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| India at the water's edge |
| Subir Roy / New Delhi Jul 08, 2010, 00:44 IST |
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This is a ground-level view of coastal India (something you will never get from starred resorts) gathered through a journey by the author from West Bengal to Gujarat. How close to the earth or the water the book is can be gauged from the author’s definition of a good restaurant in India — one where the “food must be so good, and so cheap, that auto-rickshaw drivers and wealthy businessmen set aside their backgrounds to eat at the same table”.
The book is not primarily about fish, though fish has a way of entering your system via nostril and mouth and then lodging itself firmly under the skin. The author appears to have an incredible appetite for fish and a great sense of adventure in trying out myriad varieties, undaunted by the sea of oil and masala in which the fish is typically smothered. Hence, fish has become the core around which the book has shaped. And if you add to the fish the author’s impressive ability to hold liquor, then you get a travelogue which is both heady and winning.
As a child, I was bemused by the way my father and uncles would keep on raving about the fish at the end of one of those sumptuous dinners that anchored joint family life. Yes, the fish was good, I used to think, but why go on; after all, there is sure to be more of the stuff tomorrow and the day after. But even they could not be as ecstatic as the author is. When he was lured away from his search for the perfect fish curry, it was the rawa fry that seduced him — “more often than not a ladyfish, or kane, coated with a patina of spice and a sheath of grainy semolina, and then fried into a golden-brown, crunchy segment of heaven.”
The author’s journeys bring him face to face with kindred people who can get lyrical about fish. One of them is Gobind Patil, an 80-year-old leader of the Kolis, the absolutely original Mumbaikars, who lives in Danda Khar, close to the sea. Nisot, for example, which he serves to the author, is not just watery fish stock, but the Koli challenge to chicken soup. On the invalid’s tongue, says the author, “the strong flavour of nisot must dance like champagne bubbles, homing in on the sinuses and restoring life to taste buds dulled by medication. It is nothing less than an elixir, the sort that seems worthy of being decanted into little round gourds, to be worn on the waists of fantasy-novel adventurers setting off for unknown lands”.
The journey begins in Kolkata and Diamond Harbour, where the Ganga meets the Bay of Bengal, in search of what makes the Bengali take to poetry at the mention of the hilsa. Then there is a detour of sorts to Hyderabad, not in search of fish to eat but to record the faith of thousands who come once every year to be administered a live fish to cure asthma. In Tamil Nadu, the author draws the portrait of the Parava community around Tuticorin, moulded by the sea, Portuguese influence and Christianity. The next halt is Kerala, where the journey is much more temporal, in search of good toddy and the fish that goes with it.
In Mangalore, the author looks for days for the seemingly lost ideal fish curry, finding it only on his last day. Goa is a chronicle of the destruction that greed and tourism are wreaking. The romance of game fishing at sea is captured in the chapter on pursuing the fastest fish in the ocean, the sailfish. Mumbai is a mixture of what has been lost and can still be savoured, by way of fish curry and fish. And finally, Gujarat offers a unique journey into the world of building wooden fishing boats, big and small, a craft that has ingested the knowledge of centuries in a region that itself hardly consumes any fish.
Perhaps the most compelling among all the cameos is the one on Goa. By the time you come to it, via the magnificent story of trailing the sailfish, even the most uninitiated will have become rooters for the way of life and livelihood of coastal India’s fishermen. Then comes Goa where fishing is an integral part of life but where toxic, destructive tourism is driving the fisherman away form not just his traditional livelihood but his persona as his indolence falls prey to the easy riches of tourism.
Each chapter is an essay in itself. The total journey has been done in bits and pieces, according to convenience, and then put together seamlessly as do the boatbuilders of Gujarat using varying bits of timber to make up the watertight hull. Its flavour lies in how different worlds, which are poles apart, have been conjured up and put together. In Kerala, it is in search of toddy — the good, the questionable and the definitely spiked. Off the Maharashtra and Goa coast, it is in search of the elusive sailfish — the fastest, the biggest and the most ferocious among fish — where it is not necessary to win but weave the best stories out of those that got away.
In two places, the author invites himself to a home to taste the best fish curry which no restaurant can serve. Here is an open-ended invitation from my extended family in Kolkata to come and taste the best hilsa preparations that money cannot buy. And despite the hilsa tasting to him good even in off season, he should come when it rains. Once he tastes the fish that comes up to the river surface when there is the lightest ilshe guri, the drizzle named after the fish, he will know the difference.
subirkroy@gmail.com
FOLLOWING FISH: TRAVELS AROUND THE INDIAN COAST
Samanth Subramanian
Penguin Books
167 pages; Rs 250
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