Following Fish: Travels Around the Indian Coast

by Samanth Subramanian

  Then there are the trawlers. ‘You know,’ Parab told us, ‘the government of Goa stopped issuing licenses for new trawlers some time ago. But they do still issue renovation licenses.’ So instead of officially buying new trawlers, Goa’s fishing magnates constantly ‘renovate’ their old vessels magically into trawlers with bigger holds and newer engines. ‘What can we do? We can’t even tell our fishermen to continue in this loss-making profession,’ Parab said. ‘And if a fisherman who earns Rs 100 a day can sell his land for Rs 10 lakhs, start a lease-a-motorbike service, make Rs 1,000 a day by renting out five motorcycles, and sit at home all day playing cards and drinking, who wouldn’t do it? People are too idle, and that type of idle income is possible only in a tourist economy like Goa’s.’ Perhaps I was mistaken, but I thought I caught a wistful note in Parab’s voice as he outlined that landscape of laziness.

  I asked, at this point, about the riverboat casinos that I had seen in Panaji, and it was like setting off a depth charge in already choppy waters. ‘Until a few years ago, there was only one riverboat casino—the Caravela,’ Parab exploded. The M. V. Caravela, named after the first Portuguese armada to visit Goa in the sixteenth century, has been operating its Casino Goa since 2001. ‘Now there are five more. Every night, each boat hosts between three and five hundred guests, in addition to a hundred-odd staff. So in one night, untreated waste from thousands of people, not to mention plastic and other litter, is released into the river.’ Parab estimated that the Goan government received a Rs 1 crore license fee from each casino; in fact, a couple of months after I met him, the government increased that figure to Rs 5 crores. ‘When that’s the kind of money coming in,’ Parab said, ‘why would the government even listen to us?’

  It isn’t, he added, that the fishermen haven’t tried. ‘I’ve gone personally to the fisheries department to ask them why they were sitting idle’—that word again—‘and why they weren’t doing something to protect the fishing community.’ But the department itself, Parab muttered darkly, had sold its soul—or to be more exact, had rented it out. ‘They used to be on the ground floor and first floor of a building, with a jetty attached,’ he said. But the department had given over the jetty as well as the ground floor offices to the owners of the Caravela. ‘The fisheries department itself owns three trawlers, but now it has nowhere to park them,’ Parab said. ‘What will this kind of department do?’

  From Betim, Borges took me to Coco Beach on the Mandovi estuary, which popular opinion regarded as the most degraded stretch of beach in Goa. There was, in reality, not much beach left. I saw Coco as a grubby bar of mud, covered with a thin film of sand that was only cosmetic in its presence, and overrun by a litter of nets and fishing paraphernalia. After hectic, unplanned development had weakened the soil, the beach had been eaten away by the sea and the monsoon rains. ‘There would be shacks from there to there,’ Borges indicated, his arm moving in a wide arc over the beach. As Coco got narrower, the shacks began to trespass onto a traditional fishing stronghold, and the fishermen protested loudly enough to, in a rare victory, have them shut down. But the damage had been done; Coco now looks like something the tourism monster has masticated and spat back out.

  It was a hot day, and a group of fishermen was just launching a boat out to sea when we arrived, so we waited in the shade of a scraggly clump of trees for Reginald Silvera to finish issuing his instructions to them. Silvera, thirty years old, had been a fisherman at Coco Beach since he left school in the eighth grade to follow his father into the profession, catching mackerel, sardines, prawn and kingfish in the sea. His hair had the brittle, thirsty appearance that is bestowed by too much salty air, and his skin had been stained a dark walnut by the sun. In his immediate family, he was the only Silvera still fishing actively. ‘I set up a shack on Calangute beach a few years ago, but my brother runs that. And my other brother has a tourist boat business,’ he told me. ‘But you know, with a shack, you have to be on the beach for twelve hours every day. Who wants to do that?’ (I could think of a few people, I thought to myself.) ‘Here, I can go fishing even at night, if I want to. Fishing is my life, and it’s a good life. But not everybody feels that way. Many of my friends have drifted away into the tourism business.’

