Authors: Altaf Tyrewala
My elder brother’s wife enters the bedroom. I hide the Change of Name form. She can read English. ‘What?’ I ask.
She wants to know if I will do her a favor. Will I please
go to the butcher’s and get a two-kilo broiler? It’s for dinner, my sister-in-law says. She’s making Chicken Baghdadi for the family.
‘Yes,’ I say. Why not? A visit to the butcher! Crucial decisions must yield to inanity. I’ll go.
Medina Chicken Mart is a street away from Yasin Baag—where I live—a ghetto of seven buildings and a mosque on the outskirts of a larger unruly Muslim inner city.
When I step out of Isaq Chambers, it is unbelievable how guilty I already feel. The three surrounding buildings are shaking their heads at me. The birds are fleeing from my aura. The mosque loudspeaker goes mute and, after I have passed, it returns louder, angrier, as if to cleanse the air of my name-changing toxicity.
I pass by my family’s Maruti van parked on the street. My father and two brothers drive the Santro to our filter-paper factory. I walk past Shabir-bhai’s shop; he is seated on a chair, contemplating air, oblivious to the worker beside him running a tile-cutting machine over a ceramic slab. In the flat above the din, through the clothes hanging at the window, I can see a woman bleaching her face. I pass by Inshallah-Mashallah Watch Repairers and nod at the grey-haired owner half-asleep in the evening swelter. Huddled around the tobacconist are my childhood friends, some of whose names I no longer remember, and all of whom I know have nothing to do.
I cross the street (the footpath I was on is blocked by a grey heap of garbage which the municipality seems in no hurry to clear out). I cut across a gully. I am now on the parallel street. Squatting on either side of the road are hawkers, their wares spread before them like guts. Most are smoking. Everyone is spitting. And hovering over us all are the absurdly amplified screeches of the muezzin beckoning the faithful to prayers. In a hell like this, I guess God too must yell to be noticed.
A Honda City glides by. I am reflected in its windows. The revulsion on my face stuns me. And I am doubly stunned by the disgust on the face of the man
inside
the car, in the back seat, staring out at what must seem just another filthy Muslim ghetto.
‘Catch it!’ a man shouts.
A chicken sprints past me like a Bangladeshi jumping the border.
I am outside Medina Chicken Mart.
‘Catch it!’ a man shouts again.
I watch the chicken flee, but don’t move an inch. No way am I going to obey some idiot and run after a bloody bird.
‘Mooove!’ Coming straight at me is a man in a vest and lungi with a cleaver in his hand.
I sneer and step aside.
Tomorrow morning I
will
go to the Government Press office and apply for my name change. Let someone else clean
up this mess, which is disgusting no matter where one is—inside a luxury sedan, or outside on the stinking, noisy street. I just want to be a successful lawyer. Mahatma-dom can wait another fucking life.
‘Moo…
…oove!
Out of my way! If that chicken reaches the street, it will be crushed under some car or scooter.
I’ll
have to pay forty rupees from
my
pocket while crows and cats enjoy a risky mid-road feast.
Where did he go? I check behind a hedge and inside cartons lying in front of APJ Paint Shop. I look under the cars parked nearby. Ah! Pukpukaak! Clinging to the axle of a Fiat, haanh? I drag the bird out by his wings. He yields to my grip. I hold him against my chest. A woman customer has selected this bird. As we approach the shop, the chicken starts to tremble. Crammed in the cage for three weeks, he has watched me carry his brothers and sisters to the back where I slash, de-feather, skin, and chop them into pieces as per customers’ orders. No wonder this chap wants to flee—he has observed and learned to fear me.
‘You sure you want this one only?’ I ask the woman waiting outside the shop. The way I am hugging the bird, she says, ‘Of course not, I’m not a monster! Give me another one.’ Just as I am about to put the freedom fighter back into the cage, a youth standing next to the woman says, ‘I’ll take it, I’ll take that bird!’ I say, ‘Are you sure? This one?’ My boss Jamal Seth says, ‘Of course he’s sure! Just give the customer what he wants!’ I shrug. Just a butcher.
I take the chicken to the back of the shop and press its quivering neck on the chopping board. It croaks, like a person choking on life. Man and beast become identical when death looms—no one wants to die.
I know. I have killed men.
