Following Fish: Travels Around the Indian Coast

by Samanth Subramanian

  Eleven years later, when I attended, there was even more evidence of government support—eight ambulances, 1,100 police personnel, six closed-circuit televisions, and an assured power supply of 1,000 kilowatts. Navin Mittal, the district collector, did some rough mental arithmetic and told me that the government would spend roughly Rs 60 lakhs of taxpayer money in manpower and resources for the event. Which only proves that Milton Friedman was right: There is no such thing as a free lunch, or even a free snack of nutritious murrel fish.

  But that’s not all, Narisetti hastened to point out. ‘There are huge losses because the state supplies the fish as well, selling them to the crowds for Rs 10 each,’ he said. ‘All these fish are ordered, but word has spread that this treatment is not working, so the crowds have come down. Last year, there were thousands of wasted fish.’

  But, I feebly ventured, my boyhood bubble quivering some more, ‘Harinath said there were four lakh attendees last year?’

  ‘Not at all,’ Narisetti said. ‘There were twenty thousand.’

  The next morning, I hunted down the Department of Fisheries to clarify this number. V. Raghothama Swamy, the joint director there, was in the midst of aggregating, from various ponds and tanks in Andhra Pradesh, thousands of murrel fingerlings, remotely monitoring their journeys to Hyderabad like an anxious chaperone.

  ‘So how many fish, exactly, did you distribute last year?’ I asked.

  ‘Forty-five thousand,’ Swamy said.

  Again, I mentioned Goud’s figure of four lakh attendees to him. He smiled indulgently, glanced at a colleague, and then said, as if softening the blow to a child who’d discovered that Santa Claus was fictional. ‘Well, there were also ten thousand or so vegetarians and they take their medicine in jaggery. And many attendants for the asthmatics were also present, you must remember. So the crowd was large.’

  ‘But was it four lakhs?’

  ‘No. Definitely not,’ Swamy answered.

  On my way down the stairs, I saw a poster hanging on the wall. It showed many fish, lying quite dead in a net, being pulled in from the ocean. The caption read: ‘Fish is our health.’ Suddenly, I wasn’t so sure.

  The bleeding taxpayers aside, the other prong of the opposition to the Goud treatment attacks the medicine itself, the yellow paste that the family claims is concocted on the principles of Ayurveda. A few years earlier, the Gouds had sent samples of the paste to the Central Drug Research Institute in Lucknow and to the Indian Institute of Chemical Biology in Kolkata. The latter’s report, which Harinath photocopied and handed to me, refused to offer any opinions about the paste’s curative abilities. It would only offer, grudgingly, that the paste wouldn’t actually kill you—because an assay revealed heavy metal concentrations to be within the limits prescribed by law—and that it had no steroids secretly working against the asthma.

  Harinath also had another letter, which, mystifyingly, he freely showed me. It was from the Department of Ayurveda, Yoga and naturopathy, Unani, Siddha and Homoeopathy, or AYUSH, a government body that purports to govern such alternative medicine. The AYUSH letter refused to classify the Gouds’ cure as Ayurveda, calling it ‘at best … a folklore medicine practised by a traditional healer, who is not institutionally qualified.’

  The thing with conviction, of course, is that it can operate to extreme lengths on the side of both belief and disbelief. Harinath, in his quest to persuade me of his paste’s medicinal properties, allowed himself to be swept into a current of questionable rhetoric. ‘We have test-tube babies now, so why don’t we believe the legend of Duryodhana and his brothers being born of a ball of flesh?’ he asked. ‘We have rocket ships now, so why not the vimanas of the Ramayana?’

  Narisetti, the advocate of rationalism, is no less vulnerable to making flatly provocative statements. ‘The government should be supporting only culture, not religion. Religion is a superstitious belief. It is not a part of culture,’ he told me. But religion, and particularly in India, informs so much of our culture, I offered—the food we eat, the clothes we wear, the festivals we celebrate, the classical music we listen to, the art and theatre we support. ‘That can all survive without religion,’ he said. And then, a step further: ‘The government’s job is to educate people about this, to show that religion is just a superstitious belief. The government should reduce the presence of religion gradually until we finally get rid of it. That’s when we will live in a really secular society.’

