Following Fish: Travels Around the Indian Coast Read online

  This is a travel book like no other—inspired in its conception and marvellously skilful in its execution. Subramanian uses the production and consumption of fish to provide a series of arresting insights into the culture and ecology of the subcontinent. With vivid sketches of landscapes and waterscapes, the narrative is peopled by a rich cast of characters… The prose is elegant but never lush, the tone warm and sometimes tender.’—Ramachandra Guha

  In a coastline as long and diverse as India’s, fish inhabit the heart of many worlds—food of course, but also culture, commerce, sport, history and society. Journeying along the edge of the peninsula, Samanth Subramanian reports upon a kaleidoscope of extraordinary stories.

  In nine essays, Following Fish conducts rich journalistic investigations: among others, of the famed fish treatment for asthmatics in Hyderabad; of the preparation and the process of eating West Bengal’s prized hilsa; of the ancient art of building fishing boats in Gujarat; of the fiery cuisine and the singular spirit of Kerala’s toddy shops; of the food and the lives of Mumbai’s first peoples; of the history of an old Catholic fishing community in Tamil Nadu; of the hunt for the world’s fastest fish near Goa.

  Throughout his travels, Subramanian observes the cosmopolitanism and diverse influences absorbed by India’s coastal societies, the withdrawing of traditional fishermen from their craft, the corresponding growth of fishing as pure and voluminous commerce, and the degradation of waters and beaches from over-fishing.

  Pulsating with pleasure, adventure and discovery, and tempered by nostalgia and loss, Following Fish speaks as eloquently to the armchair traveller as to lovers of the sea and its lore.

  Photographs by Madhu Kapparath Cover design by Pinaki De

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  FOLLOWING FISH

  By dint of both circumstance and choice, Samanth Subramanian is a journalist. He has an undergraduate degree in journalism from Pennsylvania State University and a Master’s in international relations from Columbia University. By preference, he gravitates towards the long-form, narrative version of journalism—waning today, but still rewarding and revealing to both writers and readers. He has written, among other publications, for Mint, the Far Eastern Economic Review, Foreign Policy, The New Republic, Foreign Affairs, The National and The Hindu. This is his first book.

  Following Fish

  Travels around The Indian Coast

  Samanth Subramanian

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Books India Pvt. Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi 110 017, India

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

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  Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)

  Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, Auckland 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)

  Penguin Group (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First published by Penguin Books India 2010

  Copyright © Samanth Subramanian 2010

  All rights reserved

  ISBN: 978-01-4306-447-3

  This digital edition published in 2011.

  e-ISBN : 978-81-8475-255-7

  This e-book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior written consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser and without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above-mentioned publisher of this e-book.

  To my parents,

  who taught me to write and to read,

  for which I can never thank them enough.

  Rise, brothers, rise! The wakening skies

  pray to the morning light.

  The wind lies asleep in the arms of the dawn

  like a child that has cried all night.

  Come, let us gather our nets from the shore

  and set our catamarans free,

  To capture the leaping wealth of the tide,

  for we are the kings of the sea!

  No longer delay, let us hasten away

  in the track of the sea gull’s call,

  The sea is our mother, the cloud is our brother,

  the waves are our comrades all.

  What though we toss at the fall of the sun

  where the hand of the sea-god drives?

  He who holds the storm by the hair,

  will hide in his breast our lives.

  Sweet is the shade of the cocoanut glade,

  and the scent of the mango grove,

  And sweet are the sands at the full o’ the moon

  with the sound of the voices we love;

  But sweeter, O brothers, the kiss of the spray

  and the dance of the wild foam’s glee;

  Row, brothers, row to the edge of the verge,

  where the low sky mates with the sea.

  The Coromandel Fishers, Sarojini Naidu

  CONTENTS

  Copyright

  Introduction

  1. On hunting the hilsa and mastering its bones

  2. On swallowing a live fish

  3. On the ear lobe that changed history

  4. On an odyssey through toddy shops

  5. On searching for a once-lost love

  6. On pursuing the fastest fish in the ocean

  7. On grieving for bygone beaches and fish

  8. On seeking to eat as a city once ate

  9. On the crafting of a fishing boat

  Afterword

  Acknowledgements

  INTRODUCTION

  When I was twelve years old, and we were living in Indonesia, my sister and I once accompanied my parents to one of the regular dinner parties that anchored the calendar of the Indian expatriate. As per routine, we were shunted off upstairs with our friends, to watch television and play video games. Our parents sat downstairs with the other parents, probably to complain about how all their children did these days was watch television and play video games.

