Finally, one of the members of the second set disappeared into the kitchen, and in the absence of a quorum, the debate stalled momentarily and eyes started to drift back to the television. Two minutes later, our emissary returned, and in a remarkably bipartisan gesture, admitted that his party was wrong, and that egg and flour were both very much present. The bill was successfully passed. Then a businesslike gentleman, who must have been the chairman of the appropriations committee, cut in to ask if I wanted to order anything else.
I most definitely did. I asked for rice and a curry, which arrived in a shallow saucer, inflammatory with kokum but still somehow smooth with coconut, so deeply ruddy that I was certain it included tomatoes. (I was wrong. I’d learn later that Mangaloreans used tomatoes in chicken and mutton dishes, but rarely when they curried fish.) The parliament around me rattled off the other ingredients: ginger, long green chillies, garlic, onions, and fenugreek. The cut of fish, they admitted, was just of a cheap river fish, to inject the gravy with some sort of flavour. I’m pretty sure they told me exactly what that fish was, but I was too busy eating to pay them my fullest attention.
The fish in the rawa fry was what they called ‘murumeen’, a Malayalam word that refers to a type of snapper found in estuaries and seasonally in the lower reaches of rivers. Under its crust of rawa, it was soft and flaky, and hit with citrus from the lemon juice in the spice paste. If I did it right, I could peel off all three layers—the crunchy rawa, the tangy spice, the delicate fish—at the same time, to then assemble them in my mouth in an explosive fusion of textures and tastes. I picked the murumeen clean, spooned the last of the curry into my mouth, and sat back on my schoolroom bench to watch the rest of the cricket match. From outside, as the night deepened, we must have looked like a home-grown version of Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks, sitting silently in this glowing old house that opened onto the resounding stillness of Mangalore.
All my frantic telephoning, on my first day in town, had fortuitously led me to Jaideep Shenoy, a correspondent of the Hindu in Mangalore, a stolid, laconic individual who was kind enough to take a few hours out of a working day to listen to the woes of a directionless eater. To Shenoy, I owe thanks on two counts: For accompanying me to Narayan’s, and for introducing me to Vasudev Boloor.
First, Narayan’s—a tiny restaurant, sitting inside an alley near Mangalore’s riverside wharf. The area itself is called Bunder, the word surviving intact from the Persian term for ‘port’ or, more poetically, ‘haven.’ (Shenoy’s guide to finding the restaurant is more prosaic: Go to the State Bank of India building, and then just ask for Narayan’s. ‘Anybody can tell you.’) At lunchtime, Narayan’s has a teeming ground floor and, via a narrow staircase, service on the first floor as well. Even from the doorway, I could see straight through the dining hall into the kitchen, where a stone grinder of Olympian proportions churned out vast quantities of fresh masala. Around tables that were already occupied, waiting patrons stood like tussocks of patient grass. Every so often, they were nudged to one side or the other with a murmured ‘Side-u, side-u’ from the owner of Narayan’s, who circulated with a big tray of fish fresh from the kitchen.
The specialty of Narayan’s, Shenoy told me, was its tawa-fried fish-fillets of seer and ladyfish or whole sardines and mackerel that have been fried on a flat, hot pan. But that is not quite accurate. Narayan’s specialty is the masala that is slapped onto that fried fish as it sizzles on the pan, the masala that I could see writhing out of the stone grinder, the masala that dusted the fish and otherwise aggregated in fried lumps on the circulating tray like spicy, red snowdrifts. Shyam Sunder, the owner, would solicitously bend over a table, and a customer would say, through a full mouth, ‘Kane’ perhaps or ‘Bangda,’ but then he would rake the tray with a sharp eye and point to those crisp nuggets of masala. ‘That too, please.’
Shyam Sunder’s father started Narayan’s sixty years ago, and it has since become an institution of tawa-fried delight in Mangalore. It passes with flying colours the popularly understood test for a good restaurant in India—that its 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. On traditional steel thalis, waiters set down rice, pickle, a curried vegetable and some fish gravy, but nobody begins to eat until the almighty tray has blessed the plate with fish.
