It is a clear, moonless night, with many stars visible in the sky. The night is chilly, and the air, still. Orion has just risen over the horizon, but has an extra star, and it is moving fast, too fast for anything bound to the Sun. It is a blob of heavy metals, ejected by a collision between neutron stars, containing iridium, neodymium and tellurium in small quantities, but made up mostly of platinum and gold. As it enters the atmosphere, it lights up in a fiery trail. Down below, is a primordial darkness, a rugged, shadowed plateau of granite stretching endlessly under the starlight. Jagged hills rise as black silhouettes with sharp, eroded edges. Sparse patches of scrub and thorn forest look like velvet-black carpets, peppered by small clusters of twinkling village lights. Desiccated and unyielding, the Bundelkhand Craton is one of the oldest pieces of continental crust on Earth, a classic Archean shield terrain made up of rocky outcrops and low plateaus.
Only a small grain of the fragment of a distant dead star reaches the surface. It smokes for a few minutes, then begins to cool down. In the morning, a curious, plump, ground-dwelling bird called a teetar begins foraging for food. It steps forward with short, deliberate strides on strong pinkish legs. Its body is rounded and compact, covered in camouflaging grey-brown feathers. The bird's tiny head is held alert, the dark eyes scanning constantly, and the short, stout bill parted as it listens for danger. It pauses near a patch, and kicks both feet backwards simultaneously in a rapid, shallow scrape, flicking away loose dirt and dry leaves to uncover hidden seeds or grains. The greedy little bird then darts its bill downwards, picking up a single golden grain with a deft sideways twist of the head. It tosses the grain slightly upward with a flick, catches it cleanly in the bill, and tilts its head back in one smooth motion. The grain disappears down the throat of the teetar.
In the sun-baked fields, where tractors coughed like old uncles and the WhatsApp group for the village panchayat buzzed with concerns about delayed monsoons, there lives a bird hunter named Billu Lal. When he was a little baby, he had light eyes that resembled a cat, which is why his parents and grandparents started calling him Billu. Nobody really remembered the time of his birth, but based on the best guesses, the configuration of the stars in the heaven had been charted, and the astrologer had indicated that it was auspicious to pick a name that started with an A, so he was officially named Anup. But everyone called him Billu, and so will we. Billu was a wiry fellow in a faded kurta, carrying a bamboo trap and a sling made from his grandmother's old dupatta. Every dawn he wanders the bajra fields chasing teetars, that were notoriously fast, and are said to be capable of outrunning even a politician's promise.
One morning, a long way from home, while sipping chai from a fancy steel tumbler balanced on his cycle handle, Billu spotted fresh tracks. These were not ordinary teetar tracks, they look like small impact craters. Each footprint had sunk in at least an inch into the black soil, cracking the earth. 'Arre wah' he muttered. He suspected that some mischievous person had casted the foot of a teetar in iron, and was making fake tracks, but did not know how shallow the tracks were. He followed the trail past the abandoned tube well, stepped gingerly past a neem tree that was known to house a legendary cobra called Buddha Kalu, so ancient that it had hairs, and into a field of the humble mustard, that was as yellow and pretty as a field of sunflowers.
There, half-buried in the dirt like a living boulder, stood the teetar. What it had swallowed was as dense as the fury of a mother-in-law, heavier than the guilt of a murderer. The bird flapped its little wings uselessly. Billu crept forward, heart thumping louder, but when he tried to grab the bird... phut!... his arms snapped back. He heaved, he grunted, he even tied his gamcha around the bird's leg and pulled like a bullock in a tug-of-war. The teetar would not budge, but Billu went tumbling when the gamcha slipped. The teetar blinked its greedy, beady eyes, conceded a bored 'teee-tarr', and laid a golden egg right beside Billu with a soft clink.
About a kilometre away, in his tree hole, Buddha Kalu reared up, hood flared, suspiciously examining his breakfast. This was not the usual frog or rat. He was hoping to hypnotise it into a mouse, but it was not cooperating. He coiled around it protectively, muttering in snake-tongue, 'so warm, but is it delicious?' It smelled of temple incense, and seemed to be humming faintly. It was a twin of the egg that was astonishing Billu right now. Buddha Kalu was unsure what to make of it, and finally decided that it was an adequate dinner. He opened his jaws wide, and swallowed the egg whole. All the white hairs on his chest and back began to glow in the dark, in a golden colour. Buddha Kalu had no way to know it.
The egg had a radiance that resembled the Sun shining through a jar of warm honey. The occupant of the seventy-ninth square on the periodic table has a shiny, strange colour, more vibrant and desirable than anything on a rainbow. It is the congealed blood of a dying star, a heavy residue of unimaginable cosmic violence, travelling across the voids between stars, enriching everything it touches. Most, but not all men are slaves to gold. Gold hides in the veins of the Earth like a dangerous secret. Civilisations have knelt for it, Pharaohs encased themselves in the 'flesh of the gods' to prepare for the afterlife, and the conquistadors massacred on a continental scale for it. Silver tarnishes and copper yields to a sickly green rot, but gold is incorruptible, timeless, a physical manifestation of immortality. Gold induces a thirst that cannot be quenched by even the ransoms of emperors. Alchemists starved in attics attempting to birth gold from lead and prayer. Even now, beneath the polite surface of finance, nations hoard gold in windowless vaults, stacks of gleaming bars, each whispering the same promise: I am the final measure. Gold waits, luminous and absolute. Gold is the colour of both the divine and the damned, the halo of the saint and the hoard of the dragon. Buddha Kalu was fortunately a snake, and was not susceptible to the same temptations or philosophical predilections as men. Lazy and satisfied, Buddha Kalu takes a nap to digest the golden egg.
