My Neighbor's Rooster Has a Vendetta
4:30 a.m., every day, directly under my window, with intent.
I moved out of the city for peace and quiet, and instead I got a personal enemy with feathers and a schedule.
His name, according to my neighbor Mr. D'Souza, is Sultan. Sultan is a rooster the color of a sunset that has been in a fight, all burnt orange and furious green, and every morning at 4:30, not 4:15, not 5:00, 4:30 with the punctuality of a German train, he stations himself directly beneath my bedroom window and screams.
I want to be precise about the geography here, because it matters to my case. Mr. D'Souza's yard is large. There is a mango tree at the far end, a compost heap, a perfectly good fence post with morning sun. Sultan ignores all of it. Out of an entire property of crowing locations, he chooses the two square feet of dirt below my window, every single day, like a man returning to the scene of a crime he is proud of.
The first morning, I forgave it. Charming, I thought, half asleep... Rural life. Authentic. I had just left eleven years of city flats, where the ambient noise was traffic, other people's televisions, and a couple upstairs who rearranged furniture at midnight like they were solving a puzzle. A rooster felt almost literary.
By the fifth morning I was standing at the window at 4:32 in my underwear, hissing threats at a bird.
I tried everything. I am not exaggerating for effect; I kept a list, because by week two this had become the central project of my life. Foam earplugs: Sultan went through them like they were a suggestion. A white noise machine: he simply crowed louder, and I swear he added a new note at the end, a little upward flourish, as if to say, is that all. Heavy curtains: sound is not light, as it turns out.
Moving my mattress to the far room: he relocated. I want that on the record. I moved, and the bird adjusted his position accordingly, to the window of the far room, which faces a completely different part of the yard.
That was the morning I stopped calling it noise and started calling it a vendetta.
I went to see Mr. D'Souza about it, rehearsing a firm speech on the walk over. He is seventy-something, wears his reading glasses on a string, and opened his old blue door holding a cup of tea like he had been expecting me since the day I moved in. Before I could deliver a single rehearsed sentence he said, He likes you, you know.
I said that with respect, this was not what liking someone sounds like.
He said, He only does the window thing for people. He did it to my wife for sixteen years. When she passed, he stopped for a month.
Then you moved in.
It is very hard to continue a firm speech after that. I drank the tea he gave me and went home with a jar of his lime pickle, having achieved nothing, negotiated nothing, and somehow thanked him twice.
The war continued. I complained about Sultan to everyone. He became my best material. Colleagues on video calls heard him mid-meeting and started asking after him by name, how is Sultan, before asking how I was. My mother, on the phone from the city, took his side entirely. A rooster is an alarm from God, she said. You have never once woken up on time in your life. This is also true and also not the point.
Then, one Tuesday in November, 4:30 came and went in silence.
I woke up at 4:41 anyway, because apparently my body had signed a contract without consulting me. I lay there in the dark, listening to nothing... and the nothing was enormous. I told myself this was victory. I made coffee at 5:00 in a quiet kitchen and could not explain, even to myself, why the quiet felt like a room with the furniture missing.
Silence on Wednesday... Silence on Thursday.
On Friday I did something I am still slightly embarrassed about: I walked to the fence in the grey half light and called his name. Nothing... The yard was still. Mr. D'Souza's blue door stayed shut past eight, which had never happened, and his newspaper lay in the yard getting damp.
His daughter answered when I knocked. Her father was in the hospital, a fall, nothing broken but they were keeping him for observation, and she was going back that morning and could not keep coming out here to manage things.
Then, from somewhere behind the house, one small, hoarse, half-hearted crow. Sultan was sitting in the dust by the back step, deflated, feathers dull, looking at the door the way a dog looks at a door.
You can hate an alarm clock for a year and still be lost the first morning it does not go off. I heard myself say, I can feed him. I live right there. It is no trouble.
It was, for the record, enormous trouble. Sultan accepted food from me the way a king accepts taxes, with contempt and a sense of entitlement. But every morning for two weeks I let myself into that yard at sunrise, filled his dish, changed his water, and stood there while he ate, and on the fourth or fifth morning I realized I was talking to him. Full sentences. Updates about Mr. D'Souza's recovery, complaints about my job. He would tilt his head and fix me with one mad golden eye like a tiny disappointed uncle, and honestly, it helped. I had lived in this village for four months and those conversations were the longest ones I was having outside of work. I wrote about that eventually, about how loneliness can wear a costume for months, mine had worn irritation, and how you sometimes only spot it when it molts.
The rooster was never keeping me from sleeping. He was keeping me from pretending I lived here alone.
Mr. D'Souza came home on a Saturday. I watched from my window, like a nosy neighbor, which is what I had apparently become, as the taxi pulled up and he walked slowly to his door. Sultan crossed that yard at a dead sprint, wings out, screaming, and did three full laps around the old man's feet. Mr. D'Souza laughed so hard he had to hold the door frame.
I found something in my eye... Dust, probably.
The next morning, 4:30 exactly, directly under my window: full voice, extra flourish at the end. Normal service resumed.
And here is the thing I cannot explain to my city friends. I smiled before I was even fully awake. I found a writing prompt once, on a page of them I keep bookmarked, that asked, write about a sound you hated until you understood it, and I filled four pages without stopping, which had never happened to me before. Most of it was about my grandfather's radio. All of it was about Sultan. New places do not become a new beginning when you unpack the last box. They become it the first time something annoying would be missed.
These days Mr. D'Souza and I have tea on Sundays at the blue door. Sultan patrols the fence line between our houses like it is a border he personally negotiated. Last month my mother visited and he woke her at 4:30 sharp, and she came to breakfast furious, and I heard myself defending him. He likes you, I said. He only does the window thing for people.
She looked at me like I had gone completely native.
I have. The bird won. Long live the king.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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