Following Fish: Travels Around the Indian Coast

by Samanth Subramanian

  7

  On grieving

  for bygone

  beaches and

  fish

  I may be wrong, but over the course of two trips to Goa, I formed the distinct impression that its milestones and signboards were doctored. Typically, I would be driving—to Candolim, let us suppose—and a board would announce it to be twenty kilometres away. So I would drive on for another ten minutes, humming along at a consistent 60 kmph, and just when I had calculated that I had driven ten kilometres, another board would pop up, bearing the taunt: ‘Candolim: 15 km.’ Then I would drive a little faster, and in another ten minutes, when I had recouped enough confidence in my mental arithmetic to be sure of seeing a single-digit reading soon, a smug milestone by the side of the road would flash by: ‘Candolim: 12 km.’ At this point, invariably, I would begin to feel like I was trapped in a real-world engineering of Zeno’s paradox, forever halving the distance to my destination but never quite getting there.

  In some cases, such as my harum-scarum pelt to the airport on my second trip, to catch my flight out, this dilation of distances can prove unnerving, particularly if the ticket in your hand is a non-refundable one. But if your flight isn’t leaving in forty minutes, or if where you’re headed is instead just your third beach of the day, these episodes of understatement could have the opposite effect. Take it easy, the signboards soothingly say, you’re not that far away. I can see how this would play into Goa’s grander scheme of things, its relentless objective to chill you out.

  Goa’s is an economy of idleness—not an economy made up of idle people, but an economy that relies on the human desire to idle. To idle is to linger, and to linger is to buy more stuff, eat more stuff and do more stuff on jet-skis: Thence, the Goan economy. But putting that theory into practice is trickier than it sounds, even if, as a state, you can claim to be an idler’s paradise by virtue of being endowed with what seems from the air like roughly a million acres of beach. It is not easy to convince people—or, to be anthropologically precise, tourists—that there isn’t a better shop or a spicier chicken xacuti or a sleeker jet-ski just around the bend of the road, that they shouldn’t be hurrying themselves from sport to sport to banish their regrets. Goa has, by and large, mastered that art of persuasion, but it has had to steamroller a few victims along its determined path to the idylls of tourism.

  That list of unfortunates includes fishing, an activity that has for some centuries been a staple Goan pastime, a subsistence profession as well as a flourishing local industry. It is a simple matter, nearly anywhere on the Indian coast, to turn to the person next to you and spark a conversation about fish as food. Only in Goa, however, is it as simple to talk about the act of fishing itself. As if by some vast, ordained consensus, Goans told me, time after time and in the same words: ‘Fishing is in our blood.’ They sketched for me bucolic visions of the Goan villager stepping out of her hut, her son and daughter by her side and rustic rods in their hands, to spend a quiet evening by the river. One person called fishing ‘the only activity that truly cuts across every Goan religion and caste.’ Another described his boyhood to be of the sort that I thought existed only in Richmal Crompton books, consisting of muddy boys skipping and fighting their way to the water after school, to fish in homework-less oblivion until sunset. ‘Everybody fishes,’ I learned during one particularly effusive discussion. ‘You need to just sit and watch the complete peace with which these riverfront fishermen fish, to understand why they are so passionate about it.’

  I unwittingly gave myself a chance to do that when I arrived an hour early to meet somebody for breakfast in Panaji. It was a fresh morning, the sky scrubbed clean of cloud and a breeze blowing in hesitant gusts from the direction of the ocean. With nothing else to do, I began walking the promenade beside the River Mandovi, a procession of lemon-yellow and powder-blue walls across the road to my right, and moored riverboat casinos with names like Noah’s Ark and King’s Casino, dozing after the previous night’s excesses, to my left. Just before the road began to climb uphill and turn into a flyover, I came upon a woman leaning upon the white concrete balustrade, looking abstractedly over the river. I stopped a dozen metres away and, remembering that piece of earnest advice, took up my station to watch her fish.

