Why Did That @#$%*& Chicken Cross The Road!

Lakhimpur, Assam. 1996.

“What d’you want for your birthday?” asked Bruce as they cycled home from school.
 “A girlfriend,” replied Amit promptly.
 Bruce turned to Siddharth and said, “Buy him one, will you?”
 “We could if we contribute fifty bucks each,” said Siddharth. “For half an hour. Actually, two minutes should be enough.”
 “Piss off,” said Amit.
 The cycle that Amit was riding, a Rockshox, was a birthday gift from his parents, given to him a couple of weeks before his actual date of manufacture because his previous bike was in such a state that Bruce had named it ‘Jaan Ki Baazi’.
 Jaan Ki Baazi was a hand-me-down ladies’ cycle from Amit’s elder sister, who used to take good care of it, but it had fallen into neglect in Amit’s hands. For one, its handlebar had become so very loose that it would, without reasonable notice, suddenly rotate 180 degrees in its socket and throw the rider off balance. The left brake cable was long gone and the right one was working at 10% efficiency, as a result of which the bicycle’s main skill was overshooting all targeted parking spots. It was a bull and Amit was the only matador capable of riding it. Any thief trying to steal Jaan Ki Baazi would likely find himself chewing tar and gravel without a few front teeth before he had stopped looking over his shoulder. If, that is, the seat hadn’t already fallen off and the seat rod underneath hadn’t dug him a fresh orifice.
 “And don’t feed us mutton, please,” said Bruce as they crossed the railway track at Nakari. “Chicken. Number one choice is of course pork, but your folks would probably throw you out of the house.”
 Amit was about to say something when a chicken crossed the road. Till this day, whenever anyone makes any why-did-the-chicken-cross-the-road jokes, Bruce and Amit immediately have a flashback of that particular chicken crossing that particular road.
 Amit’s Rockshox was one of the first bicycles to come with shock absorbers. Before this, he had been riding Jaan Ki Baazi, which, being a ladies’ cycle, was minus the top front tube so that skirt-wearing girls could mount and dismount easily. Amit had gotten used to dismounting the same way. Now, muscle memory is usually a wonderful thing. With practice, your legs ultimately execute that hook kick without conscious thought and your fingers automatically find the right notes on the guitar. But in this particular case, Amit’s leg muscles were used to getting off from the front instead of the back like one would normally do on a gents’ bike.
 Chickens are an exceptionally silly species. The expression ‘running around like a headless chicken’ is rather mystifying because a headed chicken runs around just as stupidly as a headless chicken. They run across the road for no good reason when there are millions of vehicles zipping by, when the sensible thing to do would be to just stay put and wait for the signal to turn red. And they run in a straight line in front of a car in the same direction when they could just as easily take a few quick steps sideways, get off the road and out of harm’s way, and then start roundly abusing the driver with the choicest of words like any normal citizen, preferably once he’s out of earshot.
 It was one of these mental chickens that had suddenly decided to make a quick dash for it, oblivious to or in spite of the fact that dozens of cycles were on the road. The chicken had almost made it when Amit’s front wheel swiftly rolled into view.
 With a yell, Amit hit his brakes hard, and, as was his wont, tried to stop the bike and get off from the front. Now if you’re a lady on a lady’s cycle and you dismount from the front, it’s all right. If you’re a boy on a lady’s cycle and you dismount from the front, that’s still okay. But if you’re a boy on a gent’s cycle and you try to dismount from the front, there lies a pretty solid tubular obstacle of steel that comes in between your legs…
 What’s the correct sound effect for the situation? Plonk? Thunk? Pschhhh? Krunch? Boink-boink? Never mind.
 Amit’s mouth sprang wide open in a silent scream of anguish. This was followed by a few shouts and yelps of extreme distress. Getting hit there with even a pillow is an unpleasant enough experience; a steel pipe is exponentially worse. The weird thing is, when one gets bopped in the nut sack, the pain isn’t felt there itself but a few inches higher, where the ovaries would have been. Maybe it’s Mother Nature’s own little inside joke.
 Almost all guys find sadistic pleasure in their fellow males getting socked in the family jewels, and Bruce and Siddharth were no exceptions. They sympathised with Amit, but for the moment, laughter was their primary reaction.
 “Blasted #@$*& chicken,” said Amit when he had recovered enough to speak. “I hope his feathers are plucked one by one and he’s roasted alive over a slow fire.” And his friends laughed even more. “Shut up, assholes!”

 A few days later, Siddharth gave Amit a nicely wrapped box as a birthday gift. Amit unwrapped it and found another box inside. He opened that too and found yet another box. “This is very lame and unfunny and done to death,” he said.
 The third box contained the actual gift.
 Two ping pong balls and a banana. And a note.
 Amit didn’t find it funny at all. Bruce found it worthy of a few laughs. Siddharth himself was hysterical.
 The note said, “Spare parts for the dry times.”

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