Document Actions
The Slaughterhouse
by Arish Qureshi
It is my sixteenth day in this routine today. It's 4:00 AM; at home everyone is asleep. I wear my dirty work clothes, put a set of fresh clothes in a bag, and set out for the shop by quarter past four. I chant the kalma under my breath as I go. I will take an auto-rickshaw to the market. The driver takes five passengers in one auto-rickshaw, and charges a fare of five rupees from each passenger. I always try to sit between two people so that I may be protected from the cold wind. But today an old man is requesting I let him take my place. He says he is unwell. I shift towards the side which is open to the outside. It is 4:20 AM. It's very cold, and the auto-rickshaw is moving very fast. It is quite dark; the traffic is lean at this hour. In ten minutes, the auto-rickshaw has covered a distance that it usually takes atleast twenty four minutes to navigate. We're now at the goat market. Everyone pays the auto driver the exact fare of five rupees, and turns in different directions, towards their work.
The goat market is enormous. Starting from 3:00 AM, lakhs of goats, sheep and buffaloes are brought under the knife here through the day. But this is not my destination; I'm going to the hen market. The Kasabpura police station lies in the way. This area is known by different names. Someone calls it Kasabpura, others refer to it as the Sadar police station, and yet others know it as the Idgah.
Yesterday as I walked from here to the hen market, three men herding forty goats crossed my path. One of the men pulled a goat by its ear; the goat bleated loudly, resisted, and was dragged along, helplessly. The remaining thirty nine goats followed quietly in line. The two men walking along them hit them with sticks occasionally. I marvelled at how dragging one goat by its ear can control an entire army of goats. The goat right in front can sense it's going to be killed and so it struggles, refusing to move. And the goats behind it follow quietly, afraid that if they don't, they will get their ears pulled!
I've reached my godown. Putting the bag with my clothes on one side, I go down to the shop. All along this street, there are shops that sell chicken. It's a broad street, and people who live along it have built several storeys on top of the ground floors, over time. The godown in which I work is managed by my relatives; they own two big godowns on this street. The godown has several nets; each net holds about sixty hens. If all the nets get filled, the remaining hens are let loose on the ground. Each godown can hold roughly 7000 hens.
As I walked towards the godown, I had noticed the trucks that bring hens every morning had arrived. Crates filled with hens were stacked up in them. Men had climbed into the trucks – two to a truck – and were handing the crates, one at a time, to the two men who stood on the road, by the open rear slat of each truck. These two would hold each crate passed to them, by its sides, and throw it on a side, a little distance away. The crates hit the ground with great force; the impact waking up the hens that happened to be sleeping. Each of these crates weighs about 18 to 24 kilos.
After all the crates are brought down, all the men will begin pulling the hens out from them. There are fourteen of us in all today morning. Four are from Nepal, seven from Bihar and three, including me, are locals. The way the hens are pulled out of the crates is by taking four in one hand and two in the other, and flinging them all to a side. Once a crate is emptied, it weighs ten kilos. As the crates begin to get empty, men climb up in the trucks again – one man to a truck – and as everyone passes them back the crates, they pull them up and line them back in the truck. In this way, we fill up both the godowns with hens before sunrise. No one can do this quicker than we can. We have even given out an open challenge to all the godowns in our lane, that if anyone can beat us by finishing this work before we do, we will give them Rs. 10,000 as reward! No one has taken the challenge on, because they know we are much too fast for them. I was told this by one of the men from Nepal; he is my friend, his name is Chi Chi.
By 7:00 AM we have between three to four hundred hens in the net, ready to be cut. One person holds the hen, the other slits its neck. The knives used are so sharp that if someone's finger were to come in the way it would have to be stitched back to the hand!
Two drums are kept next to these nets. As their necks are slit, the hens are thrown inside the drums. A drum – almost as high as a lad of thirteen or fourteen – holds about 150 hens. After it fills, it needs to be turned over and emptied. The person whose job it is to slice off the heads of the hens that morning, also empties the drums.