Billu realises that attempting to lift the bird is a useless endeavour. 'Arre even Hanumanji would need a crane for this task'. But the fresh golden egg at his feet, warm and fresh is appealing. He wraps it in his gamcha, tucks it under his arm like a cricket ball, and begins to cycle on his creaky BSA SLR bicycle. The road was long, about twenty kilometres of potholes and political posters. He began pedalling, pushing off with one foot. The old BSA creaked like an arthritic uncle as the slightly rusted chain clanked into motion. The golden egg, warm and secure in his gamcha, sat against his ribs like a secret too heavy to share. The first few kilometres were fairly easy, a mostly gentle downhill slope towards the highway.
The road soon turned mean. Potholes began yawning, forcing Billu to frequently swerve, cursing softly. He had to stand on the pedals to hop over the worst of them. The dust rose in lazy plumes behind him, catching the orange from the setting Sun. Every few minutes, he glanced down at his precious bundle, half expecting it to start humming or glowing through the cloth. It did neither, it simply weighed a bit more than an egg that size had any right to. The bike was doing something odd and satisfying, that it had never done before. Whenever it went over a small pebble or rock, the stone would burst in a puff of sand, and become flat. Billu did not know what was happening, but it as satisfying as popping bubble wrap.
The landscape flattened into an endless expanse of cracked earth and thorn scrub. It was the kind of emptiness that makes a man feel small. There was a distant village out on the horizon. A pack of dogs appeared from nowhere, shadowing him for a stretch, their eyes reflecting his cycle lamp in pairs of yellow coins. Billu rang the bell once, a sharp, theatrical trinnng-triiing, that made some of the dogs jump and they all peeled away, disappointed. Overhead, the sky had deepened into a velvet purple, and Orion was already rising above the horizon, this time with no extra star. The only sounds were the rhythmic squeak of the chain, the hiss of tires on loose gravel, the occasional pop of a rock getting pulverised, and a stray, lonely bark echoing across the plateau. Billu's thighs burned, sweat soaked the back of the kurta, and the golden egg stayed cool against his skin, as though it remembered its cold origins.
At the base of a small inselberg, Billu stopped for a rest. He was tired, and he needed a break. He hid his cycle at the base of a trail, and climbed up the hill. At the top, he took out his small chillum, meant for solo operations, and filled it with herb. And then he took first fired a match to burn a clump of coconut hair, and then used the coconut hair to light the chillum, but only after intoning loudly, 'Har Har Mahadev!' Then he took a few deep drags and appreciated the landscape, under the sliver of a New Moon. Deep ravines and dry riverbeds cut across the undulating surface like inky scars. The eroded granite domes seemed like timeless sentinels. And then a movement caught his eye, forcing Billu to lower himself to the ground. And then he saw it, something magnificent and spotted emerging from the woods. It looked like a small horse, and it was unlike anything he had seen before. It was a hyena, evil and menacing, and it scared Billu. He was frozen for a few seconds as the Hyenea looked around, and then darted back into the vegetation. Billu, scared out of his wits, quickly ran down the hill, grabbed his bike, and began pedalling furiously down the road.
Kilometre after kilometre, the road began to punish him. An upslope arrived without warning, a long, shallow rise that felt like trudging through a sea of honey. At times Billu had to get down and push. A truck thundered past, impatiently blearing its horn, with the slipstream pushing him sideways. He muttered a long string of a nonsensical inventive gaali under his breath, specifically the wing of the insect that goes and dies in the machine used to make the ink for the labels on rat poison, then laughed at himself. By the time the slope eased, the night had settled in completely. The stars in the sky above reminded him of grains of rice. If only he could eat them all. Hunger and fatigue had decided to play tricks on him. He pedalled on, but for only a little while.
The upslopes were killing him, and his stomach began grumbling. Now Billu was a simple man with a simple philosophy. If you got hungry, you eat. There was only one thing on him that he could eat. Now many other people would have contemplated consuming such a rare, precious thing, but not Billu. The simple matter of hunger, in his opinion, took priority over any considerations of the uniqueness of the egg, and its spectacular metallic golden colour. So, Billu decided to make an omelette out of the golden teetar egg.
Under a banyan tree, near the highway where trunks honked like impatient ladies, Billu built a small fire with dried cow dung and broken twigs. His tempering pan was big enough for the omelette from the egg of the small bird. He whisked it with a pinch of salt, green chilli, and some jeera. A rich, juicy fragrance rose. This was liquid gold being cooked. Billu ate the omelette in reverent silence, straight out of the pan. His eyes lit up in a golden sparkle. He shouldered his empty trap, and pedalled into the night, but not before looking back towards the distant mustard fields. Somewhere out there, was a teetar that laid golden eggs.
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