Love for Horses, by proxy - Part 1
From the days when I wrote my first stories in 2009 to today, my reading, writing and dreaming selves have loved horses.
I don’t know how many parts this essay will have. Sometimes I wonder if this will stretch on to become something resembling a book. But here is the first part. I hope it will have the gift of your attention.
‘Horses buried for years Under the foundations Give their earthen floors The ease of trampolines'
Paul Muldoon, Dancers at the Moy (also the epigraph for Colum McCann’s Everything in this Country Must, which finds a mention in the essay)
In my first novel Neon Noon, the unnamed narrator-protagonist is a neurotic reader and wanna-be writer who goes to Pattaya, Thailand, for a sex trip. He believes it will help him get out of some serious break-up fugue. A bad idea, of course. His misery continues for a good time.
It is only when he re-discovers inside him some possibility for genuine human connection that he begins to turns the corner. This discovery happens in the company of a prostitute named Noon, whose own backstory reminds our man that there are other, more extreme, varieties of pain in the world. It’s possible that Noon’s story is actually untrue, or that it has been misunderstood by the man, but that ceases to matter in the novel’s telling.
On his first (and only) night with Noon, the man is unable to consummate their transaction after listening to her story. A tired Noon begins to be assailed by sleep, and mumbles: ‘If you talk, I hear.’ The man, feeling affectionate towards her, passes his fingers through her hair (in the same way that he used to run his fingers through his girlfriend’s hair, he tells us) and recounts a story from ‘the war novel’ that he had been reading earlier in the day:
I told her the story of a lone soldier, left behind by his company and hiding in a trench. At one point, a wounded enemy soldier fell inside, and the first soldier, terrified as he was, pushed his bayonet inside the enemy. He then looked at the identification papers and family pictures of the other man. Looking at these, he was suddenly overcome with pity and remorse. He asked the enemy for forgiveness, calling him his comrade. He promised to take care of his family, promising to send them money after the madness of war was over.
The man died in the soldier’s arms, amidst the sodden, rat-infested earth of the trench.
In my arms, I, too, felt Noon’s dead weight. The crumples of the bed sheet surrounded us.
The metaphor is somewhat provocative, and in a non-generous reading it can even be said to be putting war and sex tourism on the same plane. But I’m not comparing a corps-à-corps in battle with a joust on the bed; I’m juxtaposing moral defeat in a trench with moral defeat on a bed. At any rate, the foolhardiness—if it is that—is deliberate: my original title for Neon Noon was The Battle of Pattaya.
The war novel that the man was reading, and from which he narrated the above episode to Noon, is Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, a novel told from German soldier Paul Bäumer’s perspective in the First World War (whether I read it in A.W. Wheen’s 1929 translation or Brian Murdoch’s 1993 one, I cannot remember)1. An early draft of Neon Noon had the protagonist taking the novel’s name, but the mention was removed during the editing stage. I read Remarque’s novel during the conceptualisation and during the writing of Neon Noon and was very influenced by it. I considered it a masterpiece, though I never saw the word used for it in whatever little I read about it. I thought that the extent to which it had moved me, scene after scene and episode after episode, was a personal experience, made possible by a certain mood and mindset. This was in 2013 and 2014.
Recently, in reading Geoff Dyer’s book on the Great War, The Missing of the Somme, I finally read the word ‘masterpiece’ being used for All Quiet on the Western Front. It warmed my heart, like it does any reader’s to see their favourite commended by a critic of note. Dyer over-delivers, in fact. He mentions four other memoir-novels about the war and finds Remarque’s to be the best, even going to the extent of saying that ‘Many of these other books only attracted the attention they did in the wake of the renewed interest in the war generated by the phenomenal success of All Quiet.’
Robert Graves’ Goodbye to All That, Richard Aldington’s Death of a Hero, Guy Chapman’s A Passionate Prodigality, Frederic Manning’s The Middle Parts of Fortune… and Sassoon’s The Complete Memoirs of George Sherston all contain impressive passages, but none has the imaginative cohesion of purpose and design or the linguistic intensity and subtlety to rival the English translation of Erich Maria Remarque’s masterpiece.
Quite like me, Dyer makes use of an episode in Remarque’s novel to make his own sordid point. This is done in a brief section in his book where he takes note of the animals used in the Great War:
In All Quiet on the Western Front, after an artillery barrage, the air is full of the screams of wounded horses. The belly of one of them is ripped open. He becomes tangled in his intestines and trips, stumbles to his feet again. ‘I tell you,’ says one of the soldiers, ‘it is the vilest baseness to use horses in the war.’
The cries that fill the air are worse than those of men who ‘could not cry so terribly’. The soldiers ‘can bear almost anything’; but this, claims the narrator, Paul, in a passage that anticipates Picasso’s Guernica, ‘is unendurable. It is the moaning of the world, it is the martyred creation, wild with anguish, filled with terror, and groaning.
