Buffaloes

We had passed the bridge spanning a river of sand at dawn, when our noisy train spoke to its emptiness.Once out of it, the train was bending like a centipede and we took a long backward glance to see the bridge now smarting under noise injury on its deaf, deaf ears.

The buffaloes on its sand-bed looked up, unmindful of the bridge, of the noisy train that passed, and of us in the train that saw them as mere globs on the sand.Their black bodies longed for green puddles of water.Their eyes seemed vacant, as their tails swished flies.We saw they had not even once met us in our eyes.