  Watching somebody fish is very much like watching somebody stand still. This woman stood, in a white floral shirt and a beige skirt, on sandalled feet, her elbows resting on the balustrade and bearing most of her weight. She wore a fraying straw hat with a narrow brim. She appeared to have passed the age of fifty a few years earlier, but her stocky body looked powerful rather than merely thickened by age, her face was uncreased, and her hair was still a deep matte black. She held a thin wooden pole loosely in her hands, from the end of which an invisible line dropped into the water below; by her feet was a Horlicks bottle containing, I presumed, worms or other bait.

  For an angler, she did not seem particularly avid about actually catching anything. Every so often, she joggled her rod, keeping her bait bouncing in the water as if for exercise, but mostly she gazed at the horizon, or off into a copse of trees on the other side of the Mandovi. Once, she changed her bait, pulling up her line, flicking a bedraggled, stringy something off the hook and into the water, and replacing it from the Horlicks bottle with what I now realized was a small hunk of dried fish. A dreamy expression had settled upon her face, so when, half an hour after I had started to watch her, the rod started to writhe in her hands, she looked down with an air of astonishment, as if a fish had swum up to her and begged to be taken home.

  A little huffily, she gripped her rod between her knees, as if it were a rail-thin bronco, and began rapidly to pull up her line, hand over hand. The fish came up, and with the line still invisible in the sunlight, it appeared like it was being magically levitated out of the river. It was unidentifiable from where I stood, a flapping pale brown creature half the length of her forearm. After she slid the fish off its hook, she barely glanced at it. Instead, she cocked her arm and lobbed the fish mightily back into the river. Then, appearing annoyed at the interruption, she moodily re-baited her hook, sank it back into the river, and went back to her original stance, propped up by the balustrade. In five minutes, she had recovered her beatific smile and dreamy stare. It was as if a fish had never even nibbled at the bait she had so meticulously set out.

  Danny Moses, whom I’d also pumped for information on the sailfish, is a vociferous champion of angling as a Goan pastime. ‘It’s a social thing, but it’s also a chance for us to spend some time alone with nature—that’s why we do it,’ he told me, when we first met at a coffee shop in Panaji. Moses has been fishing for as long as he can remember, and like nearly every one of his fellow Goans, he said, he has a favourite spot for fishing alone: near the jail just off Coco Beach. ‘I like to fish as the tide goes out, and all the mullet come down, so the bigger fish like the bream and the barramundi all gather, waiting to eat.’

  But in his lifetime—in less than half his lifetime, in fact—Moses has seen his average catch dwindle, even as Goa has tried to keep its climbing numbers of tourists sated with the seafood they desire. ‘For seven years, this has been a fish-starved state. So much of the fish we buy now comes to us from Karnataka and Maharashtra,’ he said. ‘Ten years ago, in this very bay‘—just opposite our chairs on Miramar Circle—‘you could put in a net and just pull out the mullet. Today, you’ll get nothing.’ Moses twisted in his chair and pointed to a girl sitting with her friends on the opposite side of the café. ‘You see her? Her dad was one of the first people to get a trawler, way back in the early 1980s. He got a whole fleet. Now he has only one boat, because the catch is that much poorer these days,’ he said. ‘People have to realize, within themselves, what they stand to lose. I don’t want to even imagine a world where my son will not see a single salmon in the river. And it’s all just a classic case of greed.’

  Moses held up a hand and starting ticking off, on fleshy fingers, the items in this litany of greed; after N
umber Three, he abandoned the count and simply began karate-chopping the air in despair. He condemned the trawlers ripping up the seabed even in the two-kilometre zone from the coastline that is reserved by law for traditional fishing. He talked, through gritted teeth, about rules broken with impunity or tripped up by corruption, of surreptitious fishing even during the two-month closed season, about the pernicious stake nets, ‘banned everywhere else in the world, but here they’re put up even in the breeding areas of the river, so that all the fry are caught.’ He dissected the perpetual state of confrontation between the trawler owners and the ramponkas, the traditional fishermen using the artisanal rampon nets. That conflict has been seething since the 1970s, but even today, he said, every year some boats are burned. ‘This is an outright war.’