That day I was really out of luck, because I was the one sliting the necks of the hens. The man from Bihar, who was holding down the hens for me, said, “Arish, empty the drums.” Now, I have emptied drums with up to forty or sixty hens before, but never one with 150 hens. I went and stood near the drum. Immediately, the smell – no, not the smell but the vapours from the drum – hit my brain. I felt nauseous. I turned to my partner and said I was feeling dizzy. He told me not to worry, that this happens in the beginning, that I would get used to it in time and then I wouldn't even mind sitting amidst all this and eating my food. I said, “OK”. The drum was filled to capacity. Hens had fallen one on top of the other, all of them drenched in red blood; their beaks were open, eyes were shut, and veins stuck out from their necks.
There are two doors to the shop. The first door, that is the main door, is made of glass. This is the door customers come in through. Chicken readied for selling is also brought into the shop through this same door. Next to it, by the wall, is a large freezer, in which cleaned up chicken is stored. Across the hall from the freezer is a counter where the accountant sits and records all the transactions. A huge weighing balance is kept there; we call it kaanta. Knives of different sizes are kept by the kaanta. A man sits there and cuts and weighs the hens. All the labour sits beneath his bench on a wooden platform in a single row.
One quickly cuts off the wings, claws and the tail end of the hens, throwing the rest of the body of the hen onto the floor. Another picks these up, one at a time, then peels it like a banana. These men are so skilled that they can unclothe a hen, chuck its casing to a side and fling the hen to the man sitting on the bench above them, in ten seconds.
It was my partner again, “What are you thinking? Empty the drum or the consignment will get spoiled.” Saying, “Yes, sorry, alright I'm ready”, I held the top of the drum and titled it, and tried to lift it from below; but I couldn't do it. I said, “Yaar, I can't lift it. It's too heavy for me.” He said, “OK, I will hold it from this side and you hold it from the other.” We lifted the drum together and turned it over. It took us more than one whole minute to do this. All the men in the shop began to cheer to encourage me. Then they clapped and poked fun at me, “Wow Arish, you are one powerful guy!” I laughed. I was thinking, all the effort was this other man's, it was his muscle power that made this happen – why are they giving me the accolades? I am so thin, and he is so well built. I said, “Come on, let it be!” Then I stepped out onto the road.
There is a hotel next to our shop. Nihari is cooked here in a large metal pot in the early hours of the morning. They use wood as fuel, and all its smoke makes its way into our shop as well, irritating our eyes, so we have to keep the door to the shop closed. We keep telling the people working in the hotel, “Come on, use a fan to direct the smoke in the other direction!”
It's around 9:00 AM now: time for me to set out to bring tea from chacha's shop. I remind someone, “Bhai, it's time for tea”, and am handed a slip which says, “14 cups of tea and 14 rusks”. The tea shop is near the other godown. Chacha always wears kurta-pyjama and covers his head with a topi. His shop is very small. It has a large saucer, and it is always filled with milk. Next to it is a table with a stove on it. Chacha makes tea in a frying pan on this stove. Cups, glasses and saucers for serving tea are kept close by. There is a young boy in chacha's shop who cleans the table and washes the used cups, glasses and saucers and arranges them back in their place in a single row.
I hand the slip to chacha and say, “Send the tea and the rusks over to our place quickly.” Chacha replies, “The boy has just stepped out on a chore, and it will be some time before he returns. Why don't you wait and take the tea with you?” I sit down. A man has come and is now sitting by my side. He looks like he had a lot to drink last night, and I think he may have come to chacha's shop to drink tea and get over his hangover. He is very quiet, his body is swaying. “Can you give me some water to drink. I am feeling a bit dizzy,” he says, turning towards me. I give him water, he thanks me, and I say, “It's no problem”. Now he is quiet again. Chacha has started preparing tea. What I like about chacha is that he uses fresh tea leaves each time he makes tea, so his tea always turns out well. Sitting here I'm suddenly struck by a feeling: I wish I was here by myself, and not here on work. I would have had no worry nor anxiety about work, and would have sat here comfortably drinking my cup of tea, watching others doing their work. There, someone is out in the sun, pulling hens out of crates and cutting them, someone is packing them, someone is taking the packed parcels and loading them onto rickshaws, someone is passing on his way to somewhere else, someone is rushing past. Cars, rickshaws, trucks, scooters – all these pass by here and it's always crowded between 8:00 in the morning to 2:00 in the afternoon... Tea is ready and I took the tray with the glasses of tea in one hand and the rusks in the other, and head back towards my shop.
