Day 45 - The Donkey

*From a journal entry a few days ago ---

Today, as I was walking alongside a busy road in East Delhi, during the height of the sun's fury, a temperature well over one-hundred degrees, watching my surroundings closely as drops of sweat, growing ever more, hit the baked dirt below, I passed a donkey, forlorn and heartbreaking to see. He stood there against the brunt of the heat motionless and seemingly indifferent to anything and everything around him. And as much as I wanted to avert my eyes from him, I couldn't. 

The first thing I noticed about this sad creature was that his ears were completely missing. And I thought, either he was born this way or some cruel person must have had heartlessly cut them off and then abandoned him to his humiliation, for there seemed to be no indication of an owner around. Yet the more I took this donkey into account and his sad condition, the more I began to think the latter was a more plausible explanation, that in fact his ears had been cut off: because not only did he appear to be extremely malnourished and sickly, with most of his fur gone, exposing his decaying, leathery skin, but also his back and sides were striped with deep scars, due, most likely, to severe beatings. 

However, it wasn't really his physical condition that fully convinced me someone had cut off his ears. Instead, it was his lifeless expression and demeanor that told me this, an expression only acquired, I think, from years of heavy torture. His eyes cut me deep, eyes that had long ago stopped looking for a kind hand. He carried the face of a spirit completely crushed, as if he had been spurned and tortured into a lidless shame, for not once did I see him blink, even in the heat and with all the flies. His eyes were glued into a vacant and infinitely empty stare. And truthfully, I wouldn't be surprised if his eyelids too, along with his ears, had been cut off, forced to bear, in full, the humiliation of his condition: unwanted, cursed, a burden to society. 

His stillness invades me even now, an unnatural kind of stillness that presupposed that if he were even to shake the flies off his back some stick or whip might unflinchingly slash him again, or even worse, he might lose some other part of his body. And the idea of lying down and resting probably meant death, which if you were in that kind of condition you would most likely desire, for death and freedom would be synonymous.  But perhaps the idea of death was also beat out of him. Or I wonder to what extent animals carry the concept of death, that is, if he even knew he could die.

I walked passed this donkey full of sorrow and confusion. He was beyond any help to my estimation. Even if I were to offer him a bowl of water or a kind pat on the back, he would probably refuse and just stare at me as if I wasn't there. Or maybe rather he would interpret my kindness as more maliciousness, and in so doing be provoked into hysterics, kicking and biting and feverishly baying. 

It saddened me more than anything else to know he would die like this; he would die alone, without knowing the kindness some humans can have for animals, beaten into a submission that wouldn't allow him to accept kindness from someone else, beaten into a submission that wouldn't even allow him the dignity to use his animal instincts to fight back against cruelty. He had been degraded to less than animal. This was his place, his destiny of abject poverty, and there was nothing he could do to climb out of the filth; he had accepted and embraced his fate. He was an object of humiliation and, more than anything, he was ugly, and society hates the ugly; he was the green slime in the sewer water next to him. He was even unworthy of being killed. 

And sitting here, thinking now of this poor, pathetic donkey, I can only imagine him still standing there, from day to day and night to night. He will eventually die standing there. His flesh will rot and slip off his bones and fall to the ground. But his bones, stricken from the scorn of society, will, for awhile, remain the way he was before when he was alive, standing and intact, unwilling to budge, frozen in place by a curse long ago.