  Silvera, like other Goan fishermen I would meet over the next few days, seemed to consider it a matter of pride and honour to insist that he had stayed true to his fishing roots, and that he had stopped his ears to the seductive call of the tourism business even as his colleagues succumbed to it. A further fillip of honour was to be derived from pointing out that, unless you are on a trawler, the fishing today is more difficult than ever. During a lull in our conversation, when Silvera went further down the beach to talk to another man, Borges advised me not to believe everything I heard. ‘Many of these guys own their shacks on one side, have somebody else in the family run them, and fish only when they really feel like they want to,’ he said. ‘You just watch. He’ll come back now and tell you about how hard it is to even get a decent catch of fish these days.’

  Sure enough, Silvera returned and, as if he were picking up where he had left off, lunged with urgency into the subject of the ‘hook long line’ and the evil it had brought to Goan fishing. The hook long line, Borges had to explain to me later, is a rope of nylon that floats on the surface of the ocean, lashed to buoys at either end, and with thirty or more hooks suspended, by thinner lines, at intervals along the length of the rope. It is artisanal fishing’s equivalent of the bulldozer, but it is deployed with the sweet, almost childlike hope of the ultimate bonanza—of pulling it up again with fish on every single hook, like a clothesline of stockings stuffed to capacity with Christmas presents.

  The scourge of the hook long line, Silvera said, had hit Goan fishing hard. ‘We Goan fishermen don’t use it ourselves—it’s used more by fishermen from outside the state, especially fishermen from the south of India,’ he said. ‘They bait a line with even a hundred hooks at a time, and it’s very effective, especially with kingfish. But it catches fish of all ages, so between that and the trawlers, the waters are completely overfished. Earlier, our boats would go out, and every single boat would land a catch. Now, one day I may catch some fish, tomorrow you may catch some. Nothing is certain any more.’

  A few hours later, on the road to Aguada, Borges spotted a man riding a coughing moped ahead of us, suddenly exclaimed: ‘That’s Alex!’ and asked the driver to work the horn as he yelled out of the window for Alex to stop. (Borges did this often. We would be driving along, and suddenly he would whip open the window, stick his head out like a dog, and holler at people whom he thought he knew. On at least a couple of occasions, he received confused glances in response, but as he ducked back in, he philosophically shrugged off these cases of mistaken identity as one of the regrettable facts of life.) Alex reined in his miserable steed, parked it in the middle of his lane, and sauntered into our car for a chat. Around us, the traffic accommodated uncomplainingly, making do with half a road instead of one.

  Borges introduced Alex de Souza to me as one of the few remaining fishermen who fished alone, purely for himself. He made it sound like the temperament of an eminent concert soloist who played for personal satisfaction, and Alex’s perpetual grin widened slightly. He had cheap sunglasses pushed back over his hair, which had been bleached into a rust-brown by the elements and which he had gathered into a ponytail. He wore a psychedelic blue T-shirt, the slogan on which proclaimed that its owner had ‘NO FEAR’. He was just on his way to Aguada, he drawled, to have a look at his boat. It was all he seemed to have on his agenda for the day.

  When I met him, Alex owned a two-seater canoe, and it is unlikely that he has diversified his holdings since then. For some extra money, he occasionally drove his friend’s tourist boat, but for a living, he rowed two kilometres out at 4 a.m. every day and fished for red snapper, flathead and the occasional lobster. ‘I put the net out, take a nap for an hour or so, pull it up again, and then repeat the process,’ he said. Towards the
middle of the morning, he returned to shore, and his mother kept some of his catch and sold the remaining at the market. Alex was in his mid-thirties, and he had been leading this life for a couple of decades already.

  ‘But as the older fishermen die off, there are fewer of us who continue to go out fishing,’ Alex said. ‘My friends have tended to drift off into tourism, and the younger kids never fished at all, they went straight into the water sports business.’ His beloved beaches near Aguada have been ruined by the tourist trade as well. ‘The shacks accumulate all this garbage, but instead of disposing of it, they dig these holes in the sand and bury them there,’ he said. ‘Then the monsoon comes and washes the sand away, and the garbage comes pouring back out.’ Even if somebody did clear the trash, the pits remained, to be augmented during the next tourist season by more pits, the beach slowly transformed into a landscape of Swiss cheese.

