Every Christmas season my money-minded maternal grandmother would travel down to the city by taxi, wearing her traditional starched white embroidered cotton headdress, with a fat duck or two in tow and baskets of freshly picked produce from her organic riverside farm to sell to my hopelessly outwitted father. Usually dashing drakes, the vividly iridescent, black and white feathered creatures with reddish carbuncles like over-sized ornaments on their long faces, would sit calmly tethered by a leg outside our back door, not far from our two dogs, their flamboyant eyes bright as rare jewels and we young ones would sorrowfully feed them boiled rice grains and vegetarian scraps from the kitchen, until the inevitable slaughter and Boxing Day or New Year feast.
I ended up feeling so guilty about the poor birds, I soon
