The good, bad and ugly meet again
Aditya Rishi

MANY years after their parting shots, the good, the bad and the ugly decide to meet again in the Wild, Wild West, this time in peace. The pianist, as ever, stops playing on seeing the good enter the bar. "Don’t kill the pianist, he is doing his best": the good reads from the sign on the wall behind the piano. Everything seems perfect. "Bang! Bang! Bang!" his gun makes three requests. The first shot blows the cork off a bottle in the hands of the barman, the second makes a wine glass drop from the shelf into his hands and the third is the signal for the pianist to play on.

The good has just settled down and lit a cigar when it is cut to half by an unwelcome bullet. "You are still good," says the new shooter. The good relights the cigar from where it has been cut and, without looking at the shooter, says: "You are still ugly." The pianist has barely resumed playing when he has to stop for the third time, for another cowboy of the shooting type seems to have entered.

"Now what?" the ugly throws a question across the table to the good. "Seems bad to me," the good shoots back. The bad corks his rifle and gets ready to shoot them all, seeing which, Gringo good and Gringo bad jump out of their chairs and call out his name. "Sentenza!"

"The man with no name, good! Aha! Tuco Benedicto Pacifico Juan Maria Ramirez, isn’t that ugly," says Sentenza, Angel Eyes. "Don’t reach for the trigger, Sentenza," says the good, "We decided to meet in peace. We had a deal, remember." Tuco: "Yes, it’s about those horses we brought over from El Paso, so that, Blondie, you and I could share the booty and be rich, Gringo."

The good possesses seven English horses, the bad has nine Arabian horses and the ugly has 10 camels. Unable to find a way to equally divide the booty, the bad and the ugly decide to kill the others and take all horses. The duelists look at each other and move their hands slowly towards their guns, in an ever increasing speed, while Morricone’s ecstatic Western music plays. The tension mounts higher and higher until, finally, it erupts, but not in a blaze of gunfire.

The good, first with the solution, says: "Each gives two animals, one to each of the others. We are then equally well off." ...and, as they say in the Wild West, the quickest to draw won, but we could never ever know the price of each animal and the total value of the animals possessed by each person, until now. (Shoot your replies at The Tribune or adityarishi99@yahoo.co.in)