A tawa fry is rarely oily; instead, the crusted masala coats the fish fillet almost as if it were protecting the soft, white meat inside. The masala here was indescribably good. It was fried enough to suggest its immense potential as a meal all by itself, but it also lifted strong flavours out of the fish, like a coach goading verve out of a champion athlete. Shenoy didn’t bother with the rice and the vegetable at all, and I followed his example. After an initial piece of seer each, we commandeered the tray and lifted sardines (naturally oily, and very moist) and ladyfish (dry, but redeemed entirely by extra masala) onto our plates. Then, when we could eat no more, I stood next to the kitchen for a few minutes, simply sniffing at the frying masala on the tawa, deep-breathing fanatically, trying to fill my lungs with enough aroma to last the day.
Down the road from Narayan’s, a short walk made considerably longer by a full belly, was the wharf, crammed that afternoon with boats moored three rows deep, so thickly clustered that you could have walked on their decks from one end of the pier to the other. Across the boats, on the other side of the road, stood a row of small shops offering cold storage facilities, blocks of ice, fishmeal, engine oil and diesel. It was a sweltering afternoon, and particularly soupy and humid by the river; on many boats, the chopped ice being loaded into yellow plastic tubs started melting even before it could be lowered into the holds. In the mornings, fish were hauled out of those same holds and carted up to Mangalore’s main fish market—just opposite the State Bank of India building, a few hundred metres away.
A helpful property of the human mind is that it can sense when something is out of place even before it deciphers what specifically is wrong with the picture. At the Mangalore wharf, I experienced the reverse effect; walking around with the dullness of mind that heat and satiation can often induce, I couldn’t shake the feeling that something was very right, very familiar, and yet out of place by virtue of that very familiarity. A few minutes passed before the mental tumblers fell into place, one by one: There was Tamil everywhere. The signboards of the shops were in the Tamil script; the boats prows’ had Tamil names painted on them, and the fishermen around me were hollering and cursing in Tamil. It felt like an unexpected homecoming, and I had to wait till the next day for Vasudev Boloor to explain it to me.
Vasudev Boloor accumulates bureaucratic titles as a wealthy collector does art—with discrimination and judgement, and with due affection for each individual piece, but nevertheless in great quantities. Boloor is the president of the Mogaveera Vyavasthapaka Mandali, a Mangalore fishermen’s cooperative. He is also secretary of the Akhila Karnataka Fishermen’s Parishad, which should really make its mind up about which language to use in naming itself. Additionally, he is the secretary of the National Fishworkers’ Federation and of the Coastal Karnataka Fishermen Action Committee. All these may or may not be essentially the same organization; one can well imagine a Borges short story in which a grand conclave of all the various federations results in the discovery that they are all really composed of the same members.
I met Boloor first when Shenoy took me to Roshni Nilaya, a school of social work, and dragged him out of a meeting he was chairing. Boloor is a short, balding man with a wise face, intelligent eyes that shine even through the thickest of spectacles, and skin that is coloured and creased like a walnut. One of his fingers is permanently out of joint, broken (he would tell me later) during a student protest in Mysore; his fellow agitators included J. H. Patel and S. Bangarappa, future chief ministers of Karnataka.
Boloor, Shenoy and I sat in the Roshni Nilaya canteen, over plastic cups of awful tea, and Boloor told me about the Tamilian fishe
rmen who had begun to migrate in large numbers to the Konkan Coast. Then he told me about how Mangalore’s own fishing community had withdrawn from the profession. ‘At the College of Fisheries here in Mangalore, all the students are from outside Karnataka,’ he said. ‘They’re the ones who learn the science behind the fishing—fish diseases, weather patterns, that kind of thing.’ Then, perhaps somehow reminded of the meeting that was languishing without his stewardship, he tossed back his tea and asked if I would come to his house the next morning, to talk at further length.
Boloor lives in a neat brick bungalow in a quiet Mangalore locality that is also called Boloor; whether the area is named after the clan or vice versa, I could not ascertain. I reached early, so I waited in the living room until Boloor, still bare-torso’d and swathed in an enormous white dhoti, finished his prayers and came out to join me.
