It is always nicer to cut a pigeon when nothing worries you, when your morning will slumber well into a languid day-you want to sleep in the small, warm room outside the house. Your father sealed off an entire dalin on the western face, and created the room for you and your wife when you finally consented to marry a girl of his choice. Because the sun warms up the thatch, it is very warm in your room, and all the chili peppers that went into the watery preparation makes you sweat, and you slip into a slumber-that is how you want to enjoy your pigeon. Not this day, though. It is unfortunate.

Today the fog has descended earlier than usual, and it is punishing cold. You race towards the shrine under an ancient tree, but your toes are numb and gradually you feel the cold take away your fingers, the tip of your nose, your ears; until you feel fragmented and less than yourself, and in flashes between feeling anything at all, feeling like not even yourself. It is a punishing, cold early morning and you are already thinking of the blood and the meat. You want the smell of bothersome, stubborn small feathers burning in fire. Soon some of the meat will get cooked, and it will be such a warm aroma. Then you will cut it into pieces and slide the steel plate towards your wife, and you will immediately think of your room in early afternoon, and of the sweet corruption that laces a promise of an agreeable afternoon of love. That is what you still think, as you race towards the shrine, even though your heart knows already that the morning will be different.

Once you reach the shrine and hand over the bird to your elders, you will sit on your hunches to catch your breath. Then you will look at the short tridents tied with red and white stripes of coarse cotton, and the brown stains of animal and bird blood. You will see bare feet walking over the blood of a goat that is steaming just out of your sight, as the fog soaks away the heat in the carcass. It was sacrificed by a father whose son passed SLC, making them the only father and son pair in the village with that academic distinction. But you don’t know that, and there isn’t any way such thoughts would have occupied you, because you are working at once to bring your toes, fingers, nose and ears to life, and worrying about your wife, who won’t be waiting for you at your home. You remember those mornings when you did return home after an early morning walk in the chill, and found your wife in her very brief respite before the morning meal. Then you looked at her face and saw those large eyes you want on your daughters, all of them, and you were glad that you had finally given in to your father’s choice.

And you think of mornings when she came to wake you up-steaming tea stirring the walls alive to announce her approach. But it is foggy and gray, and bitterly, bitterly cold where you sit now. You want to watch the pigeon being killed. You must watch the bird bleed, because you must account for the redness of it. Your wife gasps for breath somewhere out of sight, but the redness of blood must penetrate the grey morning because you must account for this sacrifice.

If you don’t watch the blood spilling on the earth, how will you estimate what you have just sacrificed?

But, for the moment-look at how the morning settles on leaves and blades of grass and mossy rocks, and think of how you like your pigeon meat, and think of what promises the afternoon entails. Think of the smell of a thin bird’s meat frying in ghee, but think also of the smell that is plaguing you, which reminds you of green lights of the cavernous and mossy waterholes that seem to spring with vitality drawn from wizened, distant wombs. Inhale the gray of the mist; look at the redness of blood, and think of other deaths out of your sight.