It is a clear, moonless night, with many stars visible in the sky. 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. Dessicated 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 small 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.
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. The upslopes were killing him, and by sunset, his stomach began growling. 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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