The price of a rooster

They stopped him above Tista where the road curved up into the vicious climb called Kaazimaan-ko-ukkaalo: each armed with a long curved knife and the tallest dangled a black revolver from languid fingers. Are you, they asked him, the one that killed the rooster this morning?

The rooster. Funny how, after all these years, he automatically avoided calling it a cock. A knee-jerk reaction, he wryly acknowledged, acquired during his school days when the inadvertent double entendre had often made him the butt of ribald jokes. The red rooster had been poised for flight on the far side of the road, safely out of his path. He had seen it well in time but had been concentrating on bringing the Royal Enfield fast down the steep incline, its big four-stroke engine a threnody in second gear. The nervous bird, a picture of indecision, decided to dodge across the road at the last – and worst — possible moment. Brakes. Slight skid. Bike lurching, straight again. A squawk. And then it was gone. Leaving a note of querulous agony pegged on the staves of the warm morning air.

By the time it occurred to him to stop, he was half-a-kilometre away, pushing the bike recklessly around the fresh-baked farm cottages and into the cool of the dense teak forest that curled like a caterpillar along theleft bank of the Tista. Questions flooded his mind: should he stop, go back, apologise; had anybody seen him; ought behave gone back and made amends; would they be waiting for him when he returned in the evening. An ancient grey TATA hauling water to the drought stricken townloomed suddenly in his path almost sending him off the road. He eased the throttle backabit, grinned self-consciously andrelaxed. Getting jumpy, aren´t you, he chided himself, things could be worse.

It had been a good hard ride. Along the twisting NH-3TA through the Tista valley, the hamlets flashed by: Geilkhola, Rambi, Lohapul (´Iran´ to the insider who was always short of petrol), Kalijhora, Sevoke and he was out of the mountains, pounding over the molten highway that lay like a spear on the plain. Fifteen minutes more and into Siliguri — that sweltering town of iron and grease. Orders placed, purchases and small-talk made with the faceless white-clad hardware merchants and then it was time to go.

He was still tingling with the euphoria of the ride back through the cooling valley, the tricky mudslide, across the Bailey bridge and streaking up the sinuous road home. The faint sense of unease that had nagged him all day now turned into apprehension. It was not, he reflected ruefully, the happiest of times to run over a rooster. The political turmoil in the district had washed up motley bands of roving delinquents and it was just possible that one such group would be waiting for him up there, eager to make a name for themselves. He weighed the several alternatives. He could shove the Enfield into second and charge through them: the bike was powerful enough. On second thought, no. It would mean no more riding around this side of the hills for quite a spell .The prospect of turning back to spend a day or two in Siliguri was equally distasteful. He´d bluff it out, he decided; after all, they wouldn´t eat him. If at all they had recognised him. If at all anybody was up there, waitingforhim. He cheered up.Perhaps I did not even hit the damned bird. Perhaps it only got rattled a bit.

Humming tune lessly,he gave himself to the sheer joy of hurling the Enfield round thelooping bends just a little faster than safe. A blinding flash, a stab of pain and a warm rush of blood from his nose brought him back to his predicament. Dabbing vaguely at his face with a gloved hand, he studied the lad who had hit him: young, barely sixteen, the boy was a pimply gangling specimen whom adolescence had not treated kindly. His beady, close-set eyes stared wisely from over aflatnoseand a loose, long upper lip that cried out for a moustache.

"What´s the matter, lost your tongue?" Longlip thrust his revolting face close.
He heaved the bike on its stand, turned and stood facing them with palms spread in what he hoped was placatory ges¬ture; fear had fattened itself likea leech upon his self-assurance. "Look lads," he essayed a grin. "I nearly did hit a rooster this morning but I´m sure it escaped. Unhurt."

"That´s what you think!" this from a lout sporting skin head look.
"O I´m sure it went unscathed. You see, I was coming down on the far side of theroad like this and the rooster was on that side right here… " waving his hands about like a pave¬ment conjurer with an unsympathetic audience, he turned on the spiel.

Keep talking, he told himself, don´t give them time to think. They crowded round, some fingering the Enfield´s controls, some trying on his helmet, others trying to look menacing. Half his mind stood off to one side, dispassionately watching him perform. His inquisitors were dressed in what the video films informed them was the height of fashion. Cropped temples, beads, cut-off shirts, army fatigues, plastic gauntlets and immitation Reebocks, they had managed to pull of a sartorial synthesis of the urban guerilla and the rock star. Only the laboured accents betrayed the yokels in them. An educated and fairly wealthy young contractor, he felt superciliousandcondescendingasheautomatically catalogued their place in the local pecking order. The greed and envy with which theyeyedhisexpensiveimported clothes wasaspalpable as his smugness. An irrelevant image of an empty mansion formed: the butler and valet in the living room, dressed in his Lordship´s suits, drinking his cognac, smoking his´cigars.

