They stopped him above Tista where the road curved up into the vicious climb called Kaazimaan-ko-ukkaalo: each armed with a long curved knife and the tallest dangled a black revolver from languid fingers. Are you, they asked him, the one that killed the rooster this morning?
The rooster. Funny how, after all these years, he automatically avoided calling it a cock. A knee-jerk reaction, he wryly acknowledged, acquired during his school days when the inadvertent double entendre had often made him the butt of ribald jokes. The red rooster had been poised for flight on the far side of the road, safely out of his path. He had seen it well in time but had been concentrating on bringing the Royal Enfield fast down the steep incline, its big four-stroke engine a threnody in second gear. The nervous bird, a picture of indecision, decided to dodge across the road at the last – and worst — possible moment. Brakes. Slight skid. Bike lurching, straight again. A squawk. And then it was gone. Leaving a note of querulous agony pegged on the staves of the warm morning air.
By the time it occurred to him to stop, he was half-a-kilometre away, pushing the bike recklessly around the fresh-baked farm cottages and into the cool of the dense teak forest that curled like a caterpillar along theleft bank of the Tista. Questions flooded his mind: should he stop, go back, apologise; had anybody seen him; ought behave gone back and made amends; would they be waiting for him when he returned in the evening. An ancient grey TATA hauling water to the drought stricken townloomed suddenly in his path almost sending him off the road. He eased the throttle backabit, grinned self-consciously andrelaxed. Getting jumpy, aren´t you, he chided himself, things could be worse.
It had been a good hard ride. Along the twisting NH-3TA through the Tista valley, the hamlets flashed by: Geilkhola, Rambi, Lohapul (´Iran´ to the insider who was always short of petrol), Kalijhora, Sevoke and he was out of the mountains, pounding over the molten highway that lay like a spear on the plain. Fifteen minutes more and into Siliguri — that sweltering town of iron and grease. Orders placed, purchases and small-talk made with the faceless white-clad hardware merchants and then it was time to go.