Following Fish: Travels Around the Indian Coast

by Samanth Subramanian

  Aruni is a queer fish. After graduating with a Bachelor’s in Physics, he leaped sideways into the wholly unrelated craft of cooking. He was a chef in the industry for exactly one year when he realized that he would rather be teaching; he was a teacher at a catering college for exactly six years when he realized that he would rather be researching. ‘My students would bring their lunch boxes, and I’d always be interested in eating that food, in finding out how it was made, and what people still made at home,’ he said. ‘So I started researching the cuisines of Tamil Nadu.’ Travelling from village to village and invading kitchens with his boundless curiosity, Aruni first dredged out forgotten recipes of the Kongunad region, around Coimbatore, and of Nanjil Nadu, running from Madurai to Kanyakumari. Then, in a streak of culinary archaeology, he resurrected some ancient dishes from the Sangam Era, dug up a strain of cooking that used flowers as primary ingredients, and polished his knowledge of Ayurveda-balanced food.

  It was during a trip to Muttom, in the Kanyakumari district, that Aruni first came across a version of ‘fish podi,’ a dried fish powder that he would later find, in other age-old variations, in Nagapattinam, in Velankani and near Tuticorin—‘in fact, in every single fisherman’s house I ever visited in Tamil Nadu.’ The podi, Aruni insisted, was a singularly Tamil preparation. ‘It isn’t there in Andhra Pradesh or Kerala or anywhere else. It’s ideal for fishing families, really. It doesn’t spoil, because it has been dried, and it can use whatever fish they have left over, even tiny prawns that they’d never be able to sell. With it, you just need hot, steamed rice, and you have a meal.’

  Aruni described the oldest, most basic version of the podi for me. First the fish—any fish—was cubed and fried. Then grated coconut, peppercorns, cumin, curry leaves and raw rice were individually roasted and dried out in the sun. In the final step, the fried fish and the roasted ingredients were combined and pulverised. ‘Some versions use coriander seeds, and others use fried tamarind,’ Aruni said. ‘The powder keeps for ages. I always have three large jars of these powders on hand at home.’

  A couple of days later, Aruni scooped out a hefty portion of his dried mackerel podi and sent it to me in a plastic tub. The podi looked like powdery jaggery, speckled white in places with coconut, and it had a deep, spicy aroma, shot through with the strong presence of fish. Tasted raw, it races to the back of your throat and proceeds to set your tonsils on fire, but with rice and a liberal spoon of ghee, it settles down and thereafter only singes your mouth with occasional bursts of playful fieriness. But Aruni had selected his mackerel well: They were mackerel with character, bursting out of their envelope of spice like strong actors out of a crowded script. For at least two days, the room where I opened Aruni’s tub smelled faintly and deliciously of spiced, fried fish. If this was what the good fishermen of Manapadu offered Francis Xavier in his seaside grotto—and they very well may have—I can understand why he decided to stay.

  One day, I accompanied Father Kattar to Veerapandiyapattinam, his home village of roughly five thousand fishermen, forty-five minutes’ drive from Tuticorin and less than two kilometres from the temple town of Tiruchendur. It was the feast day of St. Thomas, Veerapandiyapattinam’s patron saint, and Kattar had been invited to participate in the evening’s Mass. ‘You know, Xavier once wrote to Rome that the residents of Veerapandiyapattinam were practitioners of sorcery,’ Kattar said with a smile. Nearly everybody in the village is a Catholic now, and the focus of the town is the Gothic-styled Church of St. Thomas, dating back to 1886. The church is a long building with a bright white, vaulted ceiling and an inexplicable, cement-coloured finish, as if it were forever young, forever on the verge of being completed.

  In the hour before Mass began, Kattar went to visit his mother, and Fernando took me to Father Stephen Gomez, a loose-limbed, thoughtful, middle-aged priest who is the director of the Valampurinatham Institute for Research in Society and Religion, located barely a kilometre from the Church of St. Thomas. Gomez listened politely to Fernando’s introduction (which included the statutory mention of Joe D’Cruz) and to my expressed interest in the religious history of the Parava community. ‘Yes, it’s an interesting subject,’ he said finally. Gomez was the only person to articulate what I’d found so fascinating about the Paravas: ‘The community has, in a way, fossilised in the state that it was four hundred years ago.’ He waved an arm vaguely to his right. ‘That church is the centre of their daily lives,’ he said. ‘Their houses are built around it, and their lives revolve around it.’

