Of Poultry

A few people actually did ask about the doorbells of India. Some of them, like the doorbell of the Office, make the sound of a bird chirping. It would be lovely, except for the fact that it sounds almost exactly like one of the birds that lives near the office. For the first few weeks I was really confused.

Speaking of poultry, a while ago I went to an Indian butcher. I’ve always had a good head for the biological; in fact I took biology every year in school just so I could dissect animals. So as you can imagine when Arastu tried to scare me away from the butcher's through descriptions of gore, I took the challenge. Besides that, as a writer one of my goals is to gather as many experiences, see as many things as possible. If you don’t like vibrant descriptions of butcher shops you may not want to read the following paragraph.

Nicole and I took a bicycle rickshaw to a market nearby. It’s made up of straw, canvas and burlap shops, and floored with packed earth. The market primarily deals in vegetables, but there is one lane of butchers. The scent was heavy and sickening but we got used to it after about two minutes. The air was thick with flies, as though a snowfall had suddenly become animated, black and malevolent. The sides of the lane were spattered and trickling with blood. At the far end of the section were a few fish stalls, but the fish here aren’t sanitary because they come from the Gomti River, which is essentially part of Lucknow’s sewage system. A half-skinned goat’s head sat on a table exposed to the flies. Live chickens walked about in steel cages stacked one on top of each other, and skinned, cross sections of goats hung about, the few organs which had not been cut away dangling and dripping blood. We went up to one stall with two men inside. One was seated on a table, with a long knife held by the handle between his toes. The other took the chicken we had purchased, and turning away from us so we couldn’t see, he sliced its neck and dropped it in a large bucket where it flopped around, bleeding, until it died. This took several minutes, after which he plucked it, took out the organs, chopped it up (the knife he used had almost seemed organic. The swarming black flies on it were like rippling skin before he picked it up) and gave to us in a little plastic black bag.

You are probably wondering if the meat was sanitary, but of course the chicken was well cooked and we all ate it without getting sick. In fact Nicole made a really delicious chicken soup.