  Summoned for dinner an hour or so later, we came down into the dining room, to a large table laden with various plates of food. My memory seems to have captured this scene and then, like a rogue design editor, Photoshopped it into even sharper significance. The peripheral details of the other dishes are blurred, but the centrepiece of the table remains in vivid focus. It was a whole, steamed fish, coloured such a wretched gray that it reminded me instantly of death. I also recall a smell that lurked over the table like an invisible warning. I did not eat much dinner that night.

  Taste is the most temperamental of our senses, remarkably resilient in some ways but also malleable enough for one to be repulsed for life by a single experience. That dinner party was sufficient to put me off fish for the next decade, and ev
en in my early twenties, when I cautiously began venturing back towards seafood, I stuck wherever possible to the safe, taste-slaying possibilities of batter and the deep fryer. Fish and chips I could face, but not fish in soup, or fish baked or grilled or, worst of all, steamed. This was not as restricting as it sounds. Everybody else in my family is rigidly vegetarian, and I was happy enough with poultry and meat when I ate out.

  Depending on how you look at it, this makes me either the least ideal or the most ideal person to write about fish. Naturally, I prefer to take the latter view, and to believe that being unencumbered by dense schools of fish-related memories is a distinct advantage. But this book goes beyond considering fish merely as food. Particularly in a nation with as lengthy and diverse a coastline as India’s, fish can sit at the heart of many worlds—of culture, of history, of sport, of commerce, of society. It can knit the coast together in one dramatic swoop: The hilsa, pride and joy of Bengal, now often arrives in many fish markets from Gujarat, at the very opposite end of the coastline. Or it can fragment the coast into a multitude of passions and traditions, each different from the one found a hundred kilometres to the north or south of it. Looking more closely at even one aspect of these worlds is like picking up the most visible thread of a fishing net, and suddenly seeing the entire skein lift into view.

  Much as I would have liked to begin in Kolkata and ramble right around the edges of the Indian peninsula over several continuous months, I wasn’t able to travel that way. Instead, I tore large chunks of time out of my working life, which is possibly why the journey divided itself easily into individual segments, and thence into individual chapters. I flew a lot. I also took buses and motorcycles and trains and cars, dozens of auto-rickshaws (including one that I drove, rather poorly, on a deserted Kerala highway), many flimsy-looking boats, twice a bicycle, and once a jerry-rigged motor vehicle for which no technical term exists.

  Almost always, I travelled alone, and so I came to depend on the kindnesses of people who knew people who knew my friends. They would ease my entry into alien worlds, at least initially; when I didn’t follow the language, they would translate and add helpful annotations. In their comforting shadow, emboldened by the fact that they belonged even if I didn’t, I could loiter endlessly, watching and listening, starting up dialogues where I chose. In this way, I aspired to become what V. S. Naipaul once called ‘a discoverer of people, a finder-out of stories.’

  In pottering about the Indian coast and writing about it, I have not intended to produce a guide to lead others down the same route. This is, in that sense, not a how-to-travel book but a travelogue—a record of my journeys, my experiences and observations, my conversations with the people I met, and my investigations into subjects that I happened to find incredibly fascinating. Put another way, it is simply what I believe all travel writing to be in its absolute essence: plain, old-fashioned journalism, disabuser of notions, destroyer of preconceptions, discoverer of the relative, shifting nature of truth.

  New Delhi

  January 2010

  1

  On hunting the hilsa

  and mastering its

  bones

  A day before I arrived in Kolkata, Burrabazar began to burn. Fire ate through fourteen levels of the Nandaram Market complex and its adjoining shops, and late in the evening, I fancied that the smoke still slept in the air. It wasn’t just because of traffic smog that I struggled to read a green-on-white sign mounted on a building, or to spot the little toenail clipping of a moon; I genuinely sensed the acridity of fresh smoke. Later, a friend’s father informed me that what I smelled was the burning of leaves, a popular winter-evening pastime much like dog walking or badminton. (That green-on-white sign, by the way, turned out to announce the premises of the Pollution Control Board.)

  Smouldering vegetation notwithstanding, I’d been reliably told that winter is the best time to visit Kolkata. The weather behaves itself and moves into a Goldilocks state—not hot but not too cold, not humid but not too dry. The pace of life slackens even by Kolkata standards, tempers are more even, the traffic seems tolerable, and the puchkas taste better. What winter is not a good time for, they told me, is to eat hilsa, and as this is all that I wanted to do, Kolkata and I appeared to be at odds with each other. At every turn, Bengali classicists—and there are many of them—suggested gently that I return for hilsa in the monsoon. There are no hilsa to be had now, they would state definitively—at least, no hilsa worth the eating. Grit your teeth, make it through the next few months, and come back then. The hilsa, they implied, is simultaneously a fish and a lesson in moral science: Good things come to those who wait.

