Following Fish: Travels Around the Indian Coast

by Samanth Subramanian

  The other spot close to Kolkata that is famous for its hilsa is Diamond Harbour, where sea trawlers often unload their catch directly to retailers and thence, very quickly, to eateries. Diamond Harbour is fifty-five kilometres from the city, but on the day after Sankranti, thousands of people were still hurtling towards the mela at Gangasagar, where the river meets the sea. The two-hour drive, I was told, would take four hours or possibly more. So instead, I took the standing-room-only train from Ballygunge Junction, filled with whooping students, a highly sought-after peanut vendor called Shumit-da, and another gentleman who sold a mysterious drink in a Sprite bottle that opened with a report like a revolver’s.

  Diamond Harbour consists essentially of one curving main road, hugging the riverfront, with a Mashal Mustard Oil sponsored embankment that has poison ivy growing out of its cracks. A fleet of jerry-rigged cycle rickshaws, with the traditional two-seater carriage ripped out and replaced by a slatted wooden platform, ferries people for Rs 10 a piece to the Diamond Harbour esplanade. (Swinging your legs en route is a bad idea. You may accidentally clip an elderly Diamond Harbour pedestrian on his shins, and receive a stream of invective that makes your rickshaw-driver laugh. It has been known to happen.)

  The esplanade seemed to be popular, on the day, as a picnic spot. Buses and vans coasted to a stop regularly on the shoulder of the road, and families tumbled out for lunch or a snack, or even to just sit on the esplanade benches and take in the spectacular view of the river mouth, broad and blue and twinkling fiercely in the sun. Across from the esplanade, on the other side of the road, was a row of shacks, unnamed eateries that I’d been told would do the hilsa true justice. I’d also been told, by the same person, that innards of asbestos would help, which seemed to entirely contradict the earlier observation.

  I wandered into one shack and sat down. ‘Shorshe ilish?’ ‘Shorshe ilish.’ From a shelf behind a curtain, a man took out a steel plate filled with rice, two oblong pieces of boiled potato, and a saucer of some thin yellow water that may or may not have started life as daal. The flies came gratis. This was prep kitchen taken to its most extreme; I half-expected a saucer of shorshe ilish to be extracted from under the table or out of a shirt pocket.

  Instead, my line chef’s wife creaked into action. She walked to a little refrigerator and pulled open its door—quite literally, for the entire door came off its hinges, to be set neatly to one side. From a compartment that, in a conventional fridge, would have been its freezer, she took out a bag of fish cuts, and casually leaned the door back against the fridge.

  ‘Is the fish fresh?’

  ‘Oh, of course, of course. It was brought in just this morning. Ganga hilsa. It’ll be very good. You wait and watch.’

  She fired up one of the two burners on her stove, washed and set a pan on the flame, and tipped some mustard oil into it. She dusted two cuts of the fish with turmeric, dropped them into the oil, and threw in some red chilli powder for good measure. Meanwhile, her line chef must have begun to fret that it had been too long since the curtain entered into the production. Like Hamlet probing behind his arras, he lifted it aside and, with a look of deep satisfaction, produced a large bowl of oil-slicked, pre-prepared mustard gravy.

  The meal should have had nothing going for it. (The rice and potato and yellow water certainly didn’t. After my first tentative bite, I didn’t touch them.) And yet, by the weird process of alchemy that makes roadside food as great as it is, the shorshe ilish was remarkable. The hilsa, as it fried, smelled divine, and my chef then dropped the pieces into their mustard bath, simmered them rapidly, and spooned them out into a stainless steel saucer. I could still see the black shells of whole mustard spluttered into the gravy. It was hot and peppery, and without the rice, the shorshe ilish became a perfect fish soup.

  The hilsa, when it had cooled down enough to be eaten, was firm and chewy, less oily and more intense than anything else I’d eaten. No silvery rings of fat encircled the flesh, and the cuts were smaller and less meaty. Surely this wasn’t Bangladeshi hilsa?

  ‘No, it’s from the river. It was caught just this morning.’

  ‘But is there hilsa in the river now, this early in the year?’