  The two men, in a sense, were funhouse mirror versions of each other—Harinath with his faith, and Narisetti with his faith in the sheer irrelevance of faith. But somehow, to believe as deeply as Harinath seemed to believe, even in something as unfounded as his asthma remedy, jarred me less than Narisetti’s dismissal of religion altogether. For the first time in my life, I felt more unsettled by the views of the faithless than by the views of the faithful.

  Even if the entire event was a manufactured sham (as opposed to an unconscious sham, and in the intent to dupe lies a vast difference), nobody could tell me exactly what purpose such a sham would serve. One argument had it that the Goud community formed an important vote bank in Andhra Pradesh, and that politicians preferred to support the Bathini Goud family rather than offend the community’s sentiment. But more puzzling still was the Gouds’ own motivation to do this every year, for no remuneration—to prepare their paste, to stand at the head of a throbbing crowd, in the stifling heat that throbbing crowds effortlessly throw off, and stick their hands down dozens of unfamiliar throats every hour. As a mere hobby, that sounds—and is—severely overrated.

  Eager theories account for this too. A few years ago, in a significant windfall, the Chandrababu Naidu government was said to have handed over to the Gouds some land in Old Hyderabad. ‘They said it was to grow their herbs,’ Narisetti said. ‘Till then, they claimed they were sourcing the herbs from the Himalayas, and that the land would make their task easier.’ Also, Narisetti added, the Gouds get a cut from the auxiliary businesses that spring up around the centrepiece event every year—shops of toys and clothes, food stalls, pushcarts of religious paraphernalia, all selling to the captive audience at the Exhibition Grounds.

  It all sounded just about plausible; there have been more improbably painstaking moneymaking schemes than the caper thus outlined. And yet, the day before the treatment, when Harinath walked into the little office at the Exhibition Grounds, he didn’t head directly to the young girl who was seated behind a desk handing out advance tokens; he didn’t ask to know how many tokens had been distributed or what the response was. Instead, he strode very rapidly into the office, straight to waist-high stacks of fresh flyers that had just been delivered there, still warm from the printers. He peeled away a flyer from the top and scanned the instructions and the list of twenty-seven permitted items on the diet sheet. Then he relaxed, smiled, and said to his companion: ‘It’s all there, it’s all correct.’ To me, that didn’t seem like the behaviour of a man out to skim a few rupees off the sale of every cheap plastic whistle or multicoloured T-shirt.

  The Doodh Bowli section of Hyderabad, lying a couple of kilometres from the Charminar, is an ancient quarter of mosques and thin, confusing streets that regularly double back upon themselves. The Bathini Goud family’s ancestral home, tucked into one of these streets, had been newly whitewashed, and its parrot-green window frames had been repainted. ‘We do a pooja the day before, at the house in Doodh Bowli. It’s usually just the family, but you must come,’ Harinath had said, and so I had gone, curious to see the clan.

  By the time Harinath and I arrived, the family was already assembled on the terrace, under a temporary canopy of cloth. In a corner, next to a small altar, the family priest sat murmuring to himself and glaring occasionally at the world at large. Harinath whipped off his shirt and sat down in the front, next to his two older brothers. I took a discreet seat at the back, feeling slightly self-conscious until I saw my fellow intruder—a French documentary filmmaker with a digital video camera, who orbited the cong
regation like a diligent planet, filming the entire pooja.

  Truth to tell, there wasn’t much to film. This was a regular Satyanarayana pooja, performed in many Hindu homes before an occasion of significance. And like almost every one of the communal poojas I’ve ever attended, there were the requisite distracted children, the whimpering baby, the sombre gentlemen up front, and the comforting white noise of women talking and laughing at the back. Harinath, sweating even in spite of the playful surges of monsoonal breeze that cut through the midday heat, sat very still, eyes closed, hands folded in prayer.

  The Bathini Goud Brothers; Harinath sits second from left

  We must have sat there for at least an hour in this manner, and attentions began to flag. The filmmaker filmed from less bravura angles, the baby whimpered louder, Harinath sweated more, and the children, losing patience, began to make sorties downstairs into the cooler confines of the house. A little while later, some men began to bring up huge wicker baskets of cooked rice, sweets and pooris, and steel buckets of sambar and rasam. In the heat, and in the restricted confines of the canopy, the wonderful, dense smell of the food rose and hung, like a spice-seeded storm cloud, above the family. Attentions, unsurprisingly, wilted further.