Reading these lines in The Missing of the Somme in 2024, I remembered the experience of reading the same scene in Remarque’s novel sometime in late 2013. And then there was a twinge of what Annie Ernaux calls literary emotion2, wherein my distress in recalling an image or experience is less than seeing it the first time but finds utility in justifying the first-time’s veracity and making the act of writing possible. This literary emotion from remembering Remarque’s novel was, of course, mixed with fresh emotion from the details in Dyer’s book. I thought of horses and their suffering for longer than I ever had. That 375,000 horses died in the Great War on the British side alone (Dyer mentions a memorial in St. Jude’s Church, Hampstead) bothered me immensely.
In the mix of these emotions, literary and otherwise, a readerly charge was generated as well. Everything that was happening to horses in my current reading life—and there was a lot happening, given that I was reading War and Peace and The Charterhouse of Parma and Red Cavalry more or less simultaneously—linked up in my mind to form a tense web of associations that invited an essayistic attempt, or, as the French would say: un essai.
I don’t know how to ride a horse. And I have never mounted one, unless you count occasions in childhood—when it’s an uncle’s baraat and an overexcited somebody plonks you on the withers and you sit in front of poor uncle for endless minutes while a medley of relatives dances like it’s the last shindig at the end of the world and your parents urge you from a distance to grin for the photos. During my own wedding, I preferred to be in a buggy behind the horse rather than being on the animal. I even allowed myself to feel a bit superior for doing that.
In 2009, however, hippophilia (not mine) was the cause of my life’s worst moment until then. I had graduated from B-school in March that year and was in love with my then-girlfriend, a French woman who shall be named Anne-Marie here. Despite coming from a family that couldn’t afford me going for salary-shorn trips of self-discovery, the magnitude of my love for Anne-Marie proved too great and I couldn’t but have her adventurous spirit (underwritten, I now understand, by the sureties of what is called ‘the first world’) inevitably alter the course of my life. We travelled through north and central India for a few months—Diu, Ujjain, Bhopal, Khajuraho, Lucknow, Nainital, Naggar, Delhi, Jaipur—and ended up severely denting whatever we had in way of savings (I anyway only had the small sums I had earned from winning the odd ‘strategy contest’ in B-school). When this ‘seeing the country’ turned exhausting, we found ourselves in Gurgaon and soon settled down in a single-room flat. Anne-Marie started teaching children of Francophone expats in Delhi, and I sank into unemployment. From her savings, we bought a scooter (and also an oven, but that story is for another day). To be of some use, I started dropping Anne-Marie to her tuition spots in Delhi—mansions in Chhatarpur, or grand apartments in Delhi’s embassy districts—and whiling my time (without a smartphone!) till she got done. Then I drove us back home.
Such a life wasn’t, of course, the stuff of Anne-Marie’s dreams, and even though we believed that this life was temporary (we had decided to return to campus next February and get proper jobs), it was still routinely unpleasant. We were both a bit homesick by now—she for Vannes (in Brittany, France); me for Muzaffarnagar. Coping mechanisms became a necessity. I turned to writing, and wrote my first short stories then; Anne-Marie, needing something outdoorsy, picked up a horse-riding class.
The horse-riding class started at 6 a.m., at a farm of sorts which was about nine kilometers away from where we lived. The instructors, four men all roughly of our age, none of whom looked like owners, were all from Rajasthan. Again, to be useful, I took to driving Anne-Marie to the farm, where I would sit down on a plastic chair and watch her make progress on a chestnut horse—its name was Baadal, the same as Rani Laxmi Bai’s last horse—for the class’s ninety minutes. She had learnt some of the basics in her childhood, and now her aim was to be able to make the horse jump over obstacles (always one for aiming high, Anne-Marie). She asked me, many times, to learn with her, but I had no interest in the activity, and at any rate, I didn’t want her to spend any more of her money on me. So I happily accepted my role of chaperone.
The horse-riding classes became an early-morning routine that both of us began to relish. Sleeping early became mandatory. The physical elements of the sport—chafing of the inner thigh, or a sore shoulder from a fall, or a certain ammoniacal smell that clung to her till she showered—became new things for me to be part of in intimacy. Knee-length riding boots of her own became the thing that she wished for the most; she conspired ways of telling her father that that was what she wanted for Christmas.
Our routine was interrupted by Diwali. I had avoided my parents to an unprecedented extent that year, what with them not being thrilled about my joblessness and my life with Anne-Marie, but Diwali was Diwali, and I had to go to Muzaffarnagar for at least a couple of days. It meant leaving Anne-Marie alone at home, but there was no other option. I left our house at five a.m., aiming to catch a bus from IFFCO Chowk to take me to the bus station at ISBT Kashmere Gate, Delhi3, from where I’d take another bus to Muzaffarnagar.