When he was a boy, living on an island near the Tipu Sultan Bathery, Boloor would go fishing before school (and later, before college) every day. ‘My father was a fisherman, so I’d do what I could to help him and then leave for school,’ he said. Wading into the river, he would reel out a large net and then try to scare fish into it, a technique that he said was called—and here he made a lovely, deep, gobbling sound—‘bolupu’. ‘My father and I would unload all our fish at Bunder, and while my mother would take the catch to the fish market to sell, I’d run for class.’
But Boloor’s love for officialdom soon began to interfere with his love for fishing. When he was in school, he joined the Rashtriya Seva Dal, which gathered the sons and daughters of fishermen into a juvenile union of sorts. ‘We met weekly for debates, and we would campaign to publicize the difficulties of fishing families,’ Boloor said, with the pride of a mother in her first-born. In college, he majored in active protest, including that Mysore agitation of finger-breaking intensity. When he started working at the Karnataka Electricity Board, sure enough, he promptly set up the first KEB Employees Union. Only after his retirement from the KEB did Boloor accept the various honorary positions in the various fishing bodies, merging his penchant for organizing people with his roots in the fishing community.
Boloor asked me where in Mangalore I had eaten, and as if I’d entered a confession booth, I told him about my impromptu love affair with the rawa fry, but also rather defensively about my inability to find the Mangalore fish curry as I remembered it. ‘That’s not surprising,’ Boloor said, and orated a little on the declining quality of fish in general. ‘But you should know better, after all. The best Mangalore fish curry is not made in restaurants but in homes.’ Having said that, without any ado, he led me out of the living room, across his front yard and through a gate in the compound wall, into the house next door. ‘This is my brother’s son’s wife, Shailaja,’ he said, introducing me to a beautiful young woman in an orange-red salwar-kameez, her long hair tied into a bun, still wet from her morning bath. ‘She’ll make you some fish curry right now.’
My desperate reluctance to impose had no effect. Boloor went back into his house to complete some work, while Shailaja brought two large mackerel out of her house and began to cut and de-scale them on a curved blade, sitting by a well in the courtyard. She removed the innards of the fish, wrenched their jaws off, cut them rapidly into thick fillets, and washed them with well water, making conversation all the while. ‘I’ve been making this curry since I was a teenager, when I learned it from my mother,’ she said. ‘And we make it at home every day. There’s almost no meal without it.’
In her kitchen, with its sloping roof and its blue and orange walls, Shailaja showed me the huge tub of masala that she made afresh every two or three days, and the tins of ingredients that went into the masala. ‘For every coconut, there are thirty-five to forty dried chillies, a tablespoon of turmeric, a handful of coriander seeds, a fistful of tamarind, and some cumin and fenugreek and mustard seeds and salt,’ she recited, the measurements getting more inexact as she progressed. ‘You fry everything except the coconut, and then you grind it all into this paste.’
Shailaja scooped up a few handfuls of the masala, thick and bright orange like clay, and mixed it into some water in a pot until it flowed off her hands with the consistency of thick tomato soup. How did she know how much she needed? I asked. ‘The hand knows,’ she said, with a smile that made my knees wobble. Expertly, she cut and added some ginger and three long, green chillies to the pot, and then some salt. On one of the stove’s two burners, the gravy began to simmer, throwing clouds of heat into the tiny kitchen. Our foreheads erupted in honest sweat. Behind Shailaja, her mother-in-law stood with a toothy grin and eyes that watched and weighed every step of the process. Just outside, in the living room, the television was going berserk with commentary about a Sanath Jayasuriya fusillade in an India-Sri Lanka cricket match.
Eight minutes later, when the surface of the curry started to resemble bubbling lava, Shailaja slipped the fillets down the sides of the pot into the gravy. ‘Don’t stir the curry with a ladle, because that’ll break the fish,’ she warned. Instead, she grabbed the rim of the pot with a cloth and gently shook it around. Really enraged now, the curry began to spit out hot little flecks into the air. With a spoon, Shailaja dabbed a little curry onto her palm and tasted it, and then she added another twist of salt, shook the pot once more, and turned off the stove. The entire operation, from gutting the fish to finishing off the curry, had taken roughly twenty minutes.
