Wednesday, April 19, 2006
First Blood
The sun burst out from behind a cloud to impart a dazzling gold wash to the world. Catching a silver droplet of rainwater here, for it was still drizzling, and a bit of a clear puddles there – one that reflected a blue patch of sky, it lit up the cascade of parti-coloured raincoats pouring out of the school-gate at the peal of the dismissal bell. The children raced out towards the waiting arm of their parents, their thrilled exclamations drowning out the quieter tones of parental conversations. The wet red soil adhered to their tiny shoes in affectionate embraces. The universal glee at their liberation from the civilizing process outshone even the sun in its radiance.
“Rajesh Krishna Mathur ”, the label of his satchel announce - a heavy baggage of pompous genealogy resting on his slim shoulders - a complex tale that his grandfather loved to trace out now that he had retired, a family of landlords, doctors, shoe-shines, soda-water-bottle-wallahs and what not…To the boy himself, he was little Raju, period. What he would tell you at this moment was that he was anxious to get to the ice-cream that waited cold and delicious in the fridge back home – the companion of his daydreams through the miserable hours of academic confinement. But first to find his mother amid the mass of parents waiting outside school…
But it was Lalita Auntie, the voluminous mass of paan-chewing, high decibel rotundity from next door who found him and said that she would take him home. Raju was mortally afraid of this Auntie. She was reputed to be the Nemesis of naughty children who did not finish their food (the creation of elders desperate to get gobs of nutrition down the gullet of the hyper-active child who would not sit at a table for even two minutes otherwise. He followed her, half-dragged along by the long-striding lady, past the rain-washed wall, which was promptly given the compliment of a paan stain by the continuously masticating mouth.
AS they passed the bazaar on the way home, Lalita Auntie turned around, and led Raju down a little dank alley that he had never entered before. Lining the alley on either side, Raju noticed small shops selling meat, fish and eggs – items whose entry was forbidden in the Mathur household menu by religious custom. Lalita Auntie meanwhile was planning the evening’s meal.
The entered a shop lit by a couple of yellow bulbs even though it was daytime. Little light reached the narrow alleyway. The shop had no counter. On the floor was a seat fashioned out of egg-crates tied together. On it sat a man with a big paunch, little beady eyes and a big calculator. His assistant sat behind a large curving blade of gleaming polished steel, the only bright thing in the room. There was a bucket of water to his side and discarded entrails and dirty feathers littering the floor about him.
A balance hung down between the two, chained from one of the rafters of the asbestos roof. Behind them was a low, open-topped enclosure where an indistinguishable mass of feathery creatures with red tufts moved about. A rusty signboard proclaimed: “CHICKEN SOP” Rate: Whole 50/kg. Part: 70/kg. A cash-box with a radio playing loud film music from on top of it, and a little hanging shrine with artificial incense sticks that could not mask the odour completed the spartan interiors of the shop.
As he turned the volume of his radio set down, yawning widely, Lalita Auntie confronted the pot-bellied man. “Give me half-a-kilo of the best chicken that you have!” she commanded. The assistant dived energetically among the birds, scattering them everyway and emerged victorious out of the melee with feathers on this head and a specimen of the appropriate size held upside down by its legs. The bird flapped its wings, cackling furiously and scattering feathers everywhere. It made Raju sneeze.
The assistant, little more than a boy himself, grinned back at him, revealing his missing teeth. Raju remembered repeated injunctions to refrain from eating too many chocolates which would make his teeth decay and fall off. Out of childish curiosity he asked, “What happened to your teeth? Did you have too many chocolates?” “No such luck. I can’t afford to have chocolates. I lost my teeth in a scuffle in the market,” the boy replied, casually severing the chicken’s head in a swift, smooth move. The head was thrown to one side, shrieking mechanically, but voicelessly. The rest of the body flapped about violently spurting blood a few feet away for a moment or two before giving up the meaningless fight. Within a few seconds the red crested head too accepted the irreversible partition and calmed down. A yellowish filmy eyelid descended over the unseeing eye. There it lay, absolutely still, with a few flecks of red blood on pristine white feathers, matching with the useless showy comb. It had been a pretty creature.
Meanwhile the body had been swiftly skinned and the strong legs cut off with two powerful thrusts. The intestines lay upon the floor streaming in the winter chill, coiling upon themselves in glistening loops, still quite unaware that they were dead. While Lalita Auntie babbled on animatedly with the shopkeeper, trying to secure a discount, Raju looked on, quite dumbstruck.
The chicken was weighed and cut into pieces. The boy then slit the head down the middle of the bony beak and gouged out the eyes with practised ease. “Nowadays we can even sell the waste we generate,” said the shopkeeper in an evidently self-congratulatory mood, “Legs for some kind of folk-medicine, the feathers for stuffing and the intestines for God-knows what!” This led to an argument between Lalita Auntie and the shop-owner over whether he was charging her for those items that her intended to sell again. She managed to secure a whole liver instead of half of it as a special bargain with her purchase. Finally the payment was made and peace reigned in the alley again.
Lalita Auntie leading Rau out of the shadows, a triumphant smile on the lips, her dinner now provided for, suddenly stopped in her tracks. She remembered that Raju’s family was vegetarian, and bit her tongue. In panic she warned Raju not to mention this little incident to anyone. She shouldn’t have worried. Raju’s secret fear of this Auntie had only been compounded by this experience. And there she stood grabbing his hand in a tight clasp, while he longed to get away. He did not even ask his instinctive question, “Why?”
The next morning, when she was waking him up, Raju’s mother noticed that he had wet his bed. “Damn!” she exclaimed, and yelled for the ayah.
