The Poultry Farm

Tender warmth cradles the egg,
The vigorous life that sprouts anew,
Carefully nourished, the ball of fur,
Thanks heaven for granting it's due.

Delicious feed she's served on a plate,
Conditioned to lead a life of leisure,
The rows of eggs she laid on Monday,
Were surrendered to them as their share.

Innocent and unaware,
In the grand illusion of paradise,
To the world outside the poultry farm,
She was being used in disguise.

In all earnestness, she tried each day,
To satisfy the worldly demands for more,
With age, when she failed to produce,
Was sold for slaughter as a useless whore.

Fluttering on the butcher's plate,
The glittering knife was rising high,
She awakened to the harsh realities,
As her warm blood sprinkled by.


- Indradeep, July 5, 2008

Moral Science in America -4

 Suddenly, someone screamed. It was Venkat. His wrist was bleeding. Binoy had sunk his non-vegetarian teeth straight through the veins.

Venkat jumped in pain and seemed to regain his senses. He looked more horrified than his victims. 

Binoy stood up and blinked. He seemed horribly shaken. He looked at me, pale as a sheet and breathing hard.

' O dear,' He said. 'I hope that thing doesn't get septic.'

My brain became available to me again.

' The lamady', I mumbled.

'What?' He asked.

' The landlady, you should tell the landlady. She's also a doctor.'

So we went downstairs and explained everything to the landlady. She banged on Venkat's door and forced him out. The wound wasn't going to get septic, she said.

' If you kids are telling me the truth, you better go to the police you know'

So we did. The police weren't moved by this tale, they had seen and heard far worse. But one of them pointed out that if one eventually managed to kill the other, the police might get into trouble, so they decided to go investigate.

They knocked on Venkat's door and asked him what had happened. He pointed to the fresh bite marks on his wrist and said, 

'You see this officer? this is the only problem here.'

'Really', Said the officer, "but why did he bite you in the first place?"

Venkat didn't have the balls to fabricate a story. Or perhaps, he thought his honesty would be received with understanding. 

"You see officer, this guy here, he's weird. He isn't like us normal people. So I decided to show him a little lesson. He doesn't get it when I just tell him."

" Tell him what?"

" Tell him how things are done. He just doesn't do things like the rest of us. Like I said he's weird and things had gone far enough. So I decided to teach him a lesson."

Thats when I really got the wind of who these characters were in this story. Venkat and I...were the same person.

The policeman, who sat comepletely frozen till then and slowly rose up to his full height. He walked over to Venkat at an even, deliberate pace and looked down at him.  He pressed down on Venkat's shoulder and forced him back into his seat.

"Son," He growled. " You look weird to me. You don't hit people just because you think they are weird. If you so much as touch this guy again, you are going to jail for a federal offense." Then the police officer turned on his heel and walked out of the apartment.

Venkat went back into his room and slammed the door shut. Then he cried like a baby.

I still meet Binoy and Alan these days at the usual bars, although Alan and I have been broken up for a while. The three of us sit around and talk science or art or politics or take turns imitating Hannah Montana or came up with ideas to save the cheerleader. Binoy always orders cherry coke, burps out the gas and eats up all the peanuts, but nothing he does seems to bother me all that much anymore.  

Moral science in America-3

Venkat, the good, religious, true to Indian culture boy, hated Binoy the most. Once, after Venkat had finished his late evening pooja, he walked into the kitchen to find Binoy frying fish. He was pretty much boiling with rage. 

'How dare you' he said. ' I couldn't concentrate on my pooja because of that disgusting smell.'

' Well, this is my dinner today and it takes a long time for this fish to cook. Sorry man.'

'You don't understand. Do you realize that you are making my ceremony impure? Do you believe in God? Its terrible to cook dead fish during this time, it ruins the whole pooja!'

' Listen. I don't know anything about God, but I'm sure he'd rather not have me faint out of starvation. I missed lunch today and I'm tired so lay off, will you? I'll try to fry my 'dead fish' around your pooja times from now on. But this is my house too and God doesn't pay my share of the rent."

