The Skyward Marta - 1

The gladdest birth that ever occurred in this planet would be the birth of Marta. She was the first one to hatch and freed herself from a tiny shell sphere into a giant, lovely world where everything is limitless. The egregious egg-born is however savvy, deeply reasoning, admirably humanistic when it comes to thinking and brain skills. She stood out from the rest of her poultry cohort. When every other chicken looked into the bowl for food and water, and the ground for insects, Marta always looked at the sky. Her beak pointed straight at stars like arguing with the constellation, the nose took a puff of air straight from the sky than the ground, her wisdom proliferated through deep search for the meaning, functions, and deployment of life. She often wondered why she deserves this poultry to live a life like this.

Marta, the sky gazer, carries the onus of human wisdom and the curse of being a flightless bird. Yet, her constant search for reason keeps her inquisitive, and her deeper understanding makes her truly compassionate and merciful

She had no learning on the purpose of her life, not even the faintest awareness that one day she would end up at a butcher shop. As time passed, her human-level intelligence slowly began to perceive the intentions of the actual humans. She starts to search an answer for her birth; she begins exercise to exit the poultry. With her clumsy body, and awkward feathers she repeatedly failed to take off, often collapsing into gutter, falling into the water bucket, muddying her once-white plume and only to be yelled at by the owner, Boris.

Boris strikes into the poultry, and shouts at Marta “Listen, you half-winged devil! You think yourself a creature of the sky, but you are nothing but a rat with feathers!”. He pins down Marta and stared straight into her eyes threatened to butcher her once she gains 7 pounds. Being almost culled, Marta squalled when released, clumsily joined the other chickens. Eka was her trusted friend, who brings tiny insects to feed her the energy needed for sky gazing activities. Fumiko was her diplomatic ally; warning her of Boris’s arrival, but only in exchange for part of Marta’s share at the feeder. Then comes Pierre, who overly romanticizes Marta, though her interests towards him have been less. She brooks his flirts only to get saved herself from rogue gang of Belgian roosters. In addition to these, there are many characters : the masochistic Malaysian Ayam, Hakim, then here comes the petulant Polish rooster Eliasz, who picked fights even when another chicken found a long worm. Then the feathered legged Brahma rooster, Rishi, who kills other chicken to assert dominance, and finally, then the shadowy ninja Sumatra Rooster, who challenged others to combat just for sport, because it can fly all above for a minimal long.  

Boris Poultry is a house of beasts: from the Malaysian Ayam to the Polish Kogut, from the Belgian coq hardi to the Sumatra Ninja, pugnacious and witless creatures born for conquest: of reign, of worms, of ground, and of chicken.

Marta’s life has been entangled inside the mesh walls housed to low-spirited, less-intelligent birds, otherwise a belligerent world. She hated everything in this universe : feeder lines, the plastic tray that jittered when food dropped in, she would have much preferred a ceramic plate on a dining table. She detested drinking from metallic nipple dispensers, longing instead for a cup or even a disposable can, she loathed the cramped metal enclosure overcrowded with chickens and roosters, and dreamed instead of living in a manor within a high-rise condominium. Thus, her desires are more human, infact at times she detest the nature of humans when she finds the behavior of Boris, and his imbecile and boorish sons Adrian and Nigel. Marta saw herself not as poultry, she always tried her persona equivalent to Jean-Jacques or Da Vinci. She yearned to read books confined to New York public library , or its equivalent in London. Marta would gaze at the sky and mentally absorb the grand mechanisms of the cosmos, accumulating a wealth of knowledge about the physical world simply by observing its objects and the forces that moved them. She studied human behavior by closely watching Boris’s family and the butcher, William.

Marta’s world is the structural testimony of heartless, chaotic, loggerheads, uncivil, uncouth, fractious, recalcitrant, doltish, irascible, voluptuous, sex-hungry, gluttonous, mercenary characters that run one over the other for pride, food, victory, sex, chic(l)k(d)(r)en production. Yet, Martha here with a sense of wisdom, being a gentle, couth, urbane, benevolent, witty, sagacious, ruthful, compunctious, and compassionate creature that both cares for the chicken in the slaughter line and thinks philosophically “what is war, what is love”? Marta is ambivalent when to realize if she is a human or bird, sometimes she denies both. She needed the skill of flying high, so she can escape this barn. She also refuses she is a human as she cannot make tools. Once again, she regrets for being caged mentally to decipher what material she is. Sometime wonders such a level wisdom or self-realization is itself a sin and onus for her.

To be continued......

 Anand ¥¥