A rather early memory of spending time alone with my father was our visits to the butchers in the Laitumukhrah market. We are a loud, restless bunch, my family and I; each other’s omnipresence so deeply-seated in our lives that we still collectively refuse one another the space or the time for individually intimate moments. Back then, what we called home were my father’s little “Assam-type” lodgings in a quaint public school campus in the countryside, where my parents fended for themselves and for me. Solitude was scarce there, and even on Saturdays, when we drove down to the sleepy little town that was Shillong, the car remained swamped with the standard tittle-tattle of their jobs, even though they worked at the same place. Through the tedious, unmoving traffic, I barely ever had a word with either of them, while the stereo hummed some playlist my father would have carefully curated. A sequential tribute to Jim Reeves or perhaps Kishore Kumar—or with the coming of the Christmas spirit to the town, ironically, to Christ himself—played for months on end, before souring in his ears. In the backseat, sometimes, I would want to cry, like I would, when I sat in the corner of my haunted bedroom, perched lightly on the cold, melancholy sheets of linoleum that shrouded the crumbling cement beneath it, careful to not let my sniffles escape the crevices of the bolted door, and find my father’s ears.
The Laitumukhrah market, unlike other daily bazaars and marketplaces in India—as I have come to realize from all their chaotic disregard for sophistication and neatness—has always been somewhat elegant; a small, dark parking lot leading out to a relatively clean alley, each side of which has been dug into by lines of stores uniformly separated from each other. The lines each serve a purpose; one vending vegetables, another dotted with the local Bengali population buying overpriced fish from lands near and far. The two never intermix.
The vendors at the evening fish market are mostly young college going women helping out their mothers after classes; beautiful, siren-like, with faces that seem to have been sculpted out of a light pink marble. They sit enveloped under the white tubelights in an air that lets one know that they would never beg for you to bring your business to them, and that whatever you buy from them would be a favor they had done for you, and not the other way round. My family lingers among other Bengalis, and yet stands out amidst them, for we are regulars there, and each woman knows us well. Their betel juice laced lips stretch to their brinks in a serene happiness when they see my mother, for we buy their best fish, and choose to speak the white man’s English with a certain church-like fluency; a trait that always impresses these pious women, even to the extent that they give us a slight, very slight discount. But perhaps they also smile because we engage with them in conversation and ask them how they are, and we subconsciously embrace each other with a certain warmth, one humanizing the other while most choose to keep interactions within the transactional limits. It is here that we part ways with my mother. After buying fish, she starts walking towards the Marwari grocer whose father had many years ago left behind his village for the sake of partaking in a less exploited economy. He had sold pulses and wheat and ‘refined’ oil to my mother for half a decade before handing over the reins to his middle aged son and dying a peaceful death.
My father lights a cigarette once my mother is out of sight, and I follow him back out to the alley, and towards the lanes that trade in the flesh of dead animals. There are two distinct lines here too, almost like two conflicting nations overlapping the same landmass, separated only by a frail old woman selling clumps of coriander and red hot chilies. Along the back of all these lanes runs what perhaps is the spine of this slaughtering yet indispensable industry: the line of poultry shops, connecting the rest of them and bringing to the economy a certain secular stability. At the end of this spine sits a marble-faced woman. Her daughter had once been on the brink of becoming a doctor, but an accident on the Guwahati-Shillong highway had cut her life quite short, perhaps as short as the lives her mother trades in. The woman orders around two boys of fifteen, or perhaps sixteen. Their skins, a dark, rugged brown, their shirts soiled and dotted with caked blood and reddening feathers soaking that in—boys only in my eyes—having become men to the rest of the world even before they had been in their mother’s womb. Perhaps when the bloodied river that runs across this nation split in two had brought their father here in the search for a better life. Only two walls in the woman’s shop are made of bricks. The other two are crafted carefully from boxes of metal netting and flakey wood. The coop seems to come to life as we walk in, drawing quiet, heavy breaths, as the creatures inside sit in their feathery ignorance, occasionally clucking away as they chew on their feed, and brood amidst their own excrement. We tell the older of the two boys to not chop up the legs into smaller pieces like they do for most customers. It is a luxury we can afford. The woman mourns her dead daughter as she offers ‘kwai’ to my father, wiping her bloody hands on a blackened piece of cloth before she does. The lankier of the boys unlatches the small hatch on top of the coop, and the chaos begins. I am young, and as it usually happens, a certain gush of life colors my still supple cheeks. One that is not as disarming as what is to come later that evening, yet exciting nonetheless.