  Moses was fond of tying this dystopian fishing culture to the larger loss of an older Goa—a Goa where, fifteen years ago, if somebody found a lost bag or wallet, they’d put an advertisement in the newspaper, and the money would all be there when it was claimed. There were no such advertisements in the newspapers any more, he said. The Goa of today hangs on exultantly to its lost bags and wallets; it is brasher and greedier and cockier, and often at odds with itself. ‘Earlier, we’d go inland to fish, and you know, we’d catch one fish and have a good time and come away,’ he said. I could almost see the roseate glaze on his eyeballs. ‘Now, you see kids in these four-wheel drives camping out there, with loud music and bright lights, and they’ll catch as many fish as they can. It’s making the locals in these places really angry. If they catch you now, they’ll break your rod and chase you away.’

  These were largely the complaints, Moses acknowledged, of a hobbyist fisherman; the situation of the professional fishermen, he said, was far more dire. A couple of days earlier, I had met Claude Alvares, a fierce-looking environmentalist who has for years been railing against the damage that the tourism industry has wrought upon Goa’s beaches and therefore the fishing trade. (His web site, not inaccurately, identifies him as a Typewriter Guerilla.) Alvares’ office is in a hilly section of Mapusa, on the ground floor of an apartment building that also houses a grocery shop and a stationer’s. He is a busy man, forever awash in appointments; he is also prone to forgetting about those appointments when he has built up a head of conversational steam, when his white moustache has begun to quiver with the indignation he feels.

  Broken down into its smallest unit, according to Alvares, the problem was that of the Goan beach shack. Enjoyable as it can be, the culture of the beach shack is premised entirely on artificiality. The shack is an artificial way to be ‘outdoors’ on the public beach, where alcohol isn’t allowed, and to still be ‘indoors,’ where turning down alcohol can constitute a grave breach of the Goan tourists’ social code. It is an artificial way for tourists to feel like they’re being hippies in authentic Goa and communing with the waves all day, even as they know that they will drive back to their air-conditioned hotel rooms for the night. Even the poverty-stricken label of ‘shack’ sits uneasily with the Rs 120 beers and the Rs 220 fish fry being served under its thatched roof. And as the final twist, that roof itself is only as permanent as the visitors it shelters. When a tourist season ends, the shacks are dismantled and put away as easily as if they were made of Lego bricks, to be broken out again only for the next season of beach-bumming and wave-communing. It is as if, out of tourist season, there were really no cafés in Rome.

  ‘So all the time, in Goa, there is this pressure for more shacks on the beaches,’ Alvares said. ‘This year, for instance, there are three hundred shack licenses being given out by the government, and the funny thing is, this is despite a 25 per cent drop in the number of tourists. Next year, they’ll give out four hundred licenses. Then there are the deck beds—as many as three thousand of them on Goa’s beaches and more to come next year. The people in the government never have any brains, so there’s never any limit to this nonsense.’

  This contest between the tourism and fishing industries was really no contest at all. The creep of shacks has slowly edged the fishing canoes off the beaches, the jet-skis and power-boats have kept the coastal waters in constant churn and driven away the fish, and the beachfront developers have bought or grabbed all the land they could. ‘There used to be twenty to twenty-five fishing boats at a time on Baga beach, but now there are barely a couple,’ Alvares said. So the fishermen, deprived of the space to practise their profession, had to give it up and turn, in the blackest irony, towards the only viable source of employment: tourism. They bought shacks, or they opened water-sport businesses, or they joined the hotels. Thus, in Alvares’ narrative of capitalism gone bad, the industry grew fatter still, forced more fishermen out of business, lured them into its folds and crevices, grew fatter still, and so forth.

