It's a chicken's life

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link:

http://www.telegraphindia.com/1060818/asp/guwahati/story_6621767.asp

 

It's a chicken's life

 

By Dhruba Hazarika

 

It was about the Paltan Bazar market that I was writing. And it is

the same market about which I continue...

 

To the right of the mutton stalls, eastwards, partly over the

uncovered drains, partly against a longish wooden enclosure, there

are dark and unpainted bamboo caskets, roundish and perforated,

containing the fowls. The white-feathered hens with only red lobes

and shallow-yellow beaks in contrast, are the broilers, mutants

germinated through scientific manipulation. The rest are of

variegated plummage, the " locals " , sprightly, energetic, beautiful

and almost sensuous in the ruffling of their God-given feathers.

 

The roosters seem more alert than the hens. The heads occasionally

thrust out through the holes, pupils wide and almost frantic in the

bewilderment of the cacophony that is always a prelude to a neck

wrung and feathers peeled off by muscular human arms in a bizarre

display of disembowelment of a living culinary delight.

 

The white poultry remain grouped in separate caskets, a sort of an

apartheid that is essentially based on price. " Locals " , for once in

Guwahati, have a higher value.

 

My bag is still empty and I stop in front of the poultry man. He is

lean, dark, with tousled hair and his eyes sparkle from a radiance

that comes from taking numerous lives, day in and day out, over the

years.

 

I mark the brown, dirty shirt, sleeves folded up to the elbows, blood

splattered in spots all over and some of it pock-marking his (by

contrast to the rest of the body) thick neck.

 

A boy, not yet eleven, sits at the back by the side of a wooden box,

the box a reflection of the dark wooden enclosure underneath which

goes on the business of life and death. “Salam saheb,†he addresses

me. " Broiler? " he asks. I look at him, at his semi-aggressive face,

the tough jawline and the no-nonsense set of lips. His skin is shiny

from sweat and from the heat of the day and from something else,

which I'd come to know later. Around his neck hangs a talisman, the

way it is with sadhus in temples or with the young yuppie crowd in

college campuses.

 

I love poultry. They occupy my house in much the same way the pigeons

do. I let them run wild. Some of them make the branches of the

jackfruit trees their homes after nightfall.

 

In the morning, before I take my first cup of tea, I sprinkle gram

and rice on our cemented yard. I watch them pecking away, the pointed

ends of their beaks picking each morsel with amazing rapidity and

accuracy.

 

I love watching them. It has less to do with love than to do with

something atavistic, something primeval in my urge to think of

creatures so helpless, as soft and tender in a world where brutality

generally rules.

 

It is also an expiation, sometimes, this simple art of watching the

chickens stepping daintily around the yard, an expiation in the hope

that feeding them would exorcise the unwanted happiness that comes

from cannibalising their tender, almost romantic, pink-white flesh.

 

" Broiler " I say, not only because of the price but because the

locals are so much like myself †" locals. Or perhaps because broilers come out

from incubating machines, allowing a semblance of

unnaturalness that brooks less human sympathy. Or that is what it is

with me. I do not haggle.

 

Broilers, like the machines where they come from, are available at a

fixed price, unalterable.

 

The poultry-man shoves his left hand into a basket and from a corner

grabs a fat, very fluffy chicken. I am never quite able to

distinguish a male from a female among these white denizens of the

market, and so do not suggest an alternative, the way I do with the

desi chicken. The man gets hold of the legs and drags it out. There

is no noise from the rest, no squawking; there is only a sense of

mute inevitability as one more leaves the group, never to return.

 

I feel, somehow, better: if the broiler's brethren have little or no

feeling for the swift death that will follow, I, a human, ought to

have even less.

 

A convoluted thought-process justifying one's greed and hunger and

yet supremely hypocritical in its philosophical tour-de-force!

 

The man looks at me and utters: " dhai (two-and-a-half) kg. " I nod my head. He

hands the broiler to the boy who looks at me

disinterestedly. He picks up a machete, the handle dark-brown from

years of use and the blade shiny and streaked with blood. I turn my

back, as squeamish as the eternal hypocrite, at the sight of death

and blood. But I know. I know that the boy has slit the throat open,

allowing the blood, the " bad " blood, to flow out, allowing the

writhing body to fall to the floor of the box where the feathered

remains of other birds beheaded earlier lie in a mass, streaked with

blood and the excrement that flow out when death comes suddenly yet

semi-prolonged from a half-slit throat.

 

I know the bird will be there for a minute or two while I gaze at the

people around me. For the moment, my heart lurches as I try to wipe

out the image of the boy, back straight and arms working in

concentrated unison, prizing his fingers around the neck of the fowl

and pulling back the skin, feather and all; and except for the tail's

tuft, the entire lot dropping onto the box's floor.

 

With hands hardened by years of practice, the boy pokes a couple of

fingers into the cleft between the chicken's breast bones and then

shoves his fist in as the hole widens. Twining his fingers around the

entrails he draws out his hands and flings the intestines to a

corner. He tucks in the liver and the gizzard back into the hold in

the breast and then picks up a black polythene bag into which the now

still warm but dead broiler is packed.

 

As the boy does all this I stop to look at the people around me and

instead, inanely, ask the talkative poultry-man, " How many chickens

have you killed? " " Oh, hazaar, " he declares, a sort of boast in the

tone. " Countless, " he repeats, the thrill of the kill adding to his

sweat.

 

Because of the waywardness of the words I ask him, almost

playfully, " Would you be able to kill a human? " He stops pouring

water into the bowl inside one of the cages and instead pours it over

the feathered bodies. Then he straightens and looks at me. " But of

course " . I stare at him, stupefied for a while.

 

There was no drama intended in my sudden question and now as he

replied neither was there any in his. " A man, a human? You sure? " I

asked. He flicks the water once more over another cage. " If the price

is right, I would do it, saheb. I have killed so many animals and

birds, what is one human? "

 

It's been some years since this conversation took place but I have

never forgotten it.