After that day, Venkat treated Binoy like an untouchable. He took great care to scrub and wash the stove twice before he cooked, he left the living room when Binoy came in with food no matter what he had for dinner, locked his room very noisily with a mean looking, heavy duty padlock and demarcated the easy chair in the living room as his personal territory and would purposely sit there with a large mug of tea starting exactly when Binoy would get back from work, ready to sink in and watch TV. Strangely enough, Allen, cow-eating, beer-guzzling, all American, all white, art-student Allen, was never subjected to any ill will, at least not directly.

One particular evening when Alan was out, Venkat came home looking furious. He had scored really badly on a test. He slammed his door with a vengence and went about his evening pooja with such a fervor that it scared the shit out of me. Binoy, who took the same class had scored better.

'It wasn't an easy paper,' he explained to me, 'I had to bury myself in the library for days before the test. He's being too hard on himself, he keeps a pretty tight schedule with his poojas and all.'

I expected him to sulk in his room all day but Venkat was on the easy chair like clockwork, to engage in his daily ritual of hate. I could set my watch by him. As he determinedly pretended to read fluid mechanics, Binoy turned down the sound and said, ' Maybe you should consider cutting down on all these meaningless poojas you know. I really don't know how you get any studying done.'

'Meaningless?,' he spluttered, ' Meaningless? You culture-less freak. Just because you scored more than me on this test....it doesn't mean anything. You just wait. You'll have to pay. You just wait!'

With that, he stomped off into his room. Binoy got up and sank into the easy chair and let out an obscenely happy sigh.

Then he looked at me a bit puzzled, 'Pay for what?'

It was the wrong question. Because all of a sudden, Venkat burst out of his room and answered the unasked, ' Pay, how?' question.

He grabbed Binoy by his collar and pulled him to the ground and started punching the life out of him. I screamed and tried to pull him off but presently wound up on the floor, sort of, wounded (I think). Binoy was struggling helplessly against this raging animal. Then, Venkat grabbed a cushion on the floor and began to smother Binoy.

' You think I'm wasting my time? Ha? Think you're smarter than me? You think you know it all? I'll teach you man, I'll teach you. Don't you wish you had prayed harder now? Don't you? I hate people like you. I hate people like YOU!"

I was pissing in my pants. Frozen. Rooted to the spot. I couldn't move, even as I was witnessing a murder in action. 

Moral science in America-2

This other flatmate, Binoy, had a habit of asking too many questions. I'd be watching Sex and the City and he'd ask me,

'Do all women really just want to sleep around?'

And I'd say, ' Of course not. Just sleeping around is not what these women are doing.' 

'Looks to me like thats all they do on this show. Do you know any women who live like this?'

No, but I did  know of many women who tried to live like that and many others who wanted  to live like that, just so that they could have all those shoes. But I didn't tell him that. What an idiot. Stupid, conservative oaf.

But again, that didn't fit either. He was neither stupid, nor conservative. He was a non drinker, but I had seen him frequently in bars around campus with other people who, in spite of having an economic advantage, didn't know how to dress. He always drank milk. He was part of the debating society, whose contests I liked to attend and he was always bold and maverick in whatever side he took, be it abortion (pro choice!), Iraq ('Bush is a jackass but Iraq had to happen'), prostitution ('of course, it should be legalized) or wheat grass juice ('Bullshit!').

 But still, when he asked me why I only used beautiful people to pose for my pictures ( A good photographer should be able to bring out the best of anyone, right?) or when he laughed about my boycotting the kitchen because it tied up women ('Thats silly, what are you gonna do about food for the rest of your life?'), my blood would boil and I would hate him with such a vehemence, it was all I could do to get out of the room. 

Alan, much to my indignation, liked the guy. They would spend hours discussing Carl Sagan's Cosmos or the life of Bob Dylan and such things and during these times, Alan never even noticed his terribly thick accent, how he had a tendency to stretch and draw out sentences and the really strange facial contortions he managed to pull while making the average sentence. I  felt embarrassed for him on each of these accounts and always worked myself into a severe disgust, especially when he directed his excessive rationalism toward me. 

