Episode 26: The Prize

Bahadurgarh, Haryana · 2026

The main bout finished at seven. A boy from Rohtak, thick-necked, serious, pinned the local favorite in under two minutes, and the crowd made the sound a crowd makes when it isn’t happy but has to respect the result.

The prize ceremony was on the platform. Gopina stood at the back of the press area — two plastic chairs and a rope, the full measure of the Herald’s access — and watched Ahan walk up to the microphone.

He looked different out here. At the courtyard function he’d been in office clothes, measured. Here he wore a loose shirt with the sleeves pushed up and his hair needed cutting. He shook the Rohtak boy’s hand with both of his and leaned into the microphone.

“Two minutes. I watched the whole thing and I still don’t know what you did in the first ten seconds. Can you teach me that?”

The boy laughed. The crowd laughed. The announcer laughed and nearly knocked his bottle off the chair.

Ahan handed over the winner’s check — the Modi Tiles & Sanitaryware logo on the presentation board behind him, which Gopina noted because it was her job to note it — and stayed on stage talking to the wrestlers for longer than he needed to. Not performing. Just easy in the same way Khushi was easy, as if the stage were someone’s front room and everyone on it was someone he was glad to see.

Gopina wrote the quote in her notebook. She wrote the check amount. She underlined “Modi Tiles” because Mohit would want it in the paragraph.

· · ·

The lights went out at nine-forty-two.

First the mela’s string lights, then the stall bulbs, then the announcer’s platform. The DJ truck died mid-beat. For three seconds the whole mela ground went dark, and then five hundred phone screens lifted into the air at once.

The generator behind the main stage coughed twice and quit.

“THE GENERATOR,” the announcer said, into a dead microphone, to nobody. “THE GENERATOR HAS —”

Nobody heard the rest. The crowd moved in every direction at once. Not a stampede, more the confused drift of people who had been standing still for hours and suddenly had nowhere to look. Sugarcane stalls pulled their shutters down by feel. A child screamed, was found, stopped screaming. The bonfire at the far end threw long shadows across the sand pit.

Gopina was near the livestock pen when the bellowing started.

The agricultural prizes were tied to a stake behind the platform. Two goats, a calf, and a buffalo. The buffalo was first prize. A serious animal with serious opinions about noise and darkness.

The stake held. The rope did not.

She walked out of the pen the way a queen leaves a room she no longer cares for. Slow, heavy, offended. She passed the goats, who pressed against their stakes and said nothing. She was heading for the crowd.

“Rope,” someone said. “Get the rope.”

Gopina saw the loose end trailing in the dirt. She grabbed it. The buffalo kept walking. Gopina’s sandals slid on the packed ground and she held on, because letting go seemed worse.

Then someone else grabbed the rope behind her.

“Pull left,” Ahan said. “Left. She’ll turn if you pull left.”

“How do you know that?”

“I don’t. Pull left anyway.”

They pulled left. The buffalo did not turn. She continued forward with the patience of a thing that outweighed them both put together. Two people on a rope behind a buffalo in the dark, leaning back, feet sliding, losing ground one step at a time.

“Is this working?” Gopina said.

“Define working.”

The buffalo stopped. Not because of the rope. She had found a pile of sugarcane pressed against a stall front, the leftovers from the juice stall, and she was not going to walk past sugarcane for anything as small as a crowd of people.

She lowered her head and began to eat.

Gopina and Ahan stood ten feet behind her, holding a slack rope, breathing hard. Someone’s phone torch hit them from the crowd. Someone whistled. Someone else called out that the sponsors should keep better hold of their prizes.

“You can let go,” Ahan said. “She’s not going anywhere now.”

Gopina dropped the rope. Her palms were red where it had burned through. She wiped them on her shirt.

“You’re the Herald reporter,” he said. “From the courtyard function.”

“Yes.”

“Do they usually send reporters to hold livestock?”

“It’s a flexible role.”

He laughed. Short, quiet, the kind of laugh that starts in the chest and doesn’t quite finish. He sat down on the edge of the platform and stretched his legs out. Gopina stood for a second, then sat. Two feet between them. The buffalo chewed.