At first, like marble, inorganic in the dusty shack. Pulled from a pile underneath a rough-spun cloth, it had been set on this small, scratched surface looking fat. Bloodied. The unhurried birth of an abundant world. He turned to me (his name is Surendar Singh, he tried to charge me forty rupees more): “No skin?”
No skin.
He dug short fingers underneath the dimpled skin of the bird, bringing each side against each other by the knuckles, then curving them sharply apart, stretching the skin into a sail that caught the last dregs of cloudy midmorning light before splitting, wet and limp. He stripped it back, section by section, revealing meat that light dripped on and ran off like quicksilver in veins of blue and yellow, shining against its steady, modulated white.
Then the knife. A big, ugly thing. His only one but no mythic pride as we like to write into villagers about their possessions. He had not anthropomorphized it. It had no name and no history. It was his knife and it held rough in his hands.
A straight, dumb cut to crack the breastbones in an unsteady diagonal. Those hands again, stubby and strangely hairless, forced in together then wrenched apart, the torsion cracking open the chicken and spilling light into its center where the liver and heart lay. Deep, living colors. Jeweled offerings in the chest’s arched cathedral.
His work, in earnest, was done. This was a dead thing. Split, its insides open, lurid and glistening. Nothing hidden. Nothing deeper. He grabbed the seam of the crack with thumb and forefinger and bore down in even, unfocused strokes, scanning the body into flesh.
It was wrapped first in plastic, then newspaper. Handed over the bug-proof divider, straight into my bag, the blue-tinged light from my bag’s walls swimming over it until I drew the lid down and heaved it onto my shoulder. As I walked further into the market, I wondered whether the wild dogs on the way back would bark and bare their teeth and clutch at my heels. Whether they could smell what I carried and would follow.
No skin.
He dug short fingers underneath the dimpled skin of the bird, bringing each side against each other by the knuckles, then curving them sharply apart, stretching the skin into a sail that caught the last dregs of cloudy midmorning light before splitting, wet and limp. He stripped it back, section by section, revealing meat that light dripped on and ran off like quicksilver in veins of blue and yellow, shining against its steady, modulated white.
Then the knife. A big, ugly thing. His only one but no mythic pride as we like to write into villagers about their possessions. He had not anthropomorphized it. It had no name and no history. It was his knife and it held rough in his hands.
A straight, dumb cut to crack the breastbones in an unsteady diagonal. Those hands again, stubby and strangely hairless, forced in together then wrenched apart, the torsion cracking open the chicken and spilling light into its center where the liver and heart lay. Deep, living colors. Jeweled offerings in the chest’s arched cathedral.
His work, in earnest, was done. This was a dead thing. Split, its insides open, lurid and glistening. Nothing hidden. Nothing deeper. He grabbed the seam of the crack with thumb and forefinger and bore down in even, unfocused strokes, scanning the body into flesh.
It was wrapped first in plastic, then newspaper. Handed over the bug-proof divider, straight into my bag, the blue-tinged light from my bag’s walls swimming over it until I drew the lid down and heaved it onto my shoulder. As I walked further into the market, I wondered whether the wild dogs on the way back would bark and bare their teeth and clutch at my heels. Whether they could smell what I carried and would follow.
For two years in the US I was a vegan. I was happy, with measured joy meted out through buffalo chik’n nuggets, the soy blended to the exact consistency of my favorite childhood food, and the thick, vegetable stews, rich and bubbling, heavy chunks of potato and squash shepherding me through winters fraught with roast chicken and mornings of bacon. I thought when I came here, to Himalayan India to volunteer (at a Buddhist center no less!) it would ground me in my habits and keep me living, meat-free (which I still think is the most ethical way to do so). But such conceptions slip away easily, noiselessly in the night – especially when the first day the dinner served is pizza and you’re the only one who opts for it without meat. It’s hard to conceptualize from a distance what living a life in a place so brutally foreign is like. It’s far from happy or sad, instead only the kick-in-the-gut of alien. No matter if everyone is incredibly friendly at a party or you’re lying sick alone in your room, there is still underneath an undercurrent of being apart from it all. This, cultivated by self-pity, can transform into a distant and enduring sadness. Alternatively, it can be groomed into a sense of inner uniqueness and adventure. But neither of these is, in any real or meaningful sense, a true feeling; Instead, it’s just how this intimate displacement is rationalized, converted into something you can easily chew and swallow, that doesn’t stick like a ball of putty in the back of your throat. We know how to be happy. We know how to be sad. We don’t know how to be alone.
