Know Your Enemy

There is something about this city's centres of power that smells overpoweringly of death. I cannot imagine what it is, or why, but it does. Rajpath, the perfect highway that dashes out under India Gate and zooms inexorably towards the President's Palace is an unlikely grave, but it was, and a supremely agonising one for a lone Pariah Kite a few days before January 26.

As I tempered my engine into a free 80 kilometres per hour, I noticed with a degree of alarm that a swathe of kites had begun to spiral dive towards a point on the road about forty yards ahead -- a distance I would cover in less than two seconds at my velocity. But before I could slam onto the brakes and swerve righteously onto the orange mud paths that flank the grand tarmac, a police squad car tore past me, my little vehicle almost banking in its wake. About a second to go before the meeting point. As I gunned closer to 90, I stepped past the police car and noticed just as I passed that the spiralling kites had almost hit, and then, a nauseous thwack.

The police car gunned right back past me, while I floored jammed my brakes, fish-tailing my car, pulling on the handbrake and getting the vehicle to momentarily threaten to turn turtle, before coming to a burnt-rubber rest in the middle of the line, turning all the way around. And there in the middle of the road, forty yards ahead of me, I saw the great bird.

I got out of the car and walked the forty yards as slowly as I could. The wind was icy cold. When I reached I found the kite, on its back, it's great yellow tearing talons grabbing at nothing, a gash torn into the bird from its throat, right through its great while breast right down to its legs. As I stood and watched, the bird, which had at least a four-foot wingspan and was therefore not a mere dying beast, felt compelled to emanate the most high-pitched screeches of a death rattle. A momentary pause of stillness allowed me to move closer, but I was immediately beaten back by a great flapping of its wings that made my hair fly and my trousers flap. The great bird's skull was smashed and one of its eyes was a singly bloody blob now. Out of its open, screeching beak came the semi-digested remnants of recently devoured prey. My guess is that it was a mouse, or at the very most, a small rat. There were bits of mammal tail in the bird's vomit.

I bent down and the bird flapped me away again, using its talons to tear out its bad eye and attempt to lift off again. But its gut had begun to give. A small pool of bird blood had collected around the creature as it made a final attempt to fly, took off for what was a supremely impressive second, and landed back, this time on its face, right in its own pool of blood, its nostrils buried under the puddle's surface, it's final eye shut. I must have stood there for another hour, because when I looked up, there was a newspaper photographer taking pictures of the bird and me. As he left, he said he would send me copies, but I'm not sure how, because I did not tell him who I was or where I lived.

Then I picked up the bird, by the tip of its wing and held it up so it was stretched to the limits of its great girth. It almost spanned the length of my body, and when I held it up, it made a final shudder of death-rattle before going limp, its talons buckling into its breast, the neck assymetrically and impossibly contorted backwards, the bloody eye still open and staring. I dropped the bird on a patch of cold grass by the side of the grand highway and watched. It was still alive, but I didn't think it would be for long.

I left, and went away to meet boring people in the centres of power for boring things and I told them about the bird. I think they listened because it was fun, but I don't know anything else. I thought maybe a final death-rattle would shake the great bird out of its impossibility and it might spiral back away upward. And with that comfort, I rushed back to my car and drove rapidly back to where I had left the great bird. It had been nearly four hours. If it was not there, the death rattle would have worked. Why the hell didn't I wait to see it, I thought.

But the death rattle hadn't worked. The bird lay there, just as I had left it, except that it had drawn its wings inward, probably to pack in a last joule of warmth before it died. I poked at it with a thistle, but it was indisputably over.

Something swam out of the air this evening between the Vijay Chowk traffic signal and the barrier police convoy before Raisina Hill and knocked me down onto the lukewarm tar. I lost what it was in the diffused plushness of terrible bright halogens on North Block, but, as I said, it was dark.

For three minutes, I stood to see if I would see again whatever it was that swam out at me, but I didn't. So after helping myself to some decidedly baked chatter on a group of men or women who had detonated plastic explosives in a Benares temple before heading for the river, I repaired to my vehicle which I had carefully installed between motorcycles in invisibly dark depths of the Vijay Chowk general car park. A mango tree rustled at me, so I blew smoke at its pale green mangolets.

As I bent to enter my automobile, I caught reflected in the swinging door window a quick dash of whatever it was that swam out at me in the space between the Vijay Chowk traffic signal and Raisina Hill a few minutes before. I can tell you without a faint pulse now, and it is no more a source of mirth now than it was then, that what I saw was no apparition. I very much doubt it was my mind playing tricks on me, which I notice it has stopped doing during the later hours. What I saw was also not a mirage, for the evening I remember now was quite cool. I think what i saw was death.