  The glowing twilight slowly dwindled into a pensive dusk, and the front steps of the Church of St. Thomas came alive with harsh tube lights and the hubbub of its parishioners’ conversation. I stood for a while just outside the church, with a group of men that had arrived too late for seats within. Later, I went up to the balcony where, in front of a circular mural of Christ and his disciples, I watched the choir, led by a short organist with jasmine flowers in her hair, her electronic keyboard rattling off many of the same disco classics I heard at Our Lady of the Snows. Looking down from that balcony, I could see the entire length of the church, the multicoloured saris and shirts of the congregation looking like the individual panels of a very big work of stained glass.

  The service was first led by a woman, and half an hour into the proceedings, when she issued an instruction, many of the men in her audience stood up and slipped on shoulder vestments, either in red or blue. (They also had circular headbands, which to a man they delayed putting on until the last possible minute, keeping them tucked under their arms.) ‘These are the two sabhas,’ Fernando told me. Then, searching for the right English word, he said: ‘They are the groups of acolytes.’ And this proved to be the case: At some point, they took up a cross and banners and candles and moved in a procession into the verandah of the church, where we were already standing. Near us, an orchestra of pipes and drums burst into song.

  The ceremony on the verandah was brief and completely unintelligible. Kattar, Gomez and a third priest took their seats, and for fifteen minutes, various speeches were delivered into microphones, only to rebound immediately from the massive speakers placed around us, the words rushing to fuse with their predecessors like mad little droplets of mercury. It didn’t seem to disturb my peers in the audience, who listened with rapt attention. ‘You should really be here tomorrow,’ my neighbour informed me. ‘All the children in the village attend, dressed in white and holding candles. It’s a beautiful scene.’

  After the ceremony, it remained only for Kattar to deliver his Tamil sermon, which he did with his trademark, swerving style. He lectured on truth, seemingly extempore, for several minutes, leaping athletically from quote to quote; in one three-minute sequence alone, I recognized verbatim references from Mahatma Gandhi, Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan and the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, and there were probably more that I missed. When I met him immediately afterwards, at a hurried dinner for a small jumble of priests and invitees, I found that Kattar had barely broken a sweat, his galloping oratory and the close atmosphere of the church notwithstanding. ‘It went well, I thought,’ he said.

  On our drive back to Tuticorin, Kattar was in an expansive mood. ‘This is what I missed in Rome, the ability to interact with the people,’ he said. ‘In all my previous rotations in villages here, I would know every single person. I’d be called upon to mediate disputes. I’d be invited to their homes. I’d be asked to bless the newborn children of even Hindu families. I’d feel involved, and the people would respond with their warmth and love.’ We drove on, the shrubby land around us painted in darkness and the road vanishing a few feet from our headlights. Somewhere, off to our right, I could hear a melancholy wind sighing over the slumbering sea.

  4

  On an odyssey

  through

  toddy shops

  If you ever find yourself on one of Kerala’s highways with an hour or five to spare, keep your eyes open for a distinctive black-and-white signboard by the side of the road. This board will ha
ve, in its centre, the single word ‘Kallu’ in Malayalam, and above it, a legend like ‘T. S. No. 189,’ the number being subject to change. If a few kilometres go by and you spot no such board—which in itself would be remarkable—you should flag down the first passing male cyclist or pedestrian and say just one word with a questioning drawl: ‘Shaaaaaap?’ If it is particularly early in the morning, throw in a sheepish smile for good measure.

  You must note here that the drawl is everything. If you simply say ‘shop,’ you will get either an indifferent shrug or a vague gesture towards an establishment selling soap, toothbrushes and packets of potato chips. If, however, you get it right and say ‘Shaaaaaap?—like ‘sharp’ but without the burr—you will get an animated nod and detailed directions to the nearest toddy shop.

  More often than not, you will then drive up to a walled-off compound that has one little structure easily identified as the kitchen, another little structure with bicycles parked outside it, and a number of individual little cabanas. There is, unfortunately, an explicit social code that kicks in at the shop’s gate. If you happen to look like a local or a paddy field worker, you will be led towards the common bar area; if you don’t, you will be requested, equally firmly, to take any of the cabanas that are free. Mixing is discouraged. If you insist on the common bar for yourself, you will get nothing more than a dirty look, but it will be a very dirty look indeed.

