Extract
I was now leaving Shah Jahan's city and entering its oldest suburb, Sadar Bazaar, less well-planned, but as full of life as Chandni Chowk…I marched on, accompanied now, to my disbelief and to the delight of the traders, by a cow which was matching me step-for-step, which stopped when I stopped, and started when I started. I went down a side lane, followed by my new friend, who eventually ditched me in favour of a plastic bag full of rotting food. These were narrow lanes, with tall building, a series of residential neighbourhoods. At first all the residents, by the evidence of the nameplates and swastikas on their doorway, and the small well-tended shrines, were Hindus. Then at the end of one street, I entered a totally Muslim area, where many of the men wore white skull-caps and the women covered their hair in scarves; the nameplates were in Urdu and the streets were narrower. I had lost my way… At the end of the lane, I came upon a scene of slaughter the like of which I had never seen before. Now, I have always loved walking through markets, even Middle Eastern meat markets, and am used to the sight of flesh and offal, heads and trotters; eyeballs and bladders. But I was not prepared for this. After my first shocking glimpse, I looked down and shut my eyes as if not quite believing what I had seen. The air was suffocatingly heavy with the smell of fresh meat. Beneath my shoes, the street was sticky from the blood and viscera of cattle. I looked up a little, and a small river of blood was running past me, into a drain and the sewers of Delhi. I drew breath and lifted my head to take in properly the tableau in front of me. I had wandered into an open-air slaughterhouse. It was a scene of cruelty and comradeship, a giant courtyard of death and laughter. The human beings were mainly young men: noisy, showing off, shouting instructions, hurrying each other up, telling stories. Two schoolgirls, with ponytails peeping out from under their headscarves and with brown leather satchels on their backs, wandered through their midst, and the men leapt apart to let them through. An old man was hunched over his steaming tea, as if unaware of the series of human and animal dramas being enacted around him. And everywhere there were cattle in different states of life and death and incompleteness. The living cattle were silent and dignified. They were being unloaded, almost unpacked, from small trucks, and then led into what looked like garages, open-fronted, where they were lined up in rows. All of them facing in the same direction. The young men started at the front, with the buffalo nearest the street. One of them grabbed it by the tail, the other by the head, and forced it to lie on the ground. It looked up in my direction, plaintively, I imagined, a drool of gelatinous saliva escaping from its half-open mouth. With one upward stroke with his knife, the butcher cut the throat of the buffalo. Its body moved slightly, a gentle rattle of its rib-cage. Its eyes remained open, gradually glazing over, as it bled to death. And then the butcher moved on to the next one, which was standing, waiting and watching, with apparent equanimity. And so the killing was repeated ten times in this one building. Then another young man appeared and began removing the skin, the leather of the first buffalo, with a series of light knife cuts, and some tugging; he removed its skin as if it had been wearing an all-in-one wetsuit. Within minutes, the cattle had been cut up into pieces and sorted into neat piles. Skin, ears, hooves and intestines on one side. Tongues, flesh and offal on the other.
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