  Harinath finally broke a coconut, a girl came and tied a red-and-yellow thread, with a betel leaf, around the wrists of us observers, and the priest performed his arati, offering up cubes of sugar and diced bananas to the deity. It seemed like the end, but then the group moved downstairs, first to the house’s stuffy pooja room and then to the real focus of all this consecration: the well.

  When we’d first met, I had asked Harinath whether he had ever considered taking his treatment across India, like a travelling apothecary. He had bridled at the suggestion and then said, cryptically: ‘We need our Doodh Bowli well.’ Later I had persuaded him to explain that statement, and he told me about the importance of making the medicine with the water from the well in the Doodh Bowli house. ‘Only that water. Nothing else will do,’ he had said. One summer, he claimed, every well in Doodh Bowli had gone dry, and Hyderabad had thirsted for water—yet the well in the ancestral home had gushed with sweet, cool water.

  That well is really a small, square hole in the ground, set to one side of the courtyard past the entrance of the house. Just above it, built into the staircase leading to the terrace, is a sacred tulasi plant in a bower, as if it were benignly conferring its holy status upon the well all year round. The water is not too far below the surface, but it remains so cool that even leaning over it, during the summer months, feels like passing through a blast of air conditioning.

  The priest now took position over the well and consecrated it with rice, vermillion and turmeric. As if he were a trainer pepping his boxer for the big fight, the priest flattered the well water in his recitations, calling it the embodiment of the Ganga, the Yamuna, the Narmada, the Kaveri and the Sindhu rivers. In the pooja room behind us, the women had gathered independently and were singing in low, tuneless voices. Only after that was it time to eat.

  After lunch, the Bathini Goud residence was flooded with visitors—neighbours dropping in to see how things were going, more members of the family, reporters and camera crews to interview Harinath, who seemed to have been designated communications director for the event. His daughter Alka took charge of his two cell phones, answering some calls and giving others to her father. It was, by now, past three in the afternoon, and I asked Harinath: ‘But when will you actually begin making the medicine?’

  ‘We’ll probably start in the evening, or later at night, when all this has died down.’

  I thought about that, and then asked: ‘Can I stay to watch?’

  Harinath smiled a slow, sweet smile, and said: ‘You know that isn’t possible.’

  I knew. I’d just figured that there was no harm in trying.

  With little to do until the start of the treatment the next evening, I wandered back to the Exhibition Grounds and sat in the little office building, near the Bartronics desk. Bartronics, a Hyderabad-based company, had installed automated entry systems into other locations with teeming crowds, such as the Vaishno Devi shrine in the Himalayas and the Tirumala temple at Tirupathi. The previous year, Bartronics had been engaged to implement a similar process at the Exhibition Grounds, and with needless zeal, a sophisticated biometrics system, involving fingerprints and photographs, was installed.

  ‘But it began to take a long time to check the biometrics, and people started shouting and complaining,’ a Bartronics employee told me. ‘Besides, there’s no real danger of any malpractice here, since it’s all free.’ So biometrics sat it out on the bench this year. Instead, people came to the office two or three days in advance to pick up two tokens—one for the fish counter, and one that allotted them to a specific, one-hour window of time. Then they walked away planning to come early anyway. ‘You know, just in case,’ one man said.

  Sitting next to the token-dispensing desk, I began to detect, in Harinath’s prospective patients, the same hesitant hope that I’d seen in my grandfather’s visitors many years ago. A number of them asked: ‘Does this really work?’ and the beleaguered Bartronics lady was forced to say that she was just giving out the tokens. Some scrutinized the token intently, as if it held some clue to their prospects. A few hung around, after they’d pocketed their tokens, to look at the others who came after them, as if the appearance of their fellow ward-mates would give them a better idea of this unorthodox hospital.