  The more upscale cabanas, you will find, are furnished with a small ceiling fan, thinly padded benches around a table, an asbestos roof, and chicken wire windows. Curtains are optional. The toddy will be brought to you either in a pitcher or in tall Kingfisher beer bottles, with glasses or earthen tumblers on the side. And then, inevitably, you will ask for something to eat with your toddy, and thus wander into a whole new subculture of food.

  The best toddy, toddy that is fresh and untouched by base additives, should taste only marginally less mild than milk, with a slight sweetness, a faint note of ferment, and the occasional granule of coconut husk. When it is collected as sap from the palm tree, the toddy is entirely non-alcoholic, and it is thrown into ferment only when it picks up tiny residues of yeast from the air. Tapped early in the day or late the previous night, it would have barely begun to turn into alcohol, so stories of how, in the olden days, the rich owners of coconut groves would knock back five or six glasses every morning for their health seem entirely plausible. As much as it sounds like an invitation into dipsomania, the best toddy at a toddy shop is to be had at around eleven in the morning.

  By lunchtime, the toddy’s sweetness will begin to fade, and a few hours after that, questionable practices slip into operation like well-worked gears. A shaaaaaap owner will dump sugar into his toddy to make it more palatable. He will ramp up the kick of the drink, pouring in cheap vodka or dubious arrack or country liquor. Some owners, I was told, powder dried marijuana leaves, tie them into a bundle of thin cotton cloth, and soak the bundles in the toddy. Mahesh Thampy, a friend living in Trivandrum, has heard even more horrific stories, of old batteries dropped into vats of toddy, for the acid to mix slowly with the alcohol.

  ‘You have to remember, most of the people who go to these shops just want to get high as fast as possible and leave,’ said Thampy. ‘Nobody wants to sit around and drink the good stuff. Which is why there is so much bad liquor floating around, so many newspaper headlines of blindness or even death because of illicit alcohol.’ He told me one fantastic story of sitting in a bar in Trivandrum. ‘Suddenly there was a power cut, and the lights went out. In the silence, one agonized voice cried out: “Oh my god! I’ve gone blind!”’

  The arrack-mixed toddy, in local parlance, is called ‘aana mayaki,’ which reassures its drinkers that it is strong enough to addle an elephant. ‘It’s all controlled by the liquor mafia here in Kerala, of course,’ Thampy said. ‘Two or three years ago, somebody calculated that even if every coconut tree in Kerala was tapped, you wouldn’t get the volume of toddy that is being served in the state.’ Trivandrum has its share of liquor plenipotentiaries, including one gentleman who goes by the zippy label of Yamaha Surendran. Thampy promised he wasn’t making that name up.

  Meeting Thampy was my introduction to a world where, I was told, work stops for toddy. Thampy is a clean-cut, neatly moustached man who runs a thriving real-estate business in Trivandrum. He has an MBA, and he is intelligent and earnest about his work. But on a Monday morning, he was still eager to troop out of town, onto the highway, in search of a good toddy shop. Indeed, the only person who showed any alarm at all at our agenda was our peach-fuzzed young cabbie, smiling nervously as he examined the prospects of an afternoon of driving drunks around the countryside.

  We began inauspiciously. When we entered our first toddy shop, the owner personally came out to discourage us with vigorous gestures from staying, claiming that he had no good toddy on hand. For a barkeep to turn away paying customers seemed astounding, but it confirmed what Thampy had told me about the rigid product differentiation—about how certain types of toddy are only sold to certain types of people. I had exactly five minutes to mull over that nugget of economics in the cab before we stopped again, at a ‘toddy garden’ further down the same road.

  In one of the seven cabanas with wine-red curtains and blue wooden benches, we were brought our toddy, as pale white as diluted buttermilk, served in earthen pots. On the tongue, the toddy fizzed gently, a mild and lazy alcohol that sauntered down your throat. Thampy sipped twice and proclaimed it fresh and ‘very decent’ compared to some of the toddy he’d had before. I wasn’t going to point out that, in comparison to battery-acid toddy, that was no great accreditation.