About an hour so later, as I neared Kashmere Gate in the first bus ride, I received a call from Anne-Marie. I was surprised, and not a little frightened, to hear an Indian man’s voice from the other end. The man spoke hesitatingly, calling me Tarun. He said that Anne-Marie had had an accident while driving the scooter to the horse-riding class, that it wasn’t too bad, that she’d been hurt but there was no ‘big damage done’, and that he and his wife had been driving some distance behind her and were now with her at the roadside. ‘She is saying you should come back,’ the man said. Anne-Marie had asked him to take her to a known home-clinic, run by my friend’s parents.
That she had not spoken with me herself caused me endless worry. How bad was her condition? Was she dying? I got off the bus, crossed the road, and hopped into another bus to take me to Gurgaon. About ninety minutes later—the worst ninety minutes of my twenty-three-year-old life—as I entered the room in my friend’s house where Anne-Marie had been made to rest on a double bed, I felt such a relief at seeing her blinking that I excused myself to the toilet before approaching her. I gathered myself in that private space for a couple of minutes, and then came out and saw Anne-Marie. She was bandaged in several places. A pothole had done the thing, she said. The helmet had saved her life, Aunty told me. There were gashes and scrapes on the cheek, on the breasts, on the abdomen, on the knees, and on the wrists. Nothing broken, which was miraculous.
‘I wanted to ride the horse,’ she said with a feeble smile.
The injuries left scars. Three years later, when our relationship began to unravel because of the strains that a middle-class life puts on a white woman in India—constant stares from men, the fear and actuality of sexual assault, street-level filth, the greasiness of food, the direness of beggars in the local trains, the constant noise, the impossibility of an outdoorsy life, and so on—these scars became to Anne-Marie a constant reminder of how harmful India had been to her. ‘The stupid pothole,’ she would say looking at the scar on the bony part of her waist, which was the worst. ‘The stupid horse,’ I would say, not entirely innocently. It got us nowhere.
In Neon Noon, the woman with whom the protagonist has broken up is French. Her name in the novel is Anne-Marie.
Had the early morning hours of seeing my beloved on horseback—she trotting about on the long elliptical path of the farm; the instructors’ broken-English commands; the chirpy scooter ride back home—left on me some definite impression of horses too? I remember agreeing wholeheartedly with Anne-Marie’s oft-repeated quip for the animal: ‘Such a beautiful form!’ Earlier that same year, during our cross-country travels, we’d both read Orhan Pamuk’s My Name is Red, translated by Erdağ Göknar (we’d stolen the copy from our B-school library). Anne-Marie’s declaration of the beauty of the horse's form drew some of its conviction from the novel’s complex take on the matter. Pamuk’s novel is—if one is allowed to be reductive—about the strains that a patchy awareness of the Renaissance brought on miniaturists in the Ottoman Empire during the reign of Murat III, coeval of Akbar in India. To draw close-up portraits like the firangs, or to draw a horse such that it can be distinguished from all other in a crowd of horses, is blasphemy for Ottoman miniaturists, for they seek—and are mandated—to paint the world in the way Allah sees it, with every object drawn and painted in its ideal, repetition-savvy form, the blemishes and disproportions of reality unacknowledged. This line of thought brings us to an extreme where a distinguishable personal style becomes an indicator of imperfection, and, consequently, not signing a painting becomes the biggest flex. My Name is Red explores these extremes.
To illustrate subtle variations in the ideological groundings of his cast of characters, and also just to create capacity for digressions on aesthetics and religion and geopolitics, Pamuk constructs My Name is Red as polyphonous novel in which, apart from its many characters, some of the drawn figures also get to speak in first person. Chapter 35 of the novel is titled I AM A HORSE, and is narrated by a horse as drawn in a miniature painting4. This is how it begins:
Ignore the fact that I’m standing here placid and still; if truth by told, I’ve been galloping for centuries; I’ve passed over plains, fought in battles, carried off the melancholy daughters of shahs to be wed; I’ve galloped tirelessly page by page from story to history, from history to legend and from book to book; I’ve appeared in countless stories, fables, books and battles; I’ve accompanied invincible heroes, legendary lovers and fantastic armies; I’ve galloped from campaign to campaign with our victorious sultans, and as a result, I’ve appeared in countless illustrations.