And that was how, on the morning of my departure, sitting on a small kitchen stool with a large bowl in my hands, with the television still audible and with Shailaja and her mother-in-law watching me with round eyes, I fell back in love with the Mangalore fish curry (and also, I must admit, fell temporarily in love with its chef). The heat of those thirty-five to forty dried chillies rampaged through my sinuses and made my nose run, but in an odd way, the mackerel tamed that heat—so much, in fact, that I imagined I could feel past the heat and pick out every individual spice. The mackerel, fresh and firm, came away easily in big, moist flakes, and I rolled each bite around in its gorgeous, fiery bath before eating it. On its way down, the curry scalded my mouth, seared my tonsils, and sent parades of flavour marching up and down my tongue. The most perfect rawa fry could have danced itself off the plate and in front of my eyes at that moment, and I wouldn’t have accorded it a second glance.
On my way out, I stopped again at Boloor’s house to thank him. He was leaving home as well, and as we walked to the gate together, I filled his ears with praise of Shailaja’s fish curry. ‘Really, that good, was it?’ Boloor asked. ‘But then, I wouldn’t know,’ he went on, this stalwart president of the Mogaveera Vyavasthapaka Mandali and secretary of the Akhila Karnataka Fishermen’s Parishad, of the National Fishworkers’ Federation and of the Coastal Karnataka Fishermen Action Committee. ‘You see, I don’t eat fish.’
6
On pursuing
the fastest
fish in the
ocean
Like all fishermen, Danny Moses best remembers the one that got away.
A few years ago, Moses was angling on the Angria Bank, a huge submerged coral reef, more than a hundred kilometres from his home state of Goa. Around three in the afternoon, when a day at sea is at its most deliciously torpid, Moses’ big lure suddenly popped. ‘The fish bit and then it just kept diving,’ Moses remembers. ‘It was just a small reel, so we were a little scared. But we were sure it was a marlin, trying to go deep and throw us off as they usually do.’
After a few pregnant minutes, though, the fish modified its battle plan. Rocketing to the surface, it performed a complete somersault at some distance from the boat; only when it repeated the cartwheel at closer quarters did Moses recognize it as a sailfish, one of the most elusive, mighty quarries of the deep-sea angler. ‘We could see the lure snagged at the corner of its mouth,’ he says. ‘It was shaking its head so violently that the rod was whipping about from side to side—thaap! thaap! thaap!’
The sailfish fought Moses every second o
f the ninety minutes he took to reel it closer to his boat. Then, putting on his gloves, Moses began pulling in the braided shock-leader line, hand over hand, inch by arduous inch. ‘It was seven or eight feet long, and probably fifty kilogrammes in weight. Its fin alone was two-and-a-half feet high,’ he says. ‘We were fishing on a catch-and-release basis, so all I needed to do was to touch and tag the fish to claim it as a catch.’
But sometimes, Moses admits ruefully, the size of a fish can just freeze you. When the sailfish was three feet from the boat, Moses found himself staring right into its rolling, furious eyes. ‘He was going gold and purple with rage, and these huge black bands were running down his side,’ he says. ‘The sailfish’s bill is like a razor—you put your hand out, and you might get it sliced off. That was the dilemma.’ And in that moment of indecision, Moses panicked. ‘I decided not to reach out.’
It takes a lot to push Moses into panic. He is a big man with powerful arms and shoulders, and like many Goans, he has been an inveterate angler for almost all of his life; even his keychain is a fluorescent yellow fishing lure. I had heard much about his vast experience with game fish, and when I met him, Moses gifted me this weighty thought: ‘My son fishes because I fish; I fish because my father fished, and that’s how it’s always been here.’ For the better part of two decades now, he has worked runs out to sea with sport-fishing clients, out of the states of Goa and Maharashtra, acquiring a formidable knowledge of the waters and their fish. But on that day, the sailfish froze Moses. ‘I’ve tried to justify it to myself so many times since then,’ he says. ‘Maybe at the time, I was still a little green when it came to sailfish. But I flunked. There’s no two ways about that.’
Following Fish: Travels Around the Indian Coast Page 10