He managed to find out (from me) that my parents knew nothing of Alan and once had the audacity to ask me what they would think if they found out. He laughed at me till his sides split when I couldn't tell that the cheap $12 wine from the corner store wasn't expensive French wine, as he had pitched it. The last straw was when he said that most movies these days merely entertained you while keeping you ignorant, I lost it. Nobody has any right to say that about  a movie with Christian Bale in it.

I begged...O, how I begged! I pouted, I tried holding back the goods, I did every thing I could possibly think of. But Alan flatly said no, we weren't going to move. Both the rent and the location were too good to be true. Then I screamed and shouted. If I had to stay, Binoy would have to leave. It was a strategy of overwhelming force, I planned my arguments against him, I screamed at him, I insulted him, his family and the town he was from. But nothing worked, Binoy barely gave me any notice and refused to budge. The rent and the location were too good to be true. Eventually, I started worrying that Alan might dump me for being a bitch so I decided to pipe down. 

However my issues with Binoy didn't hold a candle to Venkat's. 

Moral science in America-1

My first year in America was turning out great. I arrived here all set to get my diploma in photography and I met Alan on the very first day. He was already an expert with his digital SLR and was only happy to teach me more. He shared his apartment with two Indian guys whom I mentally classified into weird and super wierd. These guys had uncannily managed to find the cheapest place in town, a hole in the wall incredibly close to the university. They were both graduate students studying engineering and Alan told me that it had been I, who had introduced the possibility of Indians being non-geeks to him. At first I didn't know if that was a compliment.

Anyway, Alan and I had some amazing times together; I remember waking up to his 'sky collage', as he called his artwork on the ceiling, and thinking, that this was exactly where I had wanted to be, ever since those miserable 'Keralite-convent-school-of-the-sadistic-nuns' days and then a suffocating women's hostel in Chennai, as a visual communications student. I mean, I thought I'd had a good time in Chennai, we ruled all the 'cool' hangouts (you know, Bikes, Barista, Amethyst), hobnobbed with Kollywood starlets, stoned our brains out and even managed to throw in an internship or two between our hung over weekends, but this... this was different. All that madcap 'being young and wild' phase had finally passed and I was now settling into the real pace of my  real life. This was the real world and I was going to be everything I was meant to be. 

Alan took me to dinner at his parent's almost every weekend and they loved me. College was great too; we had workshops every alternate week with the greatest artists of our times; even George Lucas once gave a guest lecture. Rose, Juanita and Marie where my closest girl friends. We met for lunch every thursday and together, we represented every skin color in America. Yup, we were all so cool and cosmopolitan. I felt like I was living in Chic Lit and was eagerly awaiting the turning point, the one that would inevitably sweep me to my destiny.

But there was one thing that didn't fit. In fact, it was so jarringly out of synch with my perfect picture that I did everything I could to edit it out. Considering the amount of time I spent at Alan's, I was forced to share my time and space with Alan's super wierdo house mates. There was a Kannad fellow (or Kannadiga? I don't know), Venkatraman, who still wore the sacred thread, refused to touch anyone else's utensils, had an elaborate pooja set up in his bedroom and concocted cauldrons of rasam each day. Every other self respecting Brahmin I knew, had long since begun to live on Kentucky's Fried Chicken and worshipped only the Gods of Rock. Venkat seemed utterly uncomfortable to be living with two non vegetarians and constantly muttered complicated slokas under his breath, as though trying to ward off all the evil surrounding him. Alan and I stayed out of his way as best as we could.

But Venkat was not the problem. He could be dismissed as the comic stereotype. If this were a sitcom, he'd be a dislikable sort of Fez. Plus, he was bound to change; nobody could retain this sort of cultish devotion for long in America (Or could they?). No, the real problem was the other guy.

Sisters.

Calling it our hiding place,

day after day,

we made our way,

secretly and without a sound.

I  always knew they cared not,

but I played along,

stood on my toes,

and followed you around.

I knew not then as I know now,

that each reckless, loud step of yours,

only revealed,

 how you longed to be found.