A Crook Cook: No matter what, no matter is lost!
Once I was an ardent worshipper of Arnab Ray's way of letting his thoughts flow in 'random thoughts of a demented mind', now called 'greatbong.net'. His thoughts were far from random and his mind couldn't be more organised. But when I attempt to substantiate my thoughts in black and white, I seriously feel my mind is goi g bonkers or else why will it lollop along with chicken legs and dance with lentil dollops in seething oil. And even then, I'd make it do to quell my qualms and keep writing. Here it goes again...
It seems only yesterday, and in reality it was, that the chicken legs were striding and scuttling across the shed they called home. Being a noble breed with enviable pedigree and fancy epithets of 'organic' or 'free-range' chicken, they didn't deign to consort with broilers, reared in cages of factories. But will they live to tell the tale of how nothing matters in the end?
The freedom, the sunlight, and dirt-baths, that they so enjoyed since they were three weeks old and self-reliant enough to fend themselves from predation, were cruelly snatched from them. No more mollycoddling; a sea of them hung upside down in shackles. A pair furrowed their feathers at the lack of discrimination between 'free-range' and 'broilers' while another curled into a sepulchral smile that could only mean - how does it matter; pray the 'big blackout' renders us totally unconscious.
There was a blackout (read electrical stunning) and the next thing the legs knew was that they got numb, immobile. Now expendable, the hocks were hacked. Their haute couture of fluffy white down feathers was removed through evisceration - it felt a bit raw, equal potions of discomfort and relief like recently clipped overgrown hair (and we all have had a taste of it during lockdown due to Covid-19). The only saviour - they all were together in it and watched each other in glee as they got all washed and cleaned, and graded. The ones that weren't 'condemned' got packaged as 'lovely legs', some as 'value-pack drumsticks' while others were bagged as a whole; a few more waited their turn. A trickle of trepidation later, their batch was chucked into a machine that sliced and diced them to be packed into 'RSPCA approved diced legs 500g', whatever that meant, and shoved into freezer. Skinned and boned, (bemusing nuance when compared to armed, clothed, spectacled, let alone pitted and cored) they were chilled to the 'sinew', with no bone left to be chilled to. Sitting there, distraught in the dark, but contented of being together like a nuclear family that has drifted from its joint one, they mused on their journey.
At the break of a ray of LED light, by which time they had traversed from the abattoir to supermarket via distributor, they beamed at their reflections on shiny steel shelves. It was overwhelming to rejoin the ones they got separated from last night, blissfully ignorant that the joy was only momentary!
Moments later, their packaged neighbours started disappearing ominously and a fresh sense of consternation gripped them. Finally, after what seemed ages, the lights of the shelves were just turning off when their tray was grabbed and stowed away to be placed on a conveyor belt. A blinding red light and an electronic blip later, they were see-sawing in a shopper's bag along with a motley stash, the chill ebbing slowly. It wasn't long before the dices found themselves in an etched glassware, sloshing in satay sauce. How long they were brined, they couldn't have known. Dazed and dizzy, the bowl with them ended up in the ruddy bowels of an oven. Eons passed, forty minutes in actuality, they yawned and turned, enjoying the heat!
But as fate would have it, the lazing didn't last long. They were extricated from the oven to join a panoply of platter that had been prepared to placate rumbling pot-bellies. Out of the frying pan into the fire - that phrase from Hobbit could be rephrased as out of the eating plate into the sinuous oesophagus, of course not without a crunch and a munch.
Like cullet from glass-crusher, they got pulverised into smithereens. Down, down, down they plummeted only to bounce off the floor of a huge dark sack, whose walls crushed upon them like hammer on anvil. They, or rather what remained of them, frantically whirled and swirled to escape the nightmarish mayhem and in the commotion got segregated in an orchestrated manner. One eyed monsters (they are - check the images of intestinal epithelium cells and you'd know why) pilfered them to assimilate all the important extracts they held, thrusting them down further like inmates in internment. Their sojourn through the rest of the gullet was exacting and yet there was always an end. Like a molecule of sugar retains its properties, so did the remnants of the leg pieces when they finally tasted emancipation through the last indispensable elite orifice of the GI track!
That whit of excitement literally went down the drain through an U-bend. Egregious to write, but not half as much disgusting if you're accustomed to Moaning Myrtle's abode. Harry Potter just seeps in my thoughts and writings at the hint of anything close to it. The dandelion like neuron cells pass the signal to a monumental web - one like joined webbed feet of frogs - that enmeshes a tender corner of my hippocampus where lies the titbits of the tome. If there's anything that J K Rowling has helped me with besides loving English, it's definitely cleaning that U-bend which isn't as much aversive as it used to be before knowing Moaning Myrtle. She drags me to Hogwarts, the wizened wizards, the wilderness of the Forbidden Forests, and invariably to the young energetic cloaked students with bright scarves wrapped around their necks, attending wizardry classes. By the time I get to think of Ron, Harry, Hermione - or rather Rupert's golden curls in GOF, Emma in full bloom at the Yule Ball or the innocent Daniel in his room under the cupboard, the cleaning gets done!
Apologies for digressing - where was I? Oh yes, the diminutive leg pieces - they slipped and slithered through a labyrinth of serpentine sewers towards Sewage Treatment Plant. The gates welcomed them warmly and as several doors opened and closed behind them, they got cleaned and purified - fit to mingle with the pristine cerulean sea. Finally the bright sunshine and the breeze, though too salty for their taste, felt refreshing on their face, inspite of being much different in form from when they had begun. And their bones? Someday they'd turn to dirt too - the bones, which they had cIung to for almost six weeks - could have been six years had they not been bred as 'meat chicken' (better still compared to male chicks among 'laying chicken' that are crushed to death on day 1 immediately after 'sexing'). The younger cohort would probably rootle out slugs and grubs from that very dirt or resort to dust-bathing in it to get rid of excess oil and bacteria off their plumage.
Irrespective of their climactic culmination/ denouement, if they thought their hapless journey and tedium ended there, they couldn't be more mistaken. Water cycle, respiratory cycle, circulatory cycle and a myriad of other cycles would keep them moving relentlessly like the eternal circadian rhythm.
Has anyone or anything ever escaped from this corporeal world in true sense?
No matter what, no matter is lost!
Dona, Sydney, July '20
I sort of reiterated Antoine Lavooisier's Law of Conservation of Mass Energy, bolstered further by the groundbreaking E = mc².
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