  ‘Then there’s the sand,’ Alvares went on. ‘Go look at Anjuna beach—it is that weirdest of things, a sandless beach. They’re carting away the sand dunes to put into the plinths of all these new buildings that are coming up. Studies say that by 2020, with a rise in the sea level, 5 to 10 per cent of Goa will go under. But still they’re destroying these protective sand dunes.’ He had written about some of this, he said, in his book Fish Curry and Rice, which aggressively identifies itself, in its subtitle, as A Citizens’ Report on the Goan Environment. ‘But funnily, nobody wants to read about these things in Goa, because nobody seems to care,’ Alvares lamented. ‘You’d probably have a better chance of finding that book in Mumbai or New Delhi.’

  Alvares had two pieces of advice for me. The first was to stop talking to him, and to others like him, and to instead start visiting the beaches themselves, to talk to the fishermen I would meet. The second was to simply walk along the stretch of beach between Calangute and Candolim, to the rusting hulk of the River Princess, a ship that had run aground in north Goa in the June of 2000 and still remained in exactly the same place eight years later. Only then, Alvares said, would I be able to learn for myself the extent of the government’s greed and inefficiency, and to see in process the destruction of the fisherman’s habitat.

  On the way out of Alvares’ office, I stopped at the stationer’s in the same building to ask for Fish Curry and Rice, but they didn’t have it in stock. Over the next two days, I must have asked for the book in at least half a dozen bookstores across Goa. I didn’t find a single copy.

  Following Alvares’ advice, I began my own variation on the beach-hopping itinerary that every tourist in Goa seems to follow, and for this I relied largely on the wisdom and street smarts of George Francis Borges. Borges is a short, pugnacious individual, so baby-faced that it came as a faintly obscene shock to learn that he was thirty-seven, and that he was married with children. When he was a young man, he left Goa to work in the Middle East, returning when the first Gulf War began. ‘Then I was a boating instructor on and off, but mostly I just sat around drinking. The problem was, I had too many friends, you know?’ he told me with a lopsided smile. ‘Money would come into this hand, go out of this hand. That’s how it was.’ When I met him, Borges was professionally a doer of a little bit of this and some of that. He assisted his friends with their business if he felt like it, and if Bollywood’s movie units came to Goa to shoot, he helped out in his capacity of local guide and gopher. When Dhoom filmed there, Borges mentioned, he would zip around town bearing John Abraham on the pillion of his motorcycle, ferrying him from location to location. ‘But otherwise, I just hang around,’ he said. ‘I go fishing a couple of times a week, on a friend’s boat. Here in Goa, even if you don’t like to fish, you go fishing—just to pass the time.’ On our way to the offices of the Mandovi Fishermen Marketing Co-Op Society on the Betim jetty, Borges pointed to a ramshackle, abandoned shed by the riverside, near Reis Magos. ‘You see there? That’s my favourite spot to fish in all Goa.’

  Sitakant Kashinath Parab, the chairman of the Society and like everyone else in Goa, a friend of Borges, has eyes that are appropriately reminiscent of a fish, blank and unblinking. His brief does n
ot so much include the hundred-odd kilometres of Goa’s coastline as the two-hundred-and-fifty-odd kilometres of its river systems. On the subject of the beaches, therefore, he was vague; he ventured that perhaps 50 per cent of the coastal fishermen had moved into tourism, but he offered this suspiciously round statistic uncomfortably. When we started talking about the rivers, however, he began to give us his fullest attention, his eyes leaving the piles of papers on his government-green metal desk and only rarely thereafter flickering to odd spots on the room’s ugly blue walls.

  Parab was eager to blame the ongoing demise of fishing on what I had thought, until then, were unquestionably pillars of social progress. The improved highway system, for instance, now trucked fish into Goa from Tamil Nadu, Orissa and Gujarat, and Parab considered it competition that Goa’s fishermen didn’t need. Education had improved, but because of this ‘literation,’ Parab moaned, fishermen began to aim for sophisticated, white-collar jobs. ‘It’s not just fishermen, in fact,’ Parab said. ‘One of my friends comes from a family of toddy tappers, and in their village, there used to be a thousand people just tapping toddy. But in the next generation, there isn’t a single person who knows how to climb a coconut tree. And my friend now owns a tourist boat.’