  But Kolkata’s fish barons, far less classicist, have decided that fish are more lucrative than morals. In mid-January, I found hilsa everywhere I looked. Restaurants produced it without a murmur of protest, droves of trucks bore it in from Bangladesh, riverside shack eateries pressed it upon me, and fish markets teemed with it. Good things came to those who had even Rs 60 in their wallets. Which was how, less than three hours after I first coughed on leaf smoke, I was sitting with a plate of rice and a shallow dish of shorshe ilish in front of me.

  If Bengali cuisine were Wimbledon, the hilsa would always play on Centre Court. It is the undisputed champion of fish in this corner of India, possessed of enigmatic qualities of taste and all the more desired because of its vaunted seasonal elusiveness. Poets have written on it, one calling the ilish, as the hilsa is known in Bengali, ‘the darling of the waters.’ The hilsa can be a symbol of Bengali identity but also of the sibling rivalry between East and West Bengal. It participates in another rivalry as well: A hilsa dinner is a tradition for fans of the East Bengal football team when it wins, just as prawns are for fans of Mohun Bagan. At every fish bazaar, in a pleasing spot of meta-fishing, the promise of fresh hilsa is bait for customers, shouted out to reel business in.

  For many years, my immediate mental reference point to the phrase ‘fish market’ has been the admonition of the teachers at my school in Chennai, many of whom had clearly never been to such a market. During particularly raucous afternoons, the teacher would sally forth, in rhetorical spirit: ‘Where do you think you are? A fish market?’ I remember I would pause at the time, suspending my hijinks sometimes for a whole second, to quickly imagine a deafening charnel house where one waded through rivers of blood and offal, battled piercing odours, and purchased fish from beetle-browed, thuggish merchants of death.

  The Lake Market fish stalls rose far above those infernal expectations. In one long space papered over with wall prints of Shiva and Kali, appropriate deities of destruction, the vendors sat behind their fish on concrete platforms. Cutters jutted out from under their knees, their dark blades rising like the trunks of trumpeting elephants. Melting ice and blood dripped in taut rivulets into the gutters that lined the aisles. At the corner of each platform, fish innards stacked up in neat pyramids. The fish was so fresh there was barely any odour; the solitary line of chicken vendors at the far wall was entirely responsible for the atmosphere’s redolence. Most notably, though, business was conducted at a very civilized volume; my teachers, I think, would have been suitably astonished.

  Khokon, my gaunt and bescarved guide, was the first to assure me that there was now good hilsa to be had even in the off-season in Kolkata, and he marched me towards a vendor to prove it. The traditional start of the hilsa season, Saraswathi Pooja, was still over a month away. That is when the fish, sea-dwellers for the rest of the year, begin to move house in large numbers, swimming upriver to spawn. But there are hilsa to be found in the rivers in winter as well; one theory has it, in fact, that eco-savvy Bengalis of earlier centuries constructed the idea of the hilsa ‘season’ and buckled it to the religious calendar only to avoid overfishing.

  In my hands, the proffered hilsa felt firm, dense and oily. Its fine silver scales were not immediately obvious to the touch, but they still glinted, under the low overhead lamps, like a tray of precious gems. All the hilsa in the market tha
t day, each between eight hundred grams and one and a half kilogrammes, were from Bangladesh, and they wouldn’t have been there even ten days earlier. The Bangladesh government, in response to high domestic demand, had imposed a six-month ban on exports to India, and the ban had run its course a week before I reached Kolkata, when fish shipments resumed across the Benapole—Petrapole border.

  As united as they are in appreciation of the hilsa, Bengalis are divided by geography over the relative merits of hilsa from the Padma and Ganga rivers. Bangladeshis prize the plumper fish from the Padma above everything else; the Ganga hilsa, they will concede magnanimously, is still hilsa, but that is really all that can be said for it. West Bengalis, on the other hand, look with sympathy upon their oriental cousins, who cannot appreciate the intense flavours of the Ganga hilsa; their collective opinion is that the Bangladeshis are more to be pitied than scorned for their congenital error in judgement.

  At the Lake Market bazaar, the fish vendors claimed that they could tell Ganga hilsa from Padma hilsa simply by touch. How? ‘The Indian fish looks more silvery,’ one sage began, but then suddenly, like a stricken Freemason on the verge of divulging the secret handshake, he gave up, and hinted instead at a mystic art. ‘It’s in the touch, you won’t understand it,’ he said elliptically. ‘Just as you can’t tell if somebody is a good person or a bad person by just looking at their face. You need to know fish; you need to have that experience.’