Animal Kingdom

Ready to make a good impression at school I step out onto the street in tailor-made suit, neat headscarf and polished shoes. The gutter beneath runs red. Upstream, in the neighbouring field a butcher washes his hands and knife and a goat with a bloody neck breathes his last, bismillah.
Later when the makeshift abatoir is finished for the day and the bones put away a cat reposes there, replete.
Animals dead or alive are prominent here. Members of the livestock community take their place among the good citizens of the town, going about whatever business they might have with a purposeful air, turning right here, left there, if you please. I wander down my friends' garden path and their cow comes out to greet me; my colleagues and I plan a lesson and are interrupted by a goat who needs to get between our chairs; a row of children in assembly is scattered when this same goat needs a path through it; a bull outside the chemist's keeps me waiting till he is finished and ready to clear a path from the doorway; I arrive home to a goat and her family waiting on my doorstep.
On Saturday we took a trip to the river. While a horse chilled out up to his neck in the glacier-melt, I gazed across to the other side, a land of barren rock - brown as far as the eye could see. Suddenly from the west came three men, the proudest and happiest I have seen here, bolt upright, on handsome horses. The land belongs to such as them.
A lady I know from local aristocracy pours the nicest tea and serves it with cake. She talks about the state of education in the area, her land and its produce and local gossip. All is overheard by two silent Himalayan ibexes, heads erect, fur glossy, with horns to make a stout heart faint. Her husband, a big-shot in the world of shikar, hunting, got them, and these are the only two trophies she allows in the drawing room. "One can't go on sweeping up the hairs that do tend to fall, after all," she explains, then after a pause adds in a quieter voice, "nor tolerate them staring at each other with their beady eyes."
No, nor can one tolerate being stared at by beady eyes in the kitchen. In a land apparently beset by violence it is rodents that have been my terror by night. Why do they torment me, I wonder. Is it because while these 4 walls encompass our women's world, our fears - of disease, violation and destruction - are similarly proscribed? They shrink down, focussed on these tiniest of bodies. Whether this is it or not, Oh how I would love to see the river run red with their blood or a hundred tiny winter coats made of their hides.