The Sadness of Goats

Prelude

This essay focuses on various multi-specie living and dwelling aspects through Eid ul Adha, where a sacrificial animal (sheep, goat or cow) is brought home days before Eid and lives with the family until the time of sacrifice. The family traditions, socio-religious sensibilities and practical necessities of space and time determine the 'living together' period. In the essay, I don't see animals as passive objects. They exercise agency and sustain routines, affecting their position concerning humans. I take a cue from Schuurman and Syrjämaa (2021), where the animal category is seen as liminal, crossing several categorical boundaries, not only between companion and food production but also wild and tame, friend and stranger. The spaces of animal-human co-living are relational materialising in encounters and interactions, epitomising various ontological intersections between humans and animals through time and located within entangled histories. These interactions are mutual becoming in which animals and humans shape each other.  Even though the arrangement of living together could be for a limited time, the actions shared by animals and humans in the home get structured as a routine, following a certain spatial rhythm.

 The essay also foregrounds how living together in the same space could comprise strategies and tactics, co-existing ways to live. Certeau (1980) delineates co-existing ways to live in his theory of everyday life. He explains that those who do not possess official power do not simply succumb to the regulations and aspirations of those who rule but create and find their own space inside this framework. I read Certeau's theory of multi-species households where creatures of different sensory and communicative logic co-live and are open to a complex interaction beyond the simplistic presentation of human attempts to control and animal attempts at resigning. Instead, it acknowledges the flexibility of animals living with humans with their creativity and ability to surprise their companions.   

 The essay has been written in an autobiographical poetic style for a reason. As scholars working around communities that are not widely represented, there is an urgency to document narratives of all sorts. Methodological limitations may prolong or delay records that need to be fleshed out. In addition, bearing a living connection to histories brings out personal, generational and familial ownership and can enrich the evolving ethical and theoretical discussion about intergenerational acts of transference of memory. I also consider personalized narrative a viable medium to carry the stories forward without appropriating them, without unduly calling attention to the methodological form and, in turn, having stories displaced. This chosen writing style discusses events and tries to map the bodily, psychic and affective impact. The personalized style pushes the narrative beyond the factual, reflecting the need for aesthetic and institutional structures that broaden the traditional historical archive with a repertoire of embodied knowledge previously neglected by conventional historians. Hirsh (2012) notes how personal narratives can bring out absent, inherited, belated, or pre-mediated memories. In a way, personal narratives weave up the stories and relations the generations bear to non-representation or misrepresentation.

 The Sadness of Goats

Eid has become so different over the years. I don’t remember if I ever was too joyous over Eid’s as a kid, except when I was three or four and forced Abuji, my father, to get the sheep a month before. So, the Trinity arrived only to fall ill due to over-feeding or the enthusiastic bathing ritual children of the house were offering. Somehow, the sheep survived the loose motions and served the purpose of qurbani[1](. Those days, like our grades, the size and height of sheep were another place of competitive domain for us. Abu always got beautiful, tall and handsome goats to compete with the chirkaths (lame sheep) of H. He was my father's cousin and did not game in any domain where finances were involved. That has been the thumb rule for him. His sheep arrived with a sense of humiliation, though, always in the dark, puddles of sheep shit stuck on the tail and the body, bleating very mildly and desperately looking for food, gobbling cloth rags, newspapers or even soil.

While ours arrived in the broad daylight like the courageous fighters on the battleground, matching footsteps with my father. Most of the time, the Gazi goats were moody enough to abandon food and drink due to separation anxiety with their flock. “Yem chi panein tsandaan” (“They are looking for their own”), everybody would say, infusing this idea we are meant to be together with our own. If the food boycott crossed some hours, mamma put morsels of kresham (dry grass) in their mouth, like she fed us children sometimes when we threw tantrums. She could feel the teary eyes of Gazi goats and gave them paracetamol tablets if she thought they had a cold or running a temperature. She also knew the goats don’t like the dry grass we procured from market; they are looking for specific wild grass from forests, which was arranged by one of my father’s colleagues, B Pir. To perceive anxiety of the other is an act of kindness; to smell fear of goats is kindness magnified. I wonder if she still perceives it. Or was the sense of responsibility that came to her as Dad’s grandeur and our excitement fizzled after a while? She mostly took the cattle to the cellar for the nights rest in a warm place. She also sensed they would be scared if the lights were not kept on all night. But then she was from that generation of Kashmiris who had lived through the war years and knew it meant to be scared with lights off.

