls ran as if the earth had personally insulted them and needed to be outrun. There was prize money. There was, more importantly, izzat, something a man could spend without ever seeing it in his hands.
Ramu had a gift, the kind that cannot be taught in an agricultural college: he knew, by some marriage of instinct and love, exactly how much voice and rope and silence a bull needed in the final hundred metres. Prithvi and Surya, in turn, ran for him the way men are supposed to run for their gods and rarely do without calculation, completely.
They won. Then they won again. By the third year they were no longer Ramu’s bulls; they were the village’s bulls, and men who had never noticed Ramu before began to remember his name. Photographs of Surya’s flared nostrils mid-race appeared in the district paper. A minister’s nephew offered eleven lakh rupees for the pair and was sent away with the particular courtesy reserved for fools.
It happened at the Panguni race, the big one. Panguni fell at the turn of the Tamil year, when the temple car came out and the gods themselves were said to walk the streets for ten days, and the race was timed to close the festival as a way of sending them off with something worth watching. It was the one with eleven carts on the track at once and a crowd four-deep on both banks of the dry river. A rope on a neighbouring cart snapped at full gallop and the sound of it carried over the noise of the crowd, a single crack like a dry branch. The cart lurched sideways, its wheel scraping a long white groove into the mud. Dust rose where there should have been none, thick and sudden, and through it a bull turned across the track instead of along it, its head low and wrong. Men were running now, not watching. Somewhere in the dust a body went down under hooves and did not rise with the others.
Two men did not get up. Three bulls did not get up. Surya — magnificent, furious Surya — took a horn through the flank from a stranger’s terrified animal and was carried home on a cart he should have been pulling. Ramu washed the wound himself that night, working by lamplight, and the blood dried black against the hide before he could clean it away. Surya did not struggle, did not so much as flinch at the cloth. That frightened Ramu more than the blood had.
He lived. He would never run again.
Prithvi was unhurt in body. But when Ramu came to him that evening and called his name, once and then again, the bull did not lift his head. In all the years before, Ramu had never needed to call twice.
The cremation grounds by the river burned for two evenings, and the smoke hung low instead of rising, as though it did not yet want to leave the village to whatever was coming next.
A photograph of Surya’s wound travelled further than the two men who had died.. By the time it reached a city newspaper, and the newspaper reached an animal-welfare association, and the association reached a lawyer, the races had already begun to feel, even to the men who had run in them, like something that had happened to somebody else. A public interest petition reached the High Court within the month. The Court weighed tradition against a gored flank that could not testify on its own behalf, and ruled, as courts increasingly do, on the side of caution. Bullock cart racing was suspended pending further study. Further study, everyone understood, was a polite word for forever.
Ramu was not prosecuted. There was no law against love, even love that had by accident, by a stranger’s rope drawn blood. But the track was ploughed back into riverbed, the prize money evaporated along with the season, and the minister’s nephew did not call again.
Three years later, a man from a home for retired temple elephants, there is such a thing, and such men, came through the district looking for two ageing draught bulls willing to spend their remaining years pulling nothing heavier than a tourist’s curiosity, three slow circuits of a heritage village twice a day, for a wage paid in shade, fodder, and rest. He had heard of a black bull and a red-brown one, once famous, now idle.
Ramu took the offer not for the money, which was modest, but because he saw something in Prithvi’s face when the stranger’s cart pulled up, the head coming up, ears forward, a thing he had almost forgotten the shape of. Not the old fire. That had gone into the river smoke with the rest of it. But warmth. It was enough.
He visits them most evenings still. Surya limps a little but tosses his scarred head at the children who come to touch his horns, blunted now and harmless, polished smooth by small palms. Prithvi stands at the gate when he hears Ramu’s bicycle bell from the road, the way he used to stand at the starting line not for a race anymore, but simply to know that the man is coming. Ramu’s hands, when he reaches him, do what they have always done, settle on the warm black neck, find the place behind the ear except that now there is nothing at the other end of it to win.
It is, he thinks sometimes, a smaller thing to be. He has not yet decided if it is a worse one.