Medina Chicken Mart is a halaal shop, not some sinful jhatka-house like those Sikhs have up north. Here, I slice chicken necks while reciting Quranic verses till the blood drains away and the bird has stilled. Why? So realization dawns on the bird as it meditates on its death. Mostly, though, the chickens meditate on me. As the blood escapes their gullets, they stare with such disappointment in their beady eyes that I feel like quitting and becoming a fakir. But I don’t have a choice; who will feed my parents, my wife, and our son? He is two years and nine months old. Doesn’t speak yet. Only gurgles and grins at everything like a simpleton. ‘Genetic damage due to excessive inbreeding,’ the doctor had said while shaking his head in horror, because my wife is my
aunt’s daughter, my father is my mother’s uncle, and my wife’s mother and father are first cousins. Whatever. My son will improve as he grows. Allah is great.
A chicken’s heart beats even outside its body. I never knew that till I came to work here. In the beginning, just for fun, I had thrown a chicken’s heart on the floor and watched the purple kernel-shaped chunk pulsate and wriggle about, leaving a red trail like a snail. After some minutes it stopped suddenly, accusatively. I was overcome with such grief—as if the chicken’s soul, in passing, had cursed me. Since then, I pack the heart with the body or fling it in the bin behind me.
Every two months, coinciding with the breeding habits of chickens, the price of their meat goes above rupees fifty per kilo. Customers prefer mutton or beef. No one enters the shop. I sit and stare at the livestock. What else to do? The cage has five levels. The chickens in the top row are fresh arrivals. They come from the farm in a round wicker basket, twice a week, ten at a time, clean and calm and unsuspecting. They gape like awestruck villagers, not understanding why the old-timers in the racks below are so noisy and difficult. As they begin their row-wise descent to death, these new chickens, worn out by heat, fear, and lack of space, gradually become restless and cranky, till at last they turn so unlovable as to deserve to die. I get attached to a bird at times; if it is especially comical or very weak like my Ziad, I keep it aside till Jamal Seth spots it in the cage and wonders why it isn’t
being offered to customers. He is sly; keeps an eye on everything, with a handkerchief perpetually pressed over his nose. Customers wink at me. ‘Where’s your Murgh-e-Aazam?’ they ask when Jamal Seth isn’t around. He is hardly ever there.
It is I who opens Medina Chicken Mart in the morning. On arriving, I step out of my shirt-pant and hang them on a nail high above the bloodiness below. I put on my uniform, then—a blue-checkered lungi and netted vest. My friend Mushtaq had said that in these clothes, with the cleaver in hand and black amulets around my right arm and neck, I look like an asli kasai, absolute butcher-man. Jamal Seth had admired his wit.
Now Mushtaq doesn’t even know when to shit. He has been circling the city yelling mother-sister abuses for eight years, ever since his laundry-cum-clothes-rental shop at Anjeerwadi was gutted by neighboring slumdwellers. It was the night after the masjid was broken. The night people stopped being neighbors, cobblers, tailors, bakers, vendors, or drivers, and everyone turned Hindu or Muslim, Hindu against Muslim. It was the night some Hindus wished they weren’t Hindu and most Muslims wished they weren’t Muslim. When the curfew lifted three days later, Mushtaq rushed out like other anxious businessmen. He searched Anjeerwadi for his shop, not finding it where it should have been, as if shops could be mislaid. He ran in and out of the slum’s gullies, refusing to believe that
that
fifteen square feet
of ashen heap was his shop. He has been searching ever since, refusing to believe. On spotting Mushtaq running by, I catch him by his grimy collar and drag him to a food stand where I feed him enough to last a day. Who knows when I’ll see his crazed face again?
I used to give my lungi and vest to Mushtaq for washing; no one ever asked to rent them, of course. Now a dhobi, a bhaiya from UP, launders my clothes and demands five rupees extra to ignore the gore, the stink.
It drives my wife Laila up the wall and over the roof. ‘Why pay that dhobi extra? What am I here for? I’ll wash your clothes!’ she says. But I refuse to let her. ‘Then tell your Jamal Seth to pay the dhobi. Why should we?’ she asks. At twenty, Laila understands nothing. How can I be petty over ten rupees for laundry when, in addition to my monthly salary of two thousand, Jamal Seth allows one free chicken every week? I take it home for the family. No thanks, no chicken for me. Since I began working here, I cannot stand aromas in my food. So no chicken, no onions, and no garlic. My meals consist of boiled vegetables. If my food asserts itself at all, I vomit. If Laila applies perfume, I thrash her. Like bakers who reek of biscuits, and chemists who stink like alcoholics, the stench of chicken guts and feathers has possessed me. I avoid all other smells. To be comfortable with discomfort, one must banish all contact with ease. She is a great woman, my Laila, my queen. Only once has she
repelled me: on our wedding night, when I sprung up and hugged her, she breathed in and vomited the rich wedding food on our flower-strewn bed. Now the same girl offers to clean my foul, feather-flecked lungi and vest!
