Beast of Burden

(From Patrick)

Today, after dropping the kids off at school, Byrappou and I were driving to MG Road to look into jungle tours. Traffic in front of us slowed and parted around a man sitting on hundreds of bundled lengths of PVC pipe on top of a two wheeled carriage attached to a horse so small it looked like a donkey. It looked like a very heavy load. When traffic stopped, we were right next to it. The horse was surrounded by rickshaws and cars belching noxious fumes. The horse’s face was right above a delivery van’s exhaust pipe. The load’s weight shifted backwards and pulled the horse’s body up a few inches. The shifting load was not enough to take its hooves off the ground, but enough to squeeze its chest tightly, so that it couldn’t breathe very well. The man stepped out on the outside rails of the carriage, attempting to shift the weight forward, so that the load was on the horse’s back instead. It didn’t really work, though. The load was backward balance and the horse was left to take short rapid breaths of noxious tailpipe emissions, until traffic began again, and it could shift the weight again onto its back with forward momentum.