Buffaloes...

One of the fallacies I was subjected to when I was growing up was a myth about the recalcitrant nature of buffaloes. My dear father reinforced this myth when he said that you could never get buffaloes to do anything they did not want to do. They were not meek creatures that did anybody's bidding. They were also supposed to have unpredictable flashes of temper.

Perhaps it was this that made me come to regard buffaloes with a mixture of fear and suspicion. What may have added to the fear was the mythological association of a buffalo being the vehicle of the Hindu god of Death, Yama, or the buffalo-demon Mahishasura whom Devi kills with such fanfare. In any case, for years, buffaloes meant something not-so-good for me, and if they appeared in my dreams, I was generally scared and worried by the image when I woke up.

Then, after I left Mumbai for Madras, as it was then known, when I got married the first time, I saw dark buffalo calves with pale down on them. I heard the plaintive 'yeahhh' sound of the buffalo, so different from the assertive mooing of the cows. Some soft feelings for these creatures were inevitable. But I still gave a wide berth to these broad-beamed quadripeds on the road, if a herd of them was passing me by. When I learnt to drive, I thought of them as 'brake-inspectors' as someone had once called them in my presence. They were still distant, alien, not as special as the cats, dogs, kittens, birds, that dotted my life with regularity all the years my children were growing up.

And now I'm sitting in a riverside area of Faizabad called Kakarahi Bazaar or Cucumber Market, waiting for a meeting of the Majha Janhit Raksha Samiti, a loose organization I helped to form and name in mid-January.  'Majha' means a riverbank area in Hindi, here referring to the banks of the river Saryu, where farmers have traditionally grown vegetables and grains, and where guavas are grown in acres of orchards. The fruit here is extremely succulent, surpassing in its sweet graininess the best I have eaten before I came here.

When I learnt that this green farmland, home to thousands of farmers and their families, and the cows and buffaloes they own in large numbers, was threatened with extinction by a new 'development' scheme called the Saryu Township Yojana, I was extremely agitated, and have banded with some residents and local people's representatives to challenge the imposition of this scheme on the region. We meet on Sundays in different localities, and I have plenty of time to observe buffaloes and other beasts, as I wait for the famers and milkmen and their families to come to the meeting venues.

In Kakarahi Bazar, or Cucumber Market,  buffaloes pass us in groups of roughly one group every four minutes. They take a while to pass completely, walking slowly and sedately with rhythmic rocking pelvic motions. They look straight ahead mostly, and I notice immediately how calm they are in comparison to the nervy behaviour of cows (more on that in another post), and how disciplined they seem, walking all together. Occasionally, one more curious than the rest takes a look in our direction. But even this is a serious and disciplined thing. She stops, turns her head, and gazes at us with full concentration, her mouth lifted up, her liquid black eyes long-lashed and impossibly large in her dark grey face. As I return the gaze, I feel a real strong kindness for buffaloes.

One recovers from nearly every youthful misapprehension is what I'm thinking, if one lives long enough. The next group of buffaloes finds me musing and philosophical...

And then there is the thundering of hooves. A group of buffaloes rushes into sight, tails swishing in alarm, as they raise dust, frightened by the antics of one of them, a crazed looking creature with light grey eyes. They gallop past, and are nearly out of sight on the road before they resume their previous slower pace. My thoughts have scattered too, in this Brechtian moment that rekindled some of the yore of lore about Yama's vehicle. Like pretty much else in life, you can never know all about buffaloes.