At the doorway to my house, you’ll see the most important member of my family.

The water buffalo.

She was the fattest thing in our family; this was true in every house in the village. All day long, the women fed her and fed her fresh grass; feeding her was the main thing in their lives. All their hopes were concentrated in her fatness, sir. If she gave enough milk, the women could sell some of it, and there might be a little more money at the end of the day. She was a fat, glossy-skinned creature, with a vein the size of a boy’s penis sticking out over her hairy snout, and long thick pearly spittle suspended from the edge of her mouth; she sat all day in her own stupendous crap. She was the dictator of our house!

These are the three main diseases of this country, sir: typhoid, cholera, and election fever. This last one is the worst; it makes people talk and talk about things that they have no say in.

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.

The moment you recognize what is beautiful in this world, you stop being a slave. If you taught every poor boy how to paint, that would be the end of the rich in India.