What else makes sense in this world that we’ve built? Where the emphasis is so much on connectedness, technological, social, familial, that even stealing away to the woods alone for a walk feels guilty? And we have built it. It is nothing to blame on a mysterious other, Mr. Zuckerberg and his Facebook, but by the way we, day after day, give into the creature comfort of togetherness, taking no time to examine its value or long-term effects. This is not to say togetherness is bad – there are the subtle, sweet togethernesses that wind like hands in a darkened theater – but that its position as the default and only proper way in which we should function has imprinted all our lives in discrete and rigid forms that ultimately work against our own freedom and happiness. There is a simple, starchy pleasure in just being with someone, not unlike a full bag of chips in front of the TV, but converted into the doctrinal basis of our lives, this togetherness becomes something clung to. You grow full and sick but keep eating, only for the animal rush of salt and fat. Any actual separation becomes very real and very legitimate rebellion. To be alone, to be a hermit, a wanderer, any romantic label that attaches itself to fundamental aloneness, is a revolutionary act. All our judgements of each other (and thus ourselves) ground themselves in relativism: “I am prettier than her;” “I am smarter than him;” “he may have bigger muscles but I am more charming.” To remove oneself from this joint web of connection through which all our judgements (even the most intimate) are formed is to invalidate everyone else’s judgements not only of others, but of themselves. When one person removes themselves from social media, from a town, from society, the entire construct is threatened, as are the judgements of the people who function within it.
This is no play-threat. Being alone, being truly and really alone, is no idle game. Here, however, we should examine aloneness. In the sense I use it, aloneness is not being completely disconnected from humanity, being a lama in a cave. Rather, it is detaching oneself from the ideological systems of togetherness (the family, the town, the social media platform) which impede ones physical and mental freedom. Now, you can still use Facebook, you can still be part of a community. But, you must mindfully reject the dogmatic principles such places are often premised on. Use Facebook but don’t be connected to the interface, to the need to post. Never assign real value to likes or comments. Look at the town for what it is: a collection or resources and nothing more. It can be left at any time. It can blow away in the wind. This is aloneness. This is rebellion.
This is not dissimilar to the idea of Buddhahood. And it’s undeniable that being here, attending Buddhist classes while working with the Tibetan community, has changed in some fundamental ways the way I view Buddhism. But this is not, in any way, a Buddhist view, though Buddhism is a completely valid path to it.
Rebellion is a bitter pill to swallow. Inverting your views, the way your life is structured, is an ugly, misshapen thing. But it doesn’t need, necessarily, to be fully swallowed. Just tasted. I am in no sense fully alone, though I am closer to it, far closer, and far happier with myself and the way I process the world, then when I was another high school student in the US (and here, my way of rationalizing shows through). There is value to it. There is merit to it. Reject the ideological basis of your world. Burn your fields. Salt the ground. Dance over it. Come back in three months and see what’s sprouted up.
Unfortunately, doing so also makes one call for a different type of creature comfort: chicken curry, made the way Dadi does, fragrant and thick, hot enough to dissolve any lumps in the throat.
We make it in the kitchen. The oil is hot and smokes as the chilies and masalas pop within it, their dusty currents swirling like mist in a seer’s orb. The smell is deep and hard and shines. We eat it hot on a mountain of rice. After stripping each chunk, like my mother, I crack the bones with my teeth.
Inside: marrow.