She kept opening the oven door and poking at the chicken with a fork. She was impatient. The chicken was neither too big, nor too small but of moderate size – exactly as the kala iilam had instructed. She had got up at dawn and wrung its neck herself. Eventually the chicken was ready and, putting it on a plate, she carried it across her fully modernized kitchen to the table beside the window. She proceeded to eat. She needed to consume every piece, every scrap of flesh, very fast. Her eyes remained dull but her teeth chomped away in an energetic manner and she tore at the chicken with her bare hands. Her fingers with their long red-painted nails – not unlike Kali’s lolling tongue in the black statuette on her shelf – glistened in the sun. It looked as though she ate greedily but in fact she hardly noticed what the chicken tasted like; that was not the point of it. She tried not to think of anything, that had been the other instruction. Following the instructions was of paramount importance.