On seeing me approaching, everyone has stopped work and has got up to wash their hands to have tea. Each person picks up one glass and one rusk and settles down with these in their own corners. I wash my hands. Hands must be scrubbed very well because there is no soap. After drinking tea we will all get down to pulling the outer skin off the hens and our hands will get dirty again.
The way to peel a hen is very specific. First, hold the hen in one hand and pull one of its legs. The skin will tear. Insert four fingers under the skin and jerk it out. The skin will come off from one side. Then do the same thing with the other leg. Now turn the hen over and pull off its head from the neck. Push your fingers into its stomach and pull out its intestines and discard them to one side.
I keep thinking Babli, Nasreen or Neelofar would find it extremely difficult to see any of this. Because in the beginning, I too had found it so difficult that I threw up. I didn't like being in this environment at all. But work is work, after all, and I had to endure. I didn't have any options.
By noon, all the work is done and cleaning begins. Using rakes, we collect everything that has been discarded, and dump it all into wheelbarrows. These are then taken to the big garbage dump behind the Idgah. I have never seen such quantum of garbage as I have seen in this garbage dump. We finish clearing off the refuse by 12:30. Then we wash the godown with water, using hose pipes, soap and brooms. Blood and tissue that remain stuck to the walls are scraped off with knives. No one walking into our shop after 1:00 PM can imagine how dirty the place was in the morning. By afternoon, the place doesn't look like a shop but a swanky showroom.
Then everyone goes to the godown to bathe. After bathing, those who live there, at the godown itself, will cook. They eat chicken and rice everyday. Someone takes a bath immediately, and someone goes to sleep first. Everyone is very tired by this time. I bathe, get into my fresh set of clothes and make my way to the market to catch a rickshaw ride to Paharganj. From there I take a bus home. At home, I eat and lie down to sleep, wondering all the time, “Why do the hens have to be thrown around so much?”
Arish Quraishy is a practitioner at the LNJP Cybermohalla Lab
The text has been translated from Hindi
It is my sixteenth day in this routine today. It's 4:00 AM; at home everyone is asleep. I wear my dirty work clothes, put a set of fresh clothes in a bag, and set out for the shop by quarter past four. I chant the kalma under my breath as I go. I will take an auto-rickshaw to the market. The driver takes five passengers in one auto-rickshaw, and charges a fare of five rupees from each passenger. I always try to sit between two people so that I may be protected from the cold wind. But today an old man is requesting I let him take my place. He says he is unwell. I shift towards the side which is open to the outside. It is 4:20 AM. It's very cold, and the auto-rickshaw is moving very fast. It is quite dark; the traffic is lean at this hour. In ten minutes, the auto-rickshaw has covered a distance that it usually takes atleast twenty four minutes to navigate. We're now at the goat market. Everyone pays the auto driver the exact fare of five rupees, and turns in different directions, towards their work.
The goat market is enormous. Starting from 3:00 AM, lakhs of goats, sheep and buffaloes are brought under the knife here through the day. But this is not my destination; I'm going to the hen market. The Kasabpura police station lies in the way. This area is known by different names. Someone calls it Kasabpura, others refer to it as the Sadar police station, and yet others know it as the Idgah.
Yesterday as I walked from here to the hen market, three men herding forty goats crossed my path. One of the men pulled a goat by its ear; the goat bleated loudly, resisted, and was dragged along, helplessly. The remaining thirty nine goats followed quietly in line. The two men walking along them hit them with sticks occasionally. I marvelled at how dragging one goat by its ear can control an entire army of goats. The goat right in front can sense it's going to be killed and so it struggles, refusing to move. And the goats behind it follow quietly, afraid that if they don't, they will get their ears pulled!
I've reached my godown. Putting the bag with my clothes on one side, I go down to the shop. All along this street, there are shops that sell chicken. It's a broad street, and people who live along it have built several storeys on top of the ground floors, over time. The godown in which I work is managed by my relatives; they own two big godowns on this street. The godown has several nets; each net holds about sixty hens. If all the nets get filled, the remaining hens are let loose on the ground. Each godown can hold roughly 7000 hens.
