Explain in 1000 words
The rural life as described in the story 'A Horse and Two Goats' by RK Narayan
Answers
R. K. Narayan’s story ‘A Horse and Two Goats’ is set in a fictional south Indian village named Kritam. Kritam was a tiny village with less than thirty houses. The country people were mostly illiterate and poor. They relied on cultivating their lands or grazing domestic animals like goats and ships to earn a bare living at the day’s end. But only one family was prosperous. It was the village headman who had apparently duped those poor people by lending money and charging high interest and made a lot of money and built a brick house — the only one to be seen in the village.
The village consisted of thirty houses, only one of them built with brick and cement.
Muni, the protagonist of the story was such a poor man that he even had to stay unfed on some days. Once upon a time, he had a flock of forty sheep and goats but those days were gone now. He now grazed his two goats in the outskirts of the village near the highway. His wife sometimes worked in the Big House in the village. She ground corn or swept or scrubbed somewhere to buy foodstuffs and get a meal for her husband. Sometimes, Muni would shake down drumsticks from the tree in front of his hut and express his desire for a change of taste.
Oh, I am tired of eating those leaves. I have a craving to chew the drumsticks out of sauce, I tell you.
But his desire remained unfulfilled as there were no other food stuffs available to make a meal. The shop owner owed five rupees and a quarter to Muni and rejected to offer more on credit. Mani didn’t even see a hundred rupee note in his life. He had only earned in coppers and nickels.
He knew the five and ten by their colours although always in other people’s hands, while his own earnings at any time was in coppers and nickels.
But it was not only Muni. Hunger and poverty was rather common in the village areas. Things were worsening with time, as we see how Muni had become so poor from a prosperous life once. Famines were also prevalent in those days.
He always calculated his age from the time of the great famine…but who could calculate such things accurately nowadays with so many famines occurring?