Yet, there is something even my Laila seems to have an everlasting aversion to: cockroaches. She screams at them as if they are mosque-wreckers. Like on sighting a rat in the shop, Jamal Seth lifts his feet off the floor and yells, ‘Amjad! Choohaa! Maar usko!’ They expect me to kill them. Cockroaches—okay, they are like brown smelly wisps of air. But Bombay’s rats are big as cats; killing them is like killing a person. People think butchers can kill anything. It’s one thing to kill for money like I do at Medina Chicken, like executioners and assassins do; killing for money shows a desire for good things, a better life. But to kill out of hatred or fear hardens the heart. I have done my share of such killing and want no more. With the wooden handle of my cleaver I rap the rats on their furry little skulls and kick them to the walkway outside.
Medina Chicken Mart is part of a market. There is an open gutter at the market’s entrance (this is where rats breed whole generations). Our great muncipaltee, instead of fixing the gutter, put planks over the four-feet-deep sewer so people can cross over.
One evening some months ago, a drunk slipped into this
gutter. No one dared to help. He languished for twenty minutes amid dead fish from the pet shop, phlegm from the grocer’s chest, curdled white slush from the milkwallah, blood from Medina Chicken, and liter upon liter of piss from all of us. When the fire brigade came for him, there was a huge audience.
The man, as it turned out, was headed for Medina Chicken Mart. And he was not drunk, just short-sighted. After being dragged out of the muck, he proceeded to weave through random passageways of the market and halted outside MCM to read the board above our entrance.
We smelled him—Jamal Seth and I—before we saw him. A heady, lukewarm odor of the sludge that drains unseen below the city.
This smell,
I thought as I rinsed the cleaver,
I could get used to even a smell like this.
Jamal Seth tightened the handkerchief over his nose. ‘Are they cleaning the gutter this time of the evening?’ It was one of the few evenings Jamal Seth hadn’t already left.
Then we saw him—a short sodden figure outside the shop. He was bleeding black filth from the waist down. Passers-by took difficult detours to avoid being near the man, keeping the space around him magically empty. Entranced, I did not notice that he had begun moving toward the shop.
‘Abbey hutt! Amjad, tell that thing to stay away! Shhoo! Hutt!’ Jamal Seth stamped his feet and motioned as if at a
crazed animal. The man stopped some feet from the entrance and grinned at my boss’s histrionics. My heart warmed to the stranger—he stank worse than me and found my boss amusing.
‘What do you want?’ I asked.
‘What do you mean what do you want? Just drive him away!’ Jamal Seth shouted again. He rolled a newspaper and threatened to strike the stranger with it.
The man raised his hand. ‘I don’t want to enter your shop, okay,’ he said. ‘Just, which one of you is Amjad Farsi?’
Jamal Seth looked at me.
‘What happened to you?’ I asked the man.
‘I fell in the gutter.’
We crumpled our noses.
‘Don’t laugh. Allah has made me short-sighted. Are you mocking Allah’s actions?’ the man said. ‘Who is Amjad Farsi?’
‘I am. Who are you?’ I was smirking.
‘Wasim Sheikh’s brother,’ the man said.
‘Who?’
‘You don’t know my brother?’
‘No,’ I said.
The man patted his head as if to calm himself. ‘You kill a man and don’t even remember him?’
‘What did you say?’ Jamal Seth squinted.
The man pointed at me, ‘He! He killed my brother! He
also killed my brother’s friend!’
Jamal Seth turned to me. ‘What? What’s he saying, Amjad?’
I tightened my grip on the wooden handle of the cleaver. ‘You’ve gone mad,’ I said.
‘Have I?’ the stranger said. The sludge had formed a puddle around his feet.
‘When did this happen?’ Jamal Seth asked. Above the handkerchief, his eyes were probing like roach antennae.
‘Ask him yourself, why don’t you?’ the man said, crossing his hands over his filthy torso. They both fixed their gazes on me—twin beams of vengeance and disbelief. I stared at an uneven tile protruding from the pavement outside the shop.
‘Amjad? What is this man saying? You killed his brother?’ Jamal Seth asked.