  ‘Sometimes,’ she shrugged. ‘You got lucky.’

  Later, I crossed the road to sit on one of the stone benches. It was around four in the afternoon, and across the river, where the sun would soon set, I could see the faint outlines of East Medinipur. On the river, trawlers and dinghies placidly ploughed through the waters. A few kilometres south, India’s most revered river washed out to sea, expending itself after its mighty march across the plains. To my fancy, the long, magnificent necklace of India’s coastline began, in a sense, here—perhaps, even from my little bench on the esplanade.

  2

  On swallowing

  a live fish

  For many years, even well into his sightless eighties, my paternal grandfather used to practise an art that must be called ‘faith healing,’ but only because it was predicated on his faith and because it healed. Nobody in my family knows exactly where or how he absorbed this art, and only my father can even attempt to explain how it works. But the Tamil verb for his actions, mandrikardhu, sounded so much like the name of the Indrajal Comics hero Mandrake the Magician that, at some point in my childhood, I conflated my grandfather’s art with Mandrake’s magic.

  Whenever my grandfather came to stay with us, I’d have the opportunity to linger and watch him at work. He would sit opposite the patient, both on low wooden planks, he bare-chested and buzzing with health, the patient querulous but always eager to believe. My grandfather would shut his eyes and collapse into a little trance, his lips whispering noiselessly. Then he would, with his index finger, trace a host of mysterious prayers into a brass platter of vibhuthi, sacred ash, placed in front of him. The patient, meanwhile, would sit on in silence.

  A few further minutes into the process, my grandfather’s moving finger, having writ, would move on no more. He would palm a few pinches of the ash and, filling his cheeks, blow it all over the patient. Then he would draw a thumbprint of ash in a streak across the patient’s forehead, demand an open mouth, and drop in a peck of ash. What remained on the salver would be folded into neat sachets made of old newspapers, to be consumed in instalments over the next week or ten days, as rigorously as antibiotics or any other more orthodox medication.

  My grandfather’s energized ash was most effective, it was said, against poisonous insect bites and jaundice. One family tale went thus: When he was still living in New Delhi, working as a civil servant, my grandfather had as a visitor one of the most eminent physicists of the time. His scientific temper would, of course, not allow him to actually trust in such mumbo-jumbo, but his scientific temper was overruled by his wife’s temper, which urged him in no uncertain terms to get his particularly severe jaundice treated by Ramachandran-mama.

  So the scientist arrived, bursting with bad bile and disbelief. My grandfather began, his usual methods augmented for jaundice only by a shallow bowl of water set near his patient. As he traced and whispered, he would move his hand from the patient to the bowl, back to the patient and then back to the bowl. Slowly the water turned a sickly yellow-green.

  ‘What’s that?’ the scientist barked.

  ‘That’s the excess bilirubin in you,’ he was told.

  ‘That can’t be,’ he shot back, and when the treatment ended, he whisked the bowl off with him, to be tested at a lab.

  Being a family story, the denouement was naturally dramatic. The scientist came back the next day or the day after, fell at my grandfather’s feet, and begged to be forgiven for his scepticism. The lab had found traces of bilirubin in the water. More importantly, he was feeling remarkably better already, his jaundice slowly inching towards the exit.

  I never had jaundice, and I don’t think any insects beyond the routine household menagerie of mosquitoes and ants ever bit me. But in my fierce attacks of childhood asthma, my grandfather’s art met i
ts match. Time and again, I would sit in front of him, wheezing and heaving, crumpled from lack of breath, while he concentrated ever harder and traced ever more purposefully. In my schoolbag, as regularly present as the lunch it accompanied, would be a neat newspaper sachet of vibhuthi, to be taken during breaks. I came to know its taste the way a caffeine addict knows his espresso.

  But it did no good. An attack would wane, but the next dusty place, or the next change of season, or the next drink of cold water would set it flaring again. Secretly, and the fable of the sceptical scientist notwithstanding, I always wondered if it was because I just didn’t believe hard enough—if, in faith healing, it was as important for the healed to have faith as for the healer.

