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Aravind Adiga, “The White Tiger”
Load of Death

A rattling noise of wooden wheels. I saw a buffalo coming down the road, pulling a large cart behind it. There was no human sitting on this cart with a whip; the buffalo just knew on its own where to go. And it was coming down the road. I stood to the side, and as it passed me, I saw that this cart was full of the faces of dead buffaloes; faces, I say—but I should say skulls, stripped even of the skin, except for the little black bit of skin at the tip of the nose from which the nostril hairs still stuck out, like last defiant bits of the personality of the dead buffalo. The rest of the faces were gone. Even the eyes had been gouged out.

And the living buffalo walked on, without a master, drawing its load of death to the place where it knew it had to go.
death, road
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