  Toddy-shop food is strategically kicked into a high orbit of spice, so that customers constantly demand more toddy to soothe their flaming tongues. Our mussels, which arrived first, had been quick-roasted with coconut, curry leaves and coriander, and then buried under lashings of chilli powder. Done differently, in another dish, the mussels looked like giant spiders that had waded heroically through batter only to then accidentally fall into hot coconut oil.

  But the staple of every toddy shop is its kappa-meen curry combination. The kappa—bland, steamed lumps of tapioca, tempered with coconut and chillies—is such dense starch that, according to the laws of physics, light should not be able to escape it. It would be inedible without its thin, oil-slicked fish curry that, in happy symbiosis, would in turn be inedible without the kappa. All toddy shop meen curries come furiously red with industrial dosages of chilli powder. In the average curry, the fish is incidental, a temporary tenant in, rather than the owner of, its overwhelming gravy. The question of which fish you would like in your curry is perfunctory and academic; you won’t be able to tell the difference.

  At the toddy garden, Thampy also ordered a karimeen, a perfectly shaped pearl spot fish that was hollowed out, stuffed with masala, fried to a fantastic crisp, and served whole. ‘But this,’ he intoned, after two bites, ‘This is a fake.’ Made in China, did he mean? In a sweatshop, to a template exported from Kerala? ‘It isn’t karimeen. It’s some other fish that they’re passing off as pearl spot, and charging pearl spot prices for it.’ The dastardliness of it all seemed to move him deeply, and he buttonholed our waiter to ask where our fish was from. ‘The river fish is from Quilon,’ the waiter offered. ‘And the sea fish—that’s from just down the road.’

  By ‘just down the road’ he meant Vizhinjam, a port of ancient, ancient vintage, and one of the deepest natural harbours in India. In a smooth crescent of water and shore, watched over by an incongruously new beige-and-white mosque and a church of Portuguese construction from the 1500s, was a swarm of anchored fishing boats. On the quay, outboard motors, pulled out and oiled, were racked methodically like black metal carcasses. Intriguing clusters of cleaned, empty cans of Servo engine oil sat near the waterfront. An auto-rickshaw puttered around, wheezing, while a loudspeaker mounted on its top shouted out the dates of a speaking tour of a roster of Christian priests.

 
It was quite by accident that we ran into Mariadasan and heard his story. In plastic red-and-black slippers, a blue shirt, and a flawless white mundu edged in gold, he was standing at the edge of the quay, looking out to sea and gorging himself on the delicious, salt-flecked breeze. He must have seen us poking curiously at one of the giant clumps of palm and coconut fronds on the quay, because he walked over to us, stood there patiently until we had poked to our satisfaction, and then said: ‘It’s for the GPS.’

  We pretended to understand, but only for a few seconds. So he explained: ‘When we go out to sea, we plant these in the ocean, and we track their coordinates on the GPS.’ In these bobbing tangles of vegetation, the fish would lay their eggs and begin to lead a comfortable middle-class existence—until, a few months later, the fishermen would return, guided unerringly by their GPS, to simply scoop these residents of suburbia into their holds.

  Every single boat in this harbour had a GPS system in its cabin, Mariadasan said, and he invited us onto his craft, the Julymol, to take a look. Swaggering a little now, enjoying the interest, Mariadasan hitched up his mundu and began to show us around his compact boat—the yawning mouth of the hold; the giant wad of orange nylon net, as thick and wide as a queen-sized mattress; long bamboo poles with Servo cans tied to them as flotation devices. ‘We plant those poles in the water where we have our underwater nets,’ Mariadasan said. ‘In the daytime, there’s a flag at the top, and at night, a flashlight. That way, other approaching boats know exactly where they shouldn’t go.’

  Inside the cramped cabin, Mariadasan pointed lovingly to his GPS, and then in succession to an echo sounder, a wireless, and a CD player. ‘Look, listen,’ he said, and switched the player on. From tinny speakers poured an approximation of 1980s British pop, garbled but insistent. When Mariadasan wasn’t looking, I pressed the Eject button on the CD player, eager to find out who the band was. Out popped the CD, pasted over with a label of a naked woman, hands demurely covering her nipples. Very efficient, I thought to myself—two forms of entertainment in one.