A horse and two goats

"A Horse and Two Goats" is the story of a comical and fateful meeting between two men, neither of who speak each other's language. Muni and his wife live in poverty in a remote village in India called Kritam. In his prosperous days, before pestilence took most of his cattle, Muni had 40 sheep and goats. Now, in his old age, Muni has just two goats. His usual daily routine is to take the goats to graze two miles from his home, alongside the highway, at the foot of a life-sized clay statue of a horse. Muni never thinks about the statue. It has been there since before he was born and is just part of the landscape, as far as he is concerned. On this particular morning, his wife would boil some drumstick leaves, with a bit of salt, in a mud pot over their domestic fire. Their store of food is empty; however, so his wife sends him to the shop to get the items she needs to make the sauce. Muni can sometimes charm the shopkeeper into giving him a few items on credit. This time, however, Muni's charm fails him, and all he gains for his trouble is public humiliation. The shopkeeper pulls out a ledger and reads the list of all the unpaid items already charged to Muni's account. To pay off his debt to the shop, Muni would have to come up with five rupees and a quarter. When Muni returns home empty-handed, his frightened wife sends him out with the goats, warning him not to come home before dark. Muni is sitting on the pedestal of the statue, letting his goats graze, and watching the highway, when a van runs out of gas right in front of him.
Muni, an old man who lives in Kritam, a small village in India, is waiting around a statue of a horse for his sign to go home with his two goats when a car stops in front of him. A man gets out of it and tries to talk to Muni in Englisch, but Muni doesn’t speak Englisch and can’t understand him. He tries his best to understand what the American – as he says – wants to tell him and answers in Tamil. The American thinks that Muni is the