  One middle-aged man had flown from Montreal to be at Hyderabad during the treatment. ‘My lungs operate at about 38 per cent capacity. I have to travel with a bag full of medication,’ he said, showing me a plastic pouch crammed with tablets, nebulisers, capsules and a syringe. He looked in the bloom of health, but he said he’d spent his life trying medications of various provenances. ‘I can’t even travel alone; I need a friend with me all the time.’ He’d read about the Bathini Goud remedy on the internet. ‘Right about now, I’m willing to try anything.’

  Amarendra Kumar, an automobile dealer from Bihar, came with his wife, both looking to be able to breathe freely again. He had arrived in Hyderabad the previous morning, mistakenly believing that the treatment would start the day I met them. ‘I had booked my return tickets for tomorrow afternoon’s train,’ he said, worried. ‘Now I’ll have to cancel and rebook for Sunday.’

  The most uncertain visitors of the afternoon were a Jain family of four. They entered together and stood next to me, silently watching the tokens change hands. Then the father tapped me on the shoulder and asked: ‘Does it work better with the fish?’

  ‘It’s supposed to,’ I told him. ‘There’s a vegetarian version, but the fish is said to be more effective.’

  He stepped back into a moment’s silence and then said, almost to himself: ‘But we don’t eat meat.’

  More silence, and then, sensing that the family was not quite as well informed as they should have been, I said: ‘You do know that the fish is alive, don’t you?’

  This ignited a conflagration of comical reactions. The father sank deeper into worry. The mother, though, laughed almost hysterically. She then walked resolutely to the door and started to mock-retch graphically, holding her stomach, a mischievous smile playing over her face. ‘Come on,’ she’d say between heaves, ‘no fish, let’s go.’ Her older son, aged approximately ten, looked fascinated by the newly gruesome lustre to this treatment. His younger brother, who must have been six or seven, tugged at his father’s shirt, pulling him away, his face crumpling slowly in horror like a sheet of cellophane.

  The father wrestled with himself for five whole minutes. Then he stepped up to the Bartronics counter and asked for two tokens for his children. ‘Only in case the fish is needed,’ he justified to his family. But if the quest for his sons’ perfect health did win out over the tenets of his religion, who could blame him?

  Saturday evening proved to be hot, sticky and humid, the sort of weather that prompts the imagination to believe th
at moisture can simply be wrung out of the air. Hyderabad’s traffic, re-routed near Nampally to keep the approach to the Exhibition Grounds clear, was at its thorniest best. I entered the Grounds at half past eight for a treatment that was supposed to have begun an hour earlier. But I needn’t have worried. The Bathini Gouds, leaving Doodh Bowli with their vats of medicine, travelling under police escort, had reached the venue only at eight o’clock, snared in the traffic rearrangements organized for their benefit.

  By the time I arrived, the little road leading to the Grounds’ Ajanta Gate was clogged with people, flanked on either side by what Narisetti had called the ‘auxiliary businesses.’ Spread out on tarpaulins on the ground or on rickety pushcarts were T-shirts, children’s shoes, toys with crazy lights and wailing sounds, and bags in cloth and plastic. Nothing, as far as I asked, was priced at more than Rs 20, and the vendors, instead of looking excited at the prospect of a twenty-four-hour sales extravaganza, were following with forlorn eyes the crowds that rushed past them.

  By 5 p.m. on that day, the Bartronics people had told me, around thirty-five thousand advance tokens had been given out, but the entrance into the Grounds was surprisingly serene. On low, broad concrete platforms, people squatted, ate, slept and played, patiently waiting for the time slot printed on their tickets. On the public address system, between bursts of shehnai music, an announcer, already hoarse, was warning people not to pinch their plastic bags of fish close. ‘The fish will suffocate. Keep the mouth of the bag open.’ And then again the same announcement followed in Hindi and Telugu.

  Walking past police and medical assistance booths, stalls for free food, stalls for water, and a slumbering fire engine, I entered the maze that led up to the dais. Under a temporary tin roof, these passages, formed by iron railings and rickety wooden staves, were designed to direct the crowds to one of thirty-three counters up front; they reminded me of immigration queues at large international airports. The token system may have mitigated the crowd within those passages, but it could do nothing about the way everybody pressed up densely near the counters. Two-thirds of the maze was empty, but near every one of the thirty-three counters, people clamoured to go first, holding up their little bags of fish like cigarette lighters at a rock concert.