he scrambled to get back to his feet, something struck him on the skull and he collapsed
unconscious in the path.
When he woke up by some miracle he was still alive. However, the blow to his head was a
severe one. His money was gone, but Raja was no longer worried about his life-long ambition.
He looked up and blinked in the early morning sun. He saw the outline of his village, which he
could barely recognize. He picked himself up, still dizzy from the blow to his head, blood
crusted on his hair, pebbles embedded in his face from where he fell. He did not know where he
was supposed to go, or even remember what had happened to him. He saw the blue ribbon and
bell lying on the dirt next to him. He picked it up and stared at it, confused. Something about a
buffalo, he thought, struggling to shape a thought. As he stumbled down the dusty street, a
villager leading his goats to the field came upon him.
“Raja!” one boy cried, recognizing the long-missing son of his neighbor. But the surprise of
seeing the boy returned was replaced with horror when he saw the terrible condition he was in.
Raja looked at him blankly. Frightened, the neighbor led him home to his family.
His family tended to the wounded boy as best they could, but Raja was never the same again.
They said he would not be able to speak or work properly again. All that remained of his
memories and his mind was an obsession with buffaloes. They never learned that he had returned
with money to buy the buffalo—they never learned of Raja’s life in the city. They never learned
about his love for a city girl named Rani. All they knew was that Raja had returned home and
now was permanently helpless.
His father begged the landlord for help, and they gave him a job as a shepherd in the fields. Raja
spent his days looking after the landlord’s herd. There was one buffalo with big brown eyes he
liked the most, and he tied the blue bow around her neck. He was devoted to her and she ran
everywhere after him, tinkling her cow bell. Sometimes he would play a halting, simple melody
for her. He couldn’t capture the lively, soulful melodies that his flute playing used to have, but
there was still a haunting sadness in the whispering, raspy tunes he played, as if somewhere deep
in his injured brain, there was a lingering of memories of a love and a dream he couldn’t quite
hold onto anymore.
When the children would come to see the buffalo, they would ask him, “Raja what is the name of
your buffalo?”
He would stop for a moment and had to force the words out of his mouth, like they were stuck
there and didn’t want to come out. “Ra…, Ran… Rani.”
No longer did he have to choose between Rani and his buffalo; now he had both.
The End
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