We´re all caught in the same trap, he thought mirthlessly.
"…and you see," he was saying," I´m quite certain that the rooster was safely across before my bike could touch it."

Stony silence. Then the tall youth with the gun led an old man forward, holding him by a gaunt wrist.
"This is the owner of the rooster. He´s very angry at what you´ve done. He wants compensation. Don´t you, Abirman?"

The old man peered uncertainly about him, licked his lips and mumbled something about not making any trouble. And received a stinging backhanded slap for his courtesy.

"Say that again, old man. Just say that again," the tall one screamed. He turned, struck a pose.
"An offence has been committed on our soil and you, baaje speak of not making trouble! What if it was only a rooster. It was a rooster belonging to one of our people. By killing the rooster, he has committed an offence against the people (although he is one of our race). And he must pay dearly for it. He is guilty of… of…" here the tall youth broke into English," genocide crime!" He paused triumphantly. There was a reverent silence and for a moment, the motorcyclist expected the others to burst into applause. He seized his opportunity "Abirman — baaje, yes, he´sright Imustpayyoufortherooster.I´ll certainly reimburse you for the loss. Tell me how much do I owe you for the bird? It was a fine specimen. Just name your price and I´ll let you have the money now."

The old man opened his mouth to reply. With a casual movement, the tall boy laid open his wrinkled cheek with the gun.

"Shut up. We´ll do the talking here. We´ll decide what to do with thisc/iifcne." "Look," the motorcyclist urged, "I´mready to pay for the rooster—just tell me what it costs and I´ll pay up. I´ll pay twice the price. It´s getting dark and my batteries are low: I´ve got to get home while there´s still some daylight," He smothered a quaver in his voice, feeling angry and foolish.

"Shall we cut off his balls daju? "
"Shall we have some fun with him before we send him off to join the rooster?"
"Let me take his entrails out dai. "

They clamoured and closed in hungrily. A Kanpurey boot caught him in the testicles. He went down, retching. They dragged him to his feet and held him there as the others smashed him again,again and again. While the tall youth stood to one side, dapper, addressing him.

"Offering us money, are you. What do you take us for, you son of a whore? Do you think you can buy us out for a few hundred? Don´t you know that we are sons of the soil who struggled for our identity? Are you trying to bribe us, who are loyal citizens of the country, sworn to serve our beloved Prime Minister?" He ended a little pompously.

Just then, the smallest member of the band, barely taller than the knife slung from his shoulder, came scrambling down the embankmentscreaming,´´Seeyarpi,d«/w, Seeyarpi, Seeyarpi, Seeyarpi aayo, Seeyarpi!" But it was too late. A jeep lurched round thebehd,lightingup the scene: themotorcyclistwithhis bloddy face and outstretched arms sagging between Longlip and Skinhead who held his biceps, the rest a row of gaping mouths, frozen in the tableau of a latter day Crucifixion. The reel spun again. Action. The jeep hesitated, accelerated suddenly and flashed past, its haunches slung low under the weight of men and guns. The.motorcyclist caught a brief glimpse of a weasel-faced driver, teeth set in a grin of terror. The assailants were bounding off in all directions like jack rabbits. Abrirman´s pale shanks gleamed briefly in the twilight as he went loping over the terraced fields. The motorcyclist stood convulsed over the Enfieldasa wave of relief anaesthetised histrembling body.

Two bends below, the jeep stopped. Weasel clutched the steering wheel as the big CRPF sergeant poured abuse on him: behen-ki-chut, had he forgotten that he was a policeman? And a member of the Central Reserve Police Force! Who had ordered him to scamper off like that? Did he not realise that those desperados back there were probably insurgents? Sent to destabilise the nation? Did he not suspect a Foreign Hand? Would Weasel kindly rum the jeep around dowble-;or did he need some encouragement in the shape of a danda up his arse?

If only to change the subject, Weasel flung the jeep into a screeching turn and hurled it back up the road. The constables looked grim and took the safety catches off. They came in the true tradition of the police: shooting first. The jeep roared up the slope, bristling with guns that spat flame in all directions, bullets ricocheted off into the gathering dusk.

"There´s one of the maaderchodesl" the sergeant shouted cheerfully as he emptied his gun through the windshield in his anxiety to get his man. The jeep careened past the parked Enfield and stopped a safe two hundred yards away.

The heavy .303 slug took the motorcyclist high in the left buttock and exited from the front, taking with it a piece of his hip-bone and most of his stomach. The impact lifted him off his feet and set him down on the soft loam of the embankment.

He could see the glimmer of the first stars in thedarkening sky: it was very quiet. He thought he could hear the Tista faintly, far below. And, as the light faded from his pain-filled eyes, he exclaimed very softly, in wonder,

What is the price of a red rooster anyway?

A.Prasad is a writer and lawyer and lives in Kalimpong.