When I played Butcher

This is a small incident from my childhood that is a character building event, will explain why i m writing it here.


Growing up in a small town [think wasseypur, although it was not a muslim dominated area], getting chicken was always a big deal [this is before boiler chicken became a household name] so the only ppl who would sell a chicken were some from muslim family and since only a handful families had chicken to sell, it was seldom available to be bought. One fine evening, we bought a chicken from our backyard it was available to be sold and my aunt bought it. Normally they would sell you alive chicken. Butchering it was the job of a male member. In our family it would either be my kaka [chhote cha cha] or his best friend Sahjaad Chahcha , both of them were absent. No male member of my family or anyone in the neighbourhood was available. Now my aunt [badi mummy] was born and bought up in Nepal [to indian parents] and she had exposure to all kinds of wild lives [even in our house, snake was a usual presence, whenever you had fish in the house snake was a sure thing] and had killed snakes, frogs, chicken and what have you. But even she refused because now she was a mom now and hence she couldnt do it. So she asked me to butcher the chicken, she would guide me. Being an enthusiastic kid dying to eat chicken, i was happy to do it. So I butchered a chicken, under her guidance.  My uncle later heard about it smiled and said "ladka bada ho gaya hai" Sahjaad chacha gave me a treat, of his hand cooked mutton.


Not every male member of a family goes to a butcher,s shop to buy chicken or mutton. Buying mutton is especially tricky, only my kaka and me do it, not my dad not my cousin golu, nor my bade papa. So today i went to buy mutton, it was a khossi [a kid lamb] and had just been de-skinned. Clearly a few other processes like cleaning intestine and cutting off some cartilage had to be done, so i stood there and was thinking about my own non-issue with butchery, remembered Bill the Butcher and the Qureshis from the movies. I have seen people who can't see an animal butchered, it,s not a sight for the faint hearted, even the mutton shop owners do it discreetly. I have to admit i have never seen a religious animal sacrifice so my only exposures to butchery was in my early childhood. Atleast i think is a character building experience slaughtering an animal, firing a gun, getting in fist fights, being beaten to pulp, spending a night in Jail etc etc ... Beaten to pulp or spending night in jail is yet to be done, i missed my chance in the Anna aandolan, and havent been beaten to pulp but yeah have been beaten to a crooked nose.