A Day at the Gauntlet

In India, you will often find yourself both incredibly exhilarated and excruciatingly uncomfortable. Somewhat akin to watching Borat. With someone you just met. This was the case when Illivaranso escorted Baptiste and myself to a remote and tiny village to watch the 1,000 year old tradition of the "bull race." The excursion was a welcome break for the two of us, as it fell on a Wednesday afternoon when we would otherwise have been dejectedly staring at a computer screen trying to make yet another Excel macro application behave. The village was a forty minute drive from Tirichuli, and added all new meaning to rural as well as to my understanding of what comprises a road. Aside from the short description "bull race" I had no idea what the event was about, so when we turned a final corner in the jeep and I saw - on what would otherwise have been barren fallow land - a crowd of 5,000, I knew that something particularly exciting had to be happening to convince people to give up their sacred three hour afternoon nap.

I noticed a good 100 bulls lined up by a cement building, each thoughtfully painted with fluorescent colors, sprinkled with sequins and sparkles, donning flowers and woven grasses. People gathered on either side of a narrow 1,000 foot strip of sand that was to be the "gauntlet" and stood on makeshift wooden slats that resembled something like bleachers. Soon, it was question as to whether the attraction was the "races" or me and Baptiste. The villagers, wanting to graciously welcome us, insisted that instead of pressing ourselves into the overflowing bleachers, that we climb up to the stage overlooking the gauntlet where all the action began. I looked up to the stage, a good 12 feet above me and shuddered. The contraption looked about as stable as the tree house I tried to force my brother to make with me when I was nine and he was four. The one we abandoned after a fruitless hour of trying to tie dry twigs together with twine. The one that fell down over the course of that very evening. However, not only would I have been very rude to refuse the prime "VIP" spot that awaited me at the top, but there was no choice but to clamber up the thing as 100 hands started grabbing at me. I cursed the moment that morning when, standing in contemplation before the one shelf in my room that houses my meager supply of clothes, I had opted for a skirt instead of pants. A skirt that has a tendency to billow, and the wind was already proving itself mischievous. Bravely, I put one hand on a wooden bar above me, and the other looked to somehow pull at my skirt in just a way to make me decent as I ascended. The next three minutes were a comic display of my fear of heights, my acrobatic skills now severely impaired by the ensuing lack of mobility thanks to my vigilant efforts to not flash a crowd of thousands, and my attempt to reduce the number of splinters in my one climbing hand from fifty to ten.

As I reached the VIP pinnacle, a deafening roar boomed from the crowd, nearly enough vibration emanating from below that I thought the stage just might disintegrate. I looked around, expecting to lay eyes on an exceptionally large bull, for example, that would have elicited such enthusiasm from the masses. There was no bull and as I gazed ahead, I saw all eyes on me. Upon closer inspection, I also noticed that there was not a single woman within in a mile. Suddenly, I knew just how those few courageous men who decided to take a class at Smith must have felt when they first encountered a room of love-sick and sleep-deprived Smithies - completely and utterly terrified. I gave a little round of waves, blushing. I then pretended to be very interested in my splinters.

I sat on a pile of towels, handed out later as prizes, on a narrow plank, and looking through the thin slats that comprised the stage, I could see a bull holding pen bellow me. It could only hold one animal at a time. I began to understand that this was not a race between bulls, but something much more dangerous; the gauntlet's path, once devoid of people, now had one hundred plus men racing down it to press right up to the holding pen's gate. I wasn't sure whether they were brave or each missing the brain lobe that registers both fear and reason, or whether, possibly, they had been promised a shorter prison sentence if they dared to stand directly in the path of a very annoyed bull. There were men of all ages shoving up against each other, including some pre-pubescent boys who seemed barely able to manage the throng of their own kind, nevertheless the well-aimed kick of a peeved and bewildered bull. The announcer stood right above me, and I was glad that, unlike me, he had elegantly mastered the art of decency with his own skirt. His voice became increasingly excited, and I knew the games were about to begin.

Down in the holding pen, I saw a small bull, maybe a year or two old. When I looked behind the holding pen, I saw a line of bulls extending towards the horizon, they were arranged by size, and by the end of the queue there were beasts that were so bulky they had surely been fed a steady diet of peanut-butter laden chapatis. The men in the gauntlet began getting agitated, waiting for the first bull. The young animal below was getting an awful beating - the rope in its nose, usually used to gently guide the beast home at dusk, was being pulled vigorously, brutally chaffing the inside of its nostrils. Its owner punched its head and its bum was whipped with a branch. Men outside picked up handfuls of sand, and when finally the bull was released, surging forward it was greeted by sand in the eyes and a crowd of men smacking its rear. The "braver" men attempted to ride the animal as it tumbled down the gauntlet to safety, shaking its great head and horns.

As each consecutive bull passed, the crowd's fever increased. The trick, I realized, was to latch on to a bull and hold on for dear life until about 300 feet down the gauntlet you passed a dirty piece of polyester string raised to the top of the bleachers. Depending on the size of the bull and its capacity for rage, and if you made it to the string, you would win a towel or a tin bucket and somewhere between a whopping $3 and $5 - maybe enough to cover your medical costs or a grave plot. Last year, two men were killed.

It was getting hard to tell if the crowd came for the bulls or for the WWF mini-matches that took place on the gauntlet's grounds. While at the beginning of the races, men were playfully smacking each other as if to say "hey loser, you stepped on my bare foot," the mounting tension, the increased size of the bulls, the need to be forever glorified as that guy who held onto a bull's rump for five seconds, took over. Once friendly shoves turned into punches, turned into a face off of the divided village hood. The six policeman on the stage looked on, immobile. One was sending text messages, another was intimately acquainting his finger with his left nostril. The announcer shouted himself hoarse.

After many minutes, many bulls and many pictures, I decided I would also have one too many appointments with the village chiropractor if I didn't evacuate the one millionth of an acre I'd carved out for myself. It took a good five minutes to convince those around me that it seemed a good time to leave. Getting off the platform proved easier to do than getting up it, in part because I decided to live on the edge and plummet the last seven feet to the ground. A round of applause politely followed. I smoothed out my hair, and found Baptsite and Illivaranso gorging on sweets and soda. We prepared to leave.

"This is no game" Illivaranso offered as we inched our way down the village road, only stopping once for the unlikely pair of a cow and a dog. The cow stared at us, solemnly chewing her cud and the dog, much more insolent was far more interested in attending to his nether regions than taking his business somewhere less public. Many rounds of the beeping horn persuaded them to edge off to the shoulder of the road. "This is lifes and dead," he added. And I nodded in total agreement, remembering the aggressive and angered faces of the men in the gauntlet, wondering if the next day they would turn to great each other nicely as they regained the normalcy of their lives, pushing aside violence for the next year.