The Chinese butcher had carried on the work of his father, who had come down from Fujian as a boy and jumped ship in Malaysia. (Three or four ship-jumping ancestors have been mentioned over little more than a month.) Late night we stood among the carcasses of sheep & cows, on one side some nondescript innards hanging flaccid and loose. One expected the latter to be dripping from perforations.
Earlier a broad-shouldered Malay looked like he could have wrestled the bull to the ground that he had just finished dismembering.
Macello; macceleria—the Italian came back watching the man work.
The two long horns seemed to have been wrapped in something like black electrician's tape, a wide 2-3 inch reel.
With a short-handled axe, the man chopped the knotty casing of the brain, it appeared. The head itself had been severed earlier; it was no-where in sight.
Calves, cows and bulls' heads were sold individually at the markets. At Chow Kit in Kuala Lumpur, the oldest market in the country, one came upon rows unexpectedly.
What remained here was hard grizzle protruding from between the horns.
After some of the bone and attached meat came away, the chap carted the long horn over to a basket outside the doorway.
The horns fetched such and such, an on-looker seated on a tall chopping-block, informed. The hide the man had taken home for his floor, he added. Joking presumably.
The slaughter-house itself was a couple of kilometres out of town. Here they did the butchering.
Beyond the beef section was fish and fowl. In a corner pork was screened off. This was not separated by sheeting, the man from the butchering family informed. A dedicated, walled and separate room was reserved.
Inner Taiping at least was clearly majority Chinese. On the other side of the street, the fruit market was housed in a similar old wooden structure, with belled vaulted roof. When the Japanese invaded the market had suffered damage in the aerial bombing.
The man of the butchering family had a soft, easy manner; a particular kind of amicable butcher, who no doubt expertly wielded his knives.
Pointing on two sides, the man showed the difference in the inner, curved support posts and a line of square braced rigging along one outside wall of the building. Seventy years ago a single direct hit had been made by the Japanese Arrows.
We spoke of industrial slaughterhouses in large cities, the refrigeration, the often foreign workforce; men from other kinds of kampungs deployed to provide for a hungry urban elite, whose dinner tables sat well away from the processing.
Here at the Taiping meat market the men would work until midnight to ready for the Sunday trade, half a dozen of them in their various quarters.
The glistening sections of animals hung in-between, ribs showing in broad slats like the railings that lined the bottom half of the building. The sinews and ligaments and even the bones beneath the stretched flesh seemed to radiate the dim electric light. The lustre was uncanny. Precious stones and metals gave off such facets.
Quietly and without hurry the men worked with their knives. Two or three did not even seem to notice the intruder.
Taiping, Malaysia
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