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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 o 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... }
°f ttle 'ane-1 came upon a scene of slaughter the like of .. C u ad ?ever seen before. Now, I have always loved walking fhl ? ’even Midd,e Eastern meat markets, and am used to
l u JL,° a.n? beads and trotters; eyeballs and bladders. But rtnum ~ pr®pared this. After my first shocking glimpse, I looked
\ Ul as not quite believing what I had seen. The air fCa heavy with the smell of fresh meat. Beneath my shoes, lirtlp WaS from the blood and viscera of cattle. I looked up a rhe was mnnin8 Past me-into a drain and
the tableau in^t of Hf,ed my head t0 UkC in pr°pCrly
< rii^Hd^ndered*nioan °pen air slaughterhouse It was a scene of
> an comradeship, a giant courtyard of death and laughter. T he 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.