It is twisted, the way of human life, for each breath that even the most pious and kind draw are lent to them by those whose breaths have ceased to exist. Even the greatest among us cannot escape the blood on our hands. And when I, at twelve, smear my share onto my face and feel life gushing through me, it too is but a cupful that I have taken from this ocean of lent, borrowed and mortgaged breath. At that age, my life seemed to me like dominoes, the first of which had fallen only God knows when. I was already feeling a certain weakness, one that I thought would last perpetually and would only get worse with time.
The feeling did last a long time. It still comes back to me in flashes; in fact, this morbid, helpless feeling of being at the bottom of the food chain that human society is. And the loud restlessness of my family had always somehow managed to muffle any interest I had in talking about it to another person. So, oddly enough, it was this twisted, weekly ritual of death that I partook in that was one of my few escapes from the human, societal food chain, allowing me to step into the biological one in which I found myself more or less high up. And so when the boy gets hold of a clucking hen’s throat and pulls her out of the coop, I watch intently, not blinking once, becoming one with the resounding cries of her comrades and that of her own, feeding off of their fear much before I feed off of their flesh. The life that gushes into me begins to drown out all sorrow, the pain of unwarranted solitude, the pain of absolute loneliness, the pain of the dominoes falling perpetually and crossing the point beyond which lies only a dislike for myself and a dislike coming from everyone around me. The life that gushes into me is exhaustive. It is sans lust, and brimming with a sudden sense of strength and control over my otherwise powerless state, where the world makes no sense, and can make no sense out of me.
And then the neck comes off with a clean swipe, and the dark, rugged boy no longer remains a boy in my eyes, becoming a man again as he flings the warm, writhing body into a plastic barrel that shakes and quivers as it negotiates with the headless bird through the finality of its death, emanating power in each vibration of the struggling creature that it contains. For a moment, I have become the butcher. The blade that passes the sentence. The log on which I slaughter. The barrel in which I imprison the creature’s will to live even in its death. For a moment, I can conquer all. And yet, once the bird is dead, I feel unaccomplished. The creature was too weak for me to truly feel in power: a feathered bird with soft cartilages and softer fatty flesh, and barely any muscle. I do not find pleasure in the way it is gutted, or in the lack of struggle on the part of the blade as it cuts through the bone as easily as it does through the flesh.
My palms cup the heat emanating from the black plastic bag where the dead bird has been stuffed, and I bid adieu to the marble-faced woman, and the boys who turned to men. I follow my father back to the alley and step into the first of the two warring nations that were tangentially connected to the poultry line. The one in which our pious Gods conveniently do not forbid our presence, at least not as customers. In a few moments, we will shake our bloody hands with the damned butcher, a contract, perhaps unholy enough for any God who is not senile, to curse us with the same damnation as the butcher’s. But our Gods do not care. It is they who have crafted us, and our wants and our needs, and this bottomless hunger for the flesh of our fellow creatures. So our conscience is clear.