In early 2014, when I was writing Neon Noon, I saw a dream which had as its pivotal image a man on horseback. In an essay that I wrote then5, I traced the image in the dream to a scene from a movie that I’d seen before going to bed that night. But I did not dwell on whether the dream’s selection of that particular image from the film—and no other, mind—was driven by an as-yet unrecognised affinity for horses. In the relevant scene in the film, the man on horseback enters a sexual fantasy after receiving a text message from a woman. I wonder, now, if the re-occurrence of the image in my dream signified a nub of sexual fantasy, wrapped in symbolic ciphers and planted amidst other images with other associations and other meanings. I wonder if the horse in the dream was the connection between the fantasy-nub and reality, by pointing to an idyllic time in my life that was inevitably remembered, in the innermost of my selves if not the layers that I bared, as a time of plentiful sex. And/Or: Could it be that the horse in the dream was connected in some way to the scene of the dying horse in Remarque’s novel, a novel that I was reading at the time? Could it be, then, that the horse in the dream, once connected with the horse Remarque’s novel in modalities that are characteristic of dreams, also became an invocation of the title of Remarque’s novel—a verbal bond established in a visual medium. For with Anne-Marie gone, all was, indeed, quiet for me on the western front.
No definite answers here, only hints and suggestions. No heavier meaning-load can be assigned to dreams anyway. Speaking of verbal bonds, however, it bears mentioning that there is a character named Orhan in Neon Noon, a character who is the unborn son of the protagonist and Anne-Marie, and who therefore appears like a phantasm in the story. Going by what can only be called dream-logic, he’s somehow the same age as the protagonist.6
The horse’s pronouncement in Orhan Pamuk’s My Name is Red—of presence in histories, legends, stories, fables, and books—is due in large part to the role played in battles, in ‘fantastic armies’, and under ‘invincible heroes’. In The Missing of the Somme, Dyer makes a mention of how ‘in footage and photographs of the war there are horses everywhere.’ In Isaac Babel’s Red Cavalry (tr. Boris Dralyuk), a cycle of stories set during the Russian Civil War (1917-1922) and the Polish-Soviet War (1919-1921), one finds the importance of horses stated bluntly: ‘Without horses there is no army.’ These wars were, however, the last major conflicts where horses were crucial to the enterprise. The advent of tanks and other means of off-road progress meant that the cavalry started being phased out in the first half of the 20th century, with only vestigial splendours retained for ceremonial pomp. While horses were used even in the Second World War and in later conflicts, the creature’s importance in human warfare, an importance validated time and again over millennia, was already at an end.
And so a fresh pronouncement: the horse’s beauty may be perpetual, but its glory is a thing of the past. Its vanishing from contemporary human stories seems so perfectly aligned with urban reality that it hardly requires a comment, though even on the plane of mythology, the horse’s import has suffered a significant erosion. The era when tales of Maharana Pratap’s Chetak or Napoleon’s Marengo (both relatively small stallions) were stations for hyperboles to jostle is firmly past us. The human has no need to sing odes of the horse anymore.
And just as the horse’s glory has expired, so has its utility for farm work. On the same fields, what tanks and trucks did to the animal in war-time, tractors did to it during peace-time. That said, the second transition, reliant on personal finance more than the State’s coffers, was inevitably slower.
This point is illustrated in the the titular story in Colum McCann’s Everything in this Country Must, even though said illustration is not the story’s aim. I first read it in 2014, and it behoves a mention here as only my second experience (after All Quiet) of a horse suffering in literature. In it, a Northern Irish Catholic farmer’s draft horse gets caught in a flooding river, ‘her foreleg trapped between rocks’. The narrator is the farmer’s fifteen-year-old daughter, who pulls on a rope tied to the halter so as to keep the mare’s head above water. The farmer goes under water ‘to free the draft horse’s hoof’, but fails. Just when he is close to giving up, a truck with some British soldiers arrives at the farm and the situation becomes even more tense. There is immediate tension between the farmer and the soldiers, stemming right from the farmer’s personal history and also the context of the Troubles. In this bleak, uneven, unevenly poised world McCann brings to us, a small part of the unevenness is sourced from the fact that the British army uses trucks to get around while Northern Irish agricultural activity relies on horses.
The soldiers try to save the horse even as it takes to ‘screaming like I never heard a horse before or after.’ To learn the fate of the horse—and father and daughter—I suggest you read the splendid story yourself.
[To be continued]
Here is part of the scene in the 2022 film. It’s almost impossible to watch, which is why, I think, it must be watched
In Happening, translated by Tanya Leslie, Ernaux warns against ‘lyrical outbursts such as anger or pain’ in writing based on trauma. Her logic is what I’ve used for my purposes, even though the word trauma cannot remotely apply to my experience:
The distress I experience on recalling certain images and on hearing certain words is beyond comparison with what I felt at the time: these are merely literary emotions; in other words they generate the act of writing and justify its veracity.
The Delhi metro came to Gurgaon in June 2010
There is a chapter narrated by a dog. Another by a tree. So it goes.
The essay was republished on this substack just a couple of weeks back
I wrote about Orhan after the publication of Neon Noon as well, in a 2016 story which contained an explanation for why the character was given this name. The story was titled ‘Despair and the Classics’. I will refurbish it someday for the Substack,