Fish on Bakari Eid

I wrote this a few months ago, and just noticed it again, so I thought I’d post it. I should warn you, though: it contains graphic depictions of slaughtered goats and stinking fish.

Because of the Muslim holiday of Bakari Eid, the director of my NGO decided that fish should be bought for dinner. Bakari means goat, and on this holiday it is traditional for Muslims to have a feast of goat. Goat meat, however, is more expensive than fish, and there are few Muslims here anyway. I had to go to Ahmedabad to pick up some English textbooks, so I went into the city with the vocational training center manager and one of the drivers.

After picking up the textbooks, we went to a Muslim market to find some fish. The market was a street on one side of which were shops and on the other side of which were some stalls. Wherever I looked there were parts of recently slaughtered goat: skinned goat torsos hanging from iron hooks, legs resting on shop floors, a few heads resting on the dusty ground outside. Some people were busy hacking at chunks of meat, and others were roasting legs. By one stall I saw a family—all barefoot, dressed in rather dirty-looking clothes—of a mother and her children roasting some nearly meatless legs. All around their stall were scattered hooves; there must have been about 15 or 20 of them. A few goats who had managed to live another day wandered around sniffing at trash as usual, seemingly nonplussed by their newly deceased brethren.

It was already 4 or 5 in the afternoon, and all the fish shops on that street had closed because of the holiday, so we couldn’t buy any fish at that market. We left for another market which had less goat and a few more fish stalls. The stalls stank, and the fish were kept on the stone counter or on the shop floor. There was no ice to cool them, of course. Dozens of flies buzzed all around. A woman weighed the 15 kilos of fish that the manager of the vocational training center ordered, and threw them to her sons to skin and chop. The process was agonizingly slow, as the fish were whole, and none had been gutted, skinned, or filleted. They worked like this: first the mother cut off the tail, fins and head. Then her sons skinned it, chopped it, gutted it, and threw the product in black plastic bags. Altogether, we must have waited more than half an hour, though it took a few minutes of waiting before we were able to place our order. Once the bags were ready, they were put in a large, blue plastic barrel that the manager had brought with us in the truck for that purpose. The fish didn’t stink quite so badly once the fish was in with the top on.

Once the cooks at the center got the fish, the finished product was only thirty minutes away. Knowing where the fish came from made me a bit intimidated, but I ate it anyway. It wasn’t bad, but picking out the bones was annoying since it hadn’t been filleted.

When it comes to food in India, there are a lot of “pretend you didn’t just see that” moments. Last week I ordered an omelet at a little stand in the nearby town of Sanand. The omelet was fine, but after I returned my used plate to the shopkeeper, he wiped it with a rag, and then put it on top of the stack of supposedly “clean” plates.

So far in my life, I’ve only had food poisoning once, in Israel. Let’s hope it stays that way.