When I was in India many years ago, I accompanied one of my cousins to the market so she could buy a chicken for that evening’s dinner. She instructed me to wait for her in the car while she ran into the market, so I did. Two minutes later, my cousin emerged from the market holding a plastic bag. She set the bag on the floor in front of the seat next to her, and we started home.
Now, as an admission of my total ignorance, when my cousin told me that she was buying a chicken at the store, I very much imagined her buying what I knew as a market chicken: a headless, featherless, organless chicken that came in a shrink wrapped bag. Keeping that in mind (and the fact that I was still a very dedicated vegetarian), you can imagine my alarm when the bag on the floor of the car began to softly and almost indiscernibly cluck. No, I thought. Clearly I am imagining that. I watched the bag for a moment, wondering if the subtle crinkling of the bag’s sides was a product of the car’s bumping along a dirt road. Um, is that chicken… I started to ask, when, as though sensing my mild horror (can chickens smell fear?) the bag started to freak out. By the time we got home, the chicken bag was expanding from all directions. My cousin grabbed the bag, holding it out to her side like, well, like a plastic bag with a frenzied chicken contained within, and hurried along to the backyard.
I didn’t see my cousin or the chicken again until about an hour later, when both emerged from the kitchen. My cousin was holding a platter of fresh (no, really, I mean fresh) kebabs, which, moments after she set on the table, people began to rave about. The perfect seasoning, the fresh spices, the juicy meat—I was the only person at the table not enraptured by the kebabs, because I was the only person at the table not eating the kebabs. Vegetarianism aside, I could not help thinking of how quickly and matter-of-factly that chicken made its way to the table, and how impressed I was by the whole affair. Forget buying a trussed and refrigerated organic chicken from Whole Foods, my cousin had just bought a chicken.
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