As I walked towards the godown, I had noticed the trucks that bring hens every morning had arrived. Crates filled with hens were stacked up in them. Men had climbed into the trucks – two to a truck – and were handing the crates, one at a time, to the two men who stood on the road, by the open rear slat of each truck. These two would hold each crate passed to them, by its sides, and throw it on a side, a little distance away. The crates hit the ground with great force; the impact waking up the hens that happened to be sleeping. Each of these crates weighs about 18 to 24 kilos.
After all the crates are brought down, all the men will begin pulling the hens out from them. There are fourteen of us in all today morning. Four are from Nepal, seven from Bihar and three, including me, are locals. The way the hens are pulled out of the crates is by taking four in one hand and two in the other, and flinging them all to a side. Once a crate is emptied, it weighs ten kilos. As the crates begin to get empty, men climb up in the trucks again – one man to a truck – and as everyone passes them back the crates, they pull them up and line them back in the truck. In this way, we fill up both the godowns with hens before sunrise. No one can do this quicker than we can. We have even given out an open challenge to all the godowns in our lane, that if anyone can beat us by finishing this work before we do, we will give them Rs. 10,000 as reward! No one has taken the challenge on, because they know we are much too fast for them. I was told this by one of the men from Nepal; he is my friend, his name is Chi Chi.
By 7:00 AM we have between three to four hundred hens in the net, ready to be cut. One person holds the hen, the other slits its neck. The knives used are so sharp that if someone's finger were to come in the way it would have to be stitched back to the hand!
Two drums are kept next to these nets. As their necks are slit, the hens are thrown inside the drums. A drum – almost as high as a lad of thirteen or fourteen – holds about 150 hens. After it fills, it needs to be turned over and emptied. The person whose job it is to slice off the heads of the hens that morning, also empties the drums.
That day I was really out of luck, because I was the one sliting the necks of the hens. The man from Bihar, who was holding down the hens for me, said, “Arish, empty the drums.” Now, I have emptied drums with up to forty or sixty hens before, but never one with 150 hens. I went and stood near the drum. Immediately, the smell – no, not the smell but the vapours from the drum – hit my brain. I felt nauseous. I turned to my partner and said I was feeling dizzy. He told me not to worry, that this happens in the beginning, that I would get used to it in time and then I wouldn't even mind sitting amidst all this and eating my food. I said, “OK”. The drum was filled to capacity. Hens had fallen one on top of the other, all of them drenched in red blood; their beaks were open, eyes were shut, and veins stuck out from their necks.
There are two doors to the shop. The first door, that is the main door, is made of glass. This is the door customers come in through. Chicken readied for selling is also brought into the shop through this same door. Next to it, by the wall, is a large freezer, in which cleaned up chicken is stored. Across the hall from the freezer is a counter where the accountant sits and records all the transactions. A huge weighing balance is kept there; we call it kaanta. Knives of different sizes are kept by the kaanta. A man sits there and cuts and weighs the hens. All the labour sits beneath his bench on a wooden platform in a single row.
One quickly cuts off the wings, claws and the tail end of the hens, throwing the rest of the body of the hen onto the floor. Another picks these up, one at a time, then peels it like a banana. These men are so skilled that they can unclothe a hen, chuck its casing to a side and fling the hen to the man sitting on the bench above them, in ten seconds.
It was my partner again, “What are you thinking? Empty the drum or the consignment will get spoiled.” Saying, “Yes, sorry, alright I'm ready”, I held the top of the drum and titled it, and tried to lift it from below; but I couldn't do it. I said, “Yaar, I can't lift it. It's too heavy for me.” He said, “OK, I will hold it from this side and you hold it from the other.” We lifted the drum together and turned it over. It took us more than one whole minute to do this. All the men in the shop began to cheer to encourage me. Then they clapped and poked fun at me, “Wow Arish, you are one powerful guy!” I laughed. I was thinking, all the effort was this other man's, it was his muscle power that made this happen – why are they giving me the accolades? I am so thin, and he is so well built. I said, “Come on, let it be!” Then I stepped out onto the road.