  Eventually, as I grew older, my asthma started to make only sporadic appearances, as if it had been worn out by my parents’ infinite energy and their kitchen-sink approach to treatment. We tried, almost literally, everything—nebulisers and tablets, of course, but also yoga, exercise, homeopathy, variously controlled diets, an ice-cream-free existence, and Ayurveda. I ate boiled eggs for months on end because one doctor said it would help strengthen my constitution. Another time, I was told to perform the yogic trick of pouring warm salt water into one nostril, having it flush the respiratory passages, and return out of the other nostril. I was seven or eight years old, so unsurprisingly, I did it wrong and snorted myself full of the solution. Sometimes, during bumpy car rides or airplane turbulence, I imagine I can still feel the saline sloshing around inside my lungs.

  The one thing I did not try, the one nostrum that seemed too exotic even for my parents, was the famous ‘fish treatment’ of Hyderabad, involving the wilful ingestion of a live murrel fingerling that had been stuffed to its gills with an unknown medicine. Perhaps because it was the sole remedy that we resisted, it took on the romance of untold promise; European colonists in Africa, training their gaze on the mysteries of the only unexplored continent, must have felt the same way.

  But the fish treatment was also so visibly and glamorously an Event, far more than boiled eggs and nasal lavage. The bronchially disadvantaged would flock to Hyderabad every summer for this free treatment, often brought in from diverse corners of India on special trains run just for the purpose. As they queued patiently, they would appear on television news reports, which never seemed to tire of the spectacle. The crowds were estimated in the hundreds of thousands, and the medicine itself was said to date back to the mid-nineteenth century. The sheer scale of all this seemed, to my mind, to be entirely appropriate. After all, the treatment of something as elemental as asthma, which robs you of the very breath of life, should be epic and enigmatic and miraculously curative.

  The history of this marathon of healing—or, at least, the history as explained by the Bathini Goud family, which keeps its proprietary treatment a closely held secret—dates back to 1845. In that year, the life of one Veeranna Goud changed dramatically. Till then, he had been a toddy tapper by caste and profession, but he was one of Andhra Pradesh’s more philanthropic toddy tappers. ‘He gave away a third of whatever he earned to the poor, no matter how much or how little it was,’ Bathini Harinath Goud told me. ‘That’s just the type of man he was.’

  When I met him, Harinath was sixty-eight and rake-thin, his white beard matched by equally white, very fierce tufts of hair sprouting from his ears. He’d been participating in his family’s annual ritual for sixty-three years.’ Veeranna Goud was my greatgrandfather. He had one son, Shivram, who also had only one son, Shankar,’ Harinath said. Shankar, though, was more prolific; he had five sons and four daughters. ‘Between us, we’ve been conducting this treatment since our father passed away in 1962.’

  In 1845, that annus mirabilis of Veeranna Goud, a sage from the Himalayas had descended into the plains and was wandering India. It was the start of the monsoon, and when Veeranna encountered him, the sage was wet, hungry and homeless. ‘Veeranna fed and clothed him—expecting, of course, nothing in return,’ Harinath said. ‘The sage saw that he wouldn’t commercialize this gift, that he would use it to help his fellow man. So he taught him the art of making this medicine.’

  The recipe for this medicine has not left the Goud family since; in fact, even Goud daughters never learn it because, Harinath said, ‘after all, when they get married, they go into another family.’ All that’s known is that it is a lumpy paste, in a vivid shade of yellow. The paste is rolled into a ball, stuffed into the mouth of a month-old, two-inch-long murrel fish, which is in turn stuffed into the waiting gullet of a patient, to be swallowed intact. ‘As the fish wriggles on its way down, it helps disperse the medicine more effectively,’ one pseudo-scientific argument in favour of the treatment goes, conveniently forgetting that asthma plagues the bronchial tubes, not the oesophagus.