Another instance when Eid excitement surpassed all limits was as a teenager, when M, daughter-in-law of Chourasia’s, did mehndi [2] for my cousin and me. Years before the chaand raat[3] culture had picked up in Kashmir. For us, Chandraat was the arfa and meant stocking mutton, chicken, salads, yoghurt, bakeries and savouries. Essentially, a month’s food was stocked up as extravagance was acceptable around this time. The sensitive ones would care for neighbours and relatives who could not afford and stock up their kitchens and pantries for Eid. These were clandestine acts of love and mercy, where only the giver and the taker knew what transpired between them. The act of charity was supposed to keep both parties on the same ground, where the benefactor could gain more out of the peace he achieved from giving. And it served as a caution; the tables can turn at any moment, and the benefactor can become the seeker. Returning to the heena story, M knew how to do an elaborate henna design with a cone instead of a matchstick, and she could do the famous Chori Chori Chupkay Chupke design.

She did a lovely pattern for me, but for my cousin, she did a more intricate and beautiful way with a peacock head in the middle and elaborate wings on all sides. My cousin knew how beautiful the heena looked and blushed at the thought of praise her hands would get. In our part of the world, lot of men are attracted to Heenaed hands and drawn to the smell of Heena. She must have been 17 or 18 then and already had many admirers. Though she confided in me, but we were never equalled in the power dynamics. The scale was always heavier on her end; she commanded respect and approval, sometimes through genuine affection and sometimes through impending fear that came with the thought, what if she gets angry. Through her, I elapsed into the teenager zone much before I became one, her stories, secret crushes and admirers all making me yearn to be that age.

Eid also meant major heartbreak if the tailor did not give you clothes in time. One would be devastated through the festival, telling everyone how the tailor failed you. It was not ordinary grief; it was more. Once Mumtaz's tailor from the bund did not return the peach-coloured dress I would wear with Bollywood-style sandals, I wailed in despair for over two days. The famous tailor would get slow on weed and never meet the deadlines, and sometimes, if you weren’t particularly unlucky, your new clothes would be burnt with cigarette ash. But there was a bigger heartbreak to which we all are initiated on Eid, parting with those we love and adjusting to the vagaries of life. As kids, we fell in love with the sacrificial cattle, perhaps the first manifestation of love that emerges openly through the kid-pet dynamic. And then, another moment, they are butchered in front of you. There could not be a more significant betrayal; you refuse to believe they are sent to Jannah[4], and you refuse to eat their meat; it’s enormous to process. People say kids forget, but they don’t. They learn to love a little less each year and safeguard a part of their emotional self. Soon enough, the meaning of Eid and love changes; material things take over, clothes, savouries, crackers for those who want a wounded heart. Years later, the same ache returned through the goodbyes to the beloved; maybe my heart loved him like I loved my first lamb. The wretched history of loving and parting, sigh!

Photo credits : Arshi Javaid

In the later years, Eid glee was shifted to other domains, a happy anticipation that relatives would visit on Eid, including those who weren’t close through the last years. A hope that ice would be broken, the ice which was formed by over-indulgence of respective self-interests to collective interests.

There was also a certain excitement of the maaz (meat) diplomacy, prying eyes waiting for the meat loaves to arrive, followed by discussions on how we sent the choicest meat pieces to the respective relatives and how they instead sent bones or fat blobs. Mental logs would be scrolled to remember if the family always followed the same pattern or if it happened inadvertently. Despite being swamped with meat, the expectation always remained similar cuts, if not better, would be returned. “So and so the family is always miserly about the size of their stakes, while so and so is generous”, would echo in every Kashmiri household. Each family has a working chronological list of friends and family who get a share of the sacrificial meat; names get added or erased with time.

There was more to Eid, the politics around commemorating Eid with Pakistan and never with India, the wait for Eidi, and the desire to visit Eid fairs and swings, but that’s for another day.

(I thank Nadja-Christina Schneider and Tuba Inal-Cekic for helping with their comments on the earlier draft version).

This article is part of the “Dwelling Together. Urban Housing, Neighborliness and Multilocal Homemaking” collection. To read the other contributions to this collection, click here.