By Aashish Mishra

Lalitpur, April 1: Maya and Ram Babu Khadgi are very busy these days.
They get up at 2 AM in the morning, finish their household chores and get ready to begin their day.
Every day, at 4 AM, Ram Babu takes his scooter out to their local wholesale butcher and brings back multiple cartons of meat while Maya is at their shop in inner Chyasal, Lalitpur, cleaning up.
They unpack the brought meat, sort it out, clean it, cut it up, and by 6 AM people are already queuing up outside their shop, waiting to buy.
The Khadgi couple are meat shop owners.
“Business is booming in spite of, or rather I should say, because of the lockdown,” Maya delightfully shares. “People have really developed an appetite for meat these past few days,” she said.
Her husband Ram Babu puts this ‘appetite’ in numeric figures, “Before the lockdown, we used to sell 20-22 kilograms of meat a day. Now, we are easily selling up to 40 kilograms.”
The Khadgi couple, who run a small meat shop from the ground floor shutter of their own house, are ecstatic about this boom in their business. “If a small shop like ours is doing so well, imagine what the big meat retailers must be making,” Maya exclaims.
Well, Chini Man Shahi is just such a big meat retailer. He has an entire three-storeyed house dedicated to his meat business in Imadole where he unloads trucks of chickens and goats every week. He slaughters and processes them at his workshop a little distance away and then refrigerates and sells them to meat shops and individual customers around the valley.
“The people of Kathmandu have become voracious carnivores since the lockdown began,” he says in jest, “It’s getting hard for me to keep up with demand.”
He hasn’t been able to bring animals from outside Kathmandu Valley because of the lockdown so he has been sourcing a few animals from various places inside the valley. “Demand has soared. People are coming to the shop at 1 AM or 2 AM to buy meat because they aren’t able to travel during the day,” he said.
Shahi hesitated to present the exact figures but said that his business had grown by nearly 40 per cent since the lockdown began, despite the animal shortage.
“I don’t want to run out of meat at a lucrative time like this, so I hope the government eases restrictions on the transportation of animals during this shutdown,” he optimistically said.
But not all meat shop owners have been able to cash in on these good times.
Mohan Basnet runs a meat shop near Kumaripati, but his fortunes have not been as good as Shahi or the Khadgis. “Meat sales are through the roof right now, but alas, all I can do is watch from the sidelines,” Basnet talked about the fate he is currently forced to endure. It is not that he does not have customers or he cannot source the required meat. He is currently forced to stay idle because his shop is in too prime a location.
“My shop is right at the heart of the city, at the centre of everybody’s attention,” he says, adding, “The shops in the inner cities can open and flourish without a care in the world but because my shop is in the centre, it has to stay closed during the lockdown.”
Even if he tried to open the shop, he said that he would not find any customer. “In the alleys and chowks, people can sneak out undetected and go to the shops, but that is not possible here. If they tried to come, they would be stopped by the authorities.”
Basnet acknowledges that meat demand is high right now, but the lockdown has downed his luck.
Meanwhile, back at the Khadgis’ shop, Birat KC is a regular customer who comes every day to buy meat. He admits that he was not much of a carnivore before but since the lockdown began, hasn’t had a single meal without a meat dish on the side.
He described why he, and people like him, were favouring meat during these unforeseen holidays. “The vegetable prices are sky high right now and meat is the cheaper alternative.” He adds, “A kilo of chicken is cheaper than most of the vegetables in the market, so people are choosing it.”
He summarises the meat mania in one sentence. “It’s cheap and tasty!”