This nation is ruled by two tall, clean shaven brothers. They run the business and the blades, and do not require assistants to order around. They too pray on Fridays—and not Sundays, as it is the norm in the little town—and are true to their God in the way they take the lives they trade in. Unlike the dark skinned boys whose father had crossed the barbed wires like my ancestors, when these lands had been cleaved in two, the lineage of these two men is rooted somewhere in the more prosperous northern India. Now that I think of it, the older brother holds a faint resemblance to Nawazuddin Siddiqui, and is more invested in the business than his handsome younger brother. They are neatly dressed in black bomber jackets and dark pants; their hair oiled, and parted slickly along the middle. As we walk towards their shop, our eyes linger on the skinned bodies of the goats hanging at what is supposed to be the threshold between the buyer and the seller, their eyes seek us out and they call to us. My father smiles at them too, and with a certain strictness, asks them to not cheat us—as they still do sometimes, even after years of our loyalty—with bad, chewy flesh that won’t cook even after an hour in the cooker. My father has mastered the art of buying the flesh of these larger creatures, and I’m happy he brings me along to these trips, for one day, I too would have to master it. He carefully picks out the goat with the smallest thighs, teaching me how it is the most obvious sign that it is the youngest, and will have the softest flesh. Even though the creature is already dead and helpless, the mere fact that it is one of this size, a mammal with quite a bit of strength and intelligence that has submitted to my own strength, fascinates me for a moment. We ask them for liver and a pair of kidneys, and tell them to keep the rest a moderate balance of flesh and bone. And then the older brother slices across the hanging cadaver and carves out the parts we want. Again, I become the butcher, more excited this time as the sharp, sharp blade meets a slight resistance as it cuts through the muscular flesh, sans fat or weakness. It is satisfying the way the liver is sliced into smaller pieces with a feeling that the knife is making its way through rather fine, coagulated sand. But what finally satiates me is the cracking of the hard, strong bones of this mammal, like the sound of my own bones cackling each time I am flung back onto the cold linoleum on my bedroom floor, my tears gathering in my eyes like foam, my life gushing out of my body with them.
The deal is done. Lives have been traded, and now we head back home. I can hear my father talking on his phone as I step out of the nation that the brothers rule, and back to the clean alley. My father tells me to buy a packet of cigarettes, and asks me to hurry up, before disappearing. I am alone now, and once I have bought the cigarettes, I realize I would have to cross the old woman selling coriander and chilies, and unknowingly separating the two nations, and pass the one in which our Gods do not permit us entry.
For those many, many years we have spent in the town and shopped at the market, not once have we set foot into that nation, for we simply cannot. For our Gods have told us that even the air around it would taint our eternal souls. I wonder if their prohibitions make any sense, and if the existence of this nation is any different from the one in which I was just in. From the little entrance that serves as a portal to this forbidden nation, I see a certain darkness within it, with only a few yellow bulbs shimmering. Through the barred window perched on the right of this entrance, my eyes linger over the gargantuan and yellowing cow hooked and hanging over thick, chopped up pieces of the famed Shillong swine. These creatures and their Gods in conflict for the rest of the world, are being traded with a peaceful, democratic sincerity here in the elegant Laitumukhrah market. I wonder if the taste of such forbidden flesh would indeed burst in my mouth like stronger ointment that could indeed numb my wounds. Perhaps it would be a lesson for my own Gods. Those that have made life so pitiful for me. Perhaps it would be a moment so powerful that I could conquer divinity.
The thoughts linger in my mind as my father drives us back to the outskirts and towards our home, the stereo loudly playing the Bengali versions of Bhupen Hazarika numbers. It would be night soon and my family would noisily feast on the flesh that my father and I have bought, and my mother has cooked. The following week too would be lined up with delicacies carved from the flesh of fish and bird and the remnants of the goat. And before we know it, it will again be time for us to head back to the Laitumukhrah Market. For the hills are cold and in truth, it is the meat that keeps us all warm and satiated in our God’s twisted world.
Half a decade has passed since my last visit to the butchers in Laitumukhrah with my father. Half a decade since I have moved to the plains at the foot of my beloved hills—a land on the brink of a certain sprawling metropolitan spirit—brimming with people, the marketplaces here have none of the discipline of the lanes where I wandered through on the weekends of my childhood. None of the quiet, sophisticated grace of the marble-faced women, or the gentle calls from the brothers in the mutton shop. The traders here are desperate representatives of a saturated economy that makes them choose between their dignity and income. A choice I feel, that has already been made for them. My father has now aged. As have I. Perhaps a little earlier than I should have. He no longer asks me to tag along when he goes to the butcher. Often, he slithers away when we are at a market, and comes back to the car with the black polythene bag, and I only find out much later about where he has been. Sometimes, he asks me to go instead, when he has had a tiring day at the office or feels under the weather. I drive down to a market, which has no parking space, forced to park on the road before embracing the chaos. Yet, each time I stand before the now faceless, ever-changing butchers slitting throats and chipping bones, I become them: the knife, the log, the barrels and the blood drenched floor, sometimes wondering if I ever did manage to master the art of buying flesh off of the bodies of my fellow creatures.
