A Horse and Two Goats and Other Stories

Blurb

A Horse and Two Goats and Other Stories is a collection of short stories by R. K. Narayan, published in 1970 by The Bodley Head. The book is illustrated by R. K. Laxman, Narayan's brother, and includes five stories. The title story is a sly narrative of a business transaction between an American tourist and an Indian goat-herder as the result of an inability to communicate with each other.
This short story deals with cross-cultural experiences and the clash of cultures, specifically the clash of Indian and Western cultures. Narayan uses humor to demonstrate how far apart the two worlds are. The two main characters in this story could not be more different: Muni is poor, rural, uneducated, Hindu, brown, a social outcast; the American is wealthy, urban, educated, probably Christian, and white.
Narayan achieves this by using many kinds of irony, including dramatic irony.