There is a hotel next to our shop. Nihari is cooked here in a large metal pot in the early hours of the morning. They use wood as fuel, and all its smoke makes its way into our shop as well, irritating our eyes, so we have to keep the door to the shop closed. We keep telling the people working in the hotel, “Come on, use a fan to direct the smoke in the other direction!”
It's around 9:00 AM now: time for me to set out to bring tea from chacha's shop. I remind someone, “Bhai, it's time for tea”, and am handed a slip which says, “14 cups of tea and 14 rusks”. The tea shop is near the other godown. Chacha always wears kurta-pyjama and covers his head with a topi. His shop is very small. It has a large saucer, and it is always filled with milk. Next to it is a table with a stove on it. Chacha makes tea in a frying pan on this stove. Cups, glasses and saucers for serving tea are kept close by. There is a young boy in chacha's shop who cleans the table and washes the used cups, glasses and saucers and arranges them back in their place in a single row.
I hand the slip to chacha and say, “Send the tea and the rusks over to our place quickly.” Chacha replies, “The boy has just stepped out on a chore, and it will be some time before he returns. Why don't you wait and take the tea with you?” I sit down. A man has come and is now sitting by my side. He looks like he had a lot to drink last night, and I think he may have come to chacha's shop to drink tea and get over his hangover. He is very quiet, his body is swaying. “Can you give me some water to drink. I am feeling a bit dizzy,” he says, turning towards me. I give him water, he thanks me, and I say, “It's no problem”. Now he is quiet again. Chacha has started preparing tea. What I like about chacha is that he uses fresh tea leaves each time he makes tea, so his tea always turns out well. Sitting here I'm suddenly struck by a feeling: I wish I was here by myself, and not here on work. I would have had no worry nor anxiety about work, and would have sat here comfortably drinking my cup of tea, watching others doing their work. There, someone is out in the sun, pulling hens out of crates and cutting them, someone is packing them, someone is taking the packed parcels and loading them onto rickshaws, someone is passing on his way to somewhere else, someone is rushing past. Cars, rickshaws, trucks, scooters – all these pass by here and it's always crowded between 8:00 in the morning to 2:00 in the afternoon... Tea is ready and I took the tray with the glasses of tea in one hand and the rusks in the other, and head back towards my shop.
On seeing me approaching, everyone has stopped work and has got up to wash their hands to have tea. Each person picks up one glass and one rusk and settles down with these in their own corners. I wash my hands. Hands must be scrubbed very well because there is no soap. After drinking tea we will all get down to pulling the outer skin off the hens and our hands will get dirty again.
The way to peel a hen is very specific. First, hold the hen in one hand and pull one of its legs. The skin will tear. Insert four fingers under the skin and jerk it out. The skin will come off from one side. Then do the same thing with the other leg. Now turn the hen over and pull off its head from the neck. Push your fingers into its stomach and pull out its intestines and discard them to one side.
I keep thinking Babli, Nasreen or Neelofar would find it extremely difficult to see any of this. Because in the beginning, I too had found it so difficult that I threw up. I didn't like being in this environment at all. But work is work, after all, and I had to endure. I didn't have any options.
By noon, all the work is done and cleaning begins. Using rakes, we collect everything that has been discarded, and dump it all into wheelbarrows. These are then taken to the big garbage dump behind the Idgah. I have never seen such quantum of garbage as I have seen in this garbage dump. We finish clearing off the refuse by 12:30. Then we wash the godown with water, using hose pipes, soap and brooms. Blood and tissue that remain stuck to the walls are scraped off with knives. No one walking into our shop after 1:00 PM can imagine how dirty the place was in the morning. By afternoon, the place doesn't look like a shop but a swanky showroom.
Then everyone goes to the godown to bathe. After bathing, those who live there, at the godown itself, will cook. They eat chicken and rice everyday. Someone takes a bath immediately, and someone goes to sleep first. Everyone is very tired by this time. I bathe, get into my fresh set of clothes and make my way to the market to catch a rickshaw ride to Paharganj. From there I take a bus home. At home, I eat and lie down to sleep, wondering all the time, “Why do the hens have to be thrown around so much?”
Arish Quraishy is a practitioner at the LNJP Cybermohalla Lab
The text has been translated from Hindi