Via The Telegraph, the kind of story we never get from most hot-zone countries: Man and mind behind mask. Excerpt:
Behind the cold, hard mask and dark goggles, Bishnu Pada Saha doesn’t find killing easy. Even if it’s for a cause.
His white plastic suit and silk-smooth gloves give him a sombre, phantom-like look as he goes about his job in a clinical way.
You cannot see if his face is set as he catches the chicken’s legs expertly with his left hand and turns the bird upside down. The fingers of his right hand tighten around its neck, twist it at 90 degrees and impart a sudden jerk.
Blood squirts onto his suit. In about five seconds, the flailing wings are motionless.
Saha drops the bird into a gunny bag and stretches his hand towards the farmer standing before him for the next chicken. He has no time to waste, hundreds of birds are waiting to be culled.
How does it feel to have so much blood on one’s hands? Saha shakes his head. He will not speak till work is over.
You have to wait till the gunny bags are full and the cackle of live chickens has died down under the peepul tree in the interiors of Uttar Hajampara, one of the 52 bird-flu pockets in Margram.
Saha takes off his Chinese-made yellow gloves, now turned dark and sticky with blood. Then the mask slips.
“Yes I do feel bad at times. After all, one is snuffing out a life every few seconds. But you don’t stop to think about all this while on the job,” the young father in his thirties says.
The first day was particularly bad. “I handle cows, I had never done anything like this,” the livestock development assistant with the animal resource development (ARD) department said.
“I felt sick inside my stomach. The Tamiflu we have to take as a precaution against bird flu makes it worse by causing nausea.”
He avoids talking of his current job with wife Chaitali and son Sourav, 7, at their home in Mayureswar.
“But when she mentions the TV updates and asks if I’m safe, my mind goes back to what I have been doing. Else I don’t even think about it. In four days, I’ve learnt to keep things within me.”
But he admits the job is scary. First, there’s the danger of being attacked – a culling team was beaten up at Nalhati a few days ago. The biggest fear is catching the infection, despite the head-to-toe cocoon of plastic from which he operates.
Given a choice, would he dump this work and return to what he does every day – help cows gets artificially inseminated? Saha just smiles.