  Two days before Mrigashira Karthi—the day that signifies the advent of the monsoon every year, and the day on which the Gouds spend twenty-four straight hours thrusting fish down throats—Harinath’s house in Hyderabad’s Kawadiguda section was surprisingly peaceful. Cell phones were ringing more insistently than usual, there were stacks of pink and blue flyers on nearly every available surface, and squadrons of relatives, descended upon Hyderabad to help with the cure, paraded past us on their way in or out. But I’d expected secrecy and urgency, murmurs of incantations, perhaps even the odd sniff of brewing medicine—a Witches’ Sabbath of activity. Instead, I had Harinath relaxing on a sofa, and two grandchildren, fresh out of their baths, anointing themselves liberally with Nycil talcum powder in front of a mirror.

  Harinath handed me one of the flyers that would be distributed on the day of the treatment. In Telugu, English and Hindi, the flyers listed a strict diet, consisting of exactly twenty-seven items, which had to be followed for forty-five days after the treatment. It was an unusual menu. It included old rice and dried mango pieces but also goat meat; it recommended idlis but not chutney; it painstakingly listed, as individual items, even spices like turmeric, salt and pepper. Oddest of all was Item No. 27, which read like a bizarre chemistry experiment: ‘Heat an iron rod. Soak it in cow’s buttermilk and drink it.’

  ‘And you have to take the medicine as well, every fifteen days during that forty-five-day period, in the form of little pellets,’ Harinath said. ‘And then come back for the fish treatment for the next two years.’ Although these days, he added vaguely, because of all the fertilizer in the food and the pollution in the air, it could even take three or four years for the treatment to dig its feet in. At that, the bubble of my boyhood vision quivered violently. This sounded nothing like epic or enigmatic or miraculously curative. Why, it even had pellet-sized dosages of medicine! It may as well have been homeopathy!

  As he spoke, Harinath exhibited a strange verbal tic that puzzled me at first. He talked easily and at length, in almost pre-crafted sentences, about his family’s history, but every time he said the word ‘dawai’—‘treatment’ or ‘medicine’—he stumbled, caught himself, and replaced it with the word ‘prasadam.’ Selectively and specifically, he was bowdlerizing his own speech.

  Behind that tic, I was to discover, lay a decade-long back-story of rising opposition in Hyderabad to the Goud fish treatment. The opposition has been led by two organizations—the Jana Vignana Vedika, an NGO that was born of, but no longer resides with, the Communist Party of India-Marxist; and the Hyderabad chapter of the America-based Center for Inquiry, a non-profit that promotes reason and science over superstition.

  In the early 2000s, this opposition began to hotly question everything about the treatment—its efficacy, its secrecy, its potential for harm, and its promotion by the Andhra Pradesh government. When I met Harinath, it was a couple of weeks before a public-interest litigation came up for hearing in a Hyderabad city civil court, challenging five government departments and the Gouds. Two years earlier, in the face of such contention, the government had felt compelled to put up a banner at the treatment’s venue, stating that the ‘medicine’ had no curative properties. ‘Ha! That had no effec
t on attendance at all,’ Harinath said, with a snort.

  Innaiah Narisetti, a former journalist and the chair of the local Center for Inquiry chapter, is a dignified, articulate man, with a track record like the back of a porcupine, bristling with sharp needles of attack against irrational belief and superstition. ‘This is a cult organization,’ he said. ‘The doctors say it isn’t scientific. It isn’t hygienic. No patient records are maintained; there are no follow-up visits. But still they claim a cure! That is bogus.’ I mentioned to him Harinath’s tic, of labelling it a ‘prasadam’ instead of a cure, and Narisetti laughed. ‘The courts won’t get taken in by that. They’ll see through it, they’ll see that it’s just a strategy.’

  Part of Narisetti’s harangue included the understandable grievances of the wronged taxpayer. Until 1997, the Gouds had conducted their event, at their own expense, in their ancestral home in the old Doodh Bowli quarter of Hyderabad. ‘People would sleep in the alleys near our house, on the sidewalk, just for this,’ Harinath remembered. ‘You’d get tears in your eyes just listening to them cough all night.’ In 1997, though, following some communal turmoil, a curfew was imposed in Doodh Bowli. N. Chandrababu Naidu, then chief minister of Andhra Pradesh, started to allow the Gouds free use of larger public spaces—for a year, the Nizam College’s football fields, and subsequently the Exhibition Grounds in Nampally, its new home.