  On another day, we drove to the Sinquerim jetty, the shooting location, Borges informed me with his inside knowledge, of the famous Dhoom scene featuring a boat leaping over a bridge. The jetty pushes into a narrow channel of water, on either side of which lines of palm trees grant blessed shade from the sun. From this convenient point, Borges’ friends Mickey and Dominic ran their boat rental service, along with half a dozen other water sport entrepreneurs. The jetty was thrumming with jet-skis and powerboats, and this was in the first week of October, when it was still too early for tourists; during the peak of the season, I thought, the channel must positively swarm with craft, scudding through like hordes of angry water beetles.

  Both Mickey and Dominic come from fishing families in Candolim; Dominic, in fact, was the president of the North Goa Fishermen’s Union, although he admitted that the title did more to mark him out as a member of a bureaucracy than to mark him out as a fisherman. ‘We started in water sports full time two years ago, simply because the catch wasn’t good,’ Dominic said. For many years, Dominic’s family had fished just off the Goan shore in canoes, catching mostly mackerel and sardines. But when motorboats became cheaper, so did the temptation to buy them and lease them out to tourists. ‘At first, we were just taking the hippies out to see the dolphins,’ he grinned. As the fishing withered, the tourist trade flourished; for Mickey and Dominic, the move from one to the other was inevitable. And they were, clearly, the more prosperous for it. Their shirt pockets bulged with compact, complex-looking cell phones and expensive sunglasses, and a large diamond stud gleamed like a sunburst against the dark skin of Mickey’s left ear lobe. I recalled Parab’s ethical dilemma—how to convince fishermen to continue fishing when it was probably in their best interests to do otherwise—and I did not envy him his duty of grappling with it.

  Only on my final full day in Goa was I able to follow the second part of Alvares’ advice: to walk the beach from Calangute to Candolim. I reached Calangute early in the evening, with an hour to go before the sun doused itself in the far waters to the west. It was Saturday, and I had expected a crowd, but Calangute was only comfortably populated, mostly by Goans enjoying a rare chance to have their beach to themselves. A couple of loud cricket games were in progress, sending tennis balls scooting across the sand like fluorescent yellow crabs. Fathers in rolled-up trousers introduced their children to the ocean. At one spot, two shirtless men stood holding one end of a yellow line that ran away into the water, waiting patiently for a bite.

  Even from Calangute, the bulk of the River Princess is clearly visible on the horizon, looking like a gigantic beached whale. She is something of an optical illusion, making for such a massive object for the eye to focus on that she dupes the mind into believing that the walk is shorter than it really is. Inexplicably left in her place for nearly a decade, the River Princess had settled, I later read, eight to ten metres into the seabed and had taken on more than thirty thousand metric tonnes of sand; moving her now, a salvage expert had proclaimed in the media, would be ‘like uprooting a sunken four-storeyed building.’ The briny air had chewed her eight-hundred-foot-long superstructure into streaks of rust and black, and claws of corroded steel regularly broke away into the water or washed up onto the shore.

  When she was still alive, the River Princess was an ore-carrier belonging to Salgaocar Mining Industries, but after she expired one rainy night on a sandbar off Candolim, her owner was able to abandon the corpse without inviting penal action of any kind. When the wreck became a blight on a popular beach, Goans reasonably expected the state to tow her away, if only out of a self-interested desire to protect the tourist trade, its golden goose. Instead, the River Princess now began to be mired in the far swampier waters of bureaucracy. A lawsuit ineffectually travelled to the Goa bench of the Mumbai High Court; a 2001 act to protect tourist spots in Goa, designed and passed specifically for the removal of the River Princess, did nothing; multiple governments issued multiple salvage tenders that went nowhere. Meanwhile, the River Princess sank further into her grave, altering the tidal flow around her, peeling into the sea. From a distance, she resembled a jagged dagger stabbed into Goa’s soft curves.

  Walking towards the ship, I passed lines of beach eateries, boardedup for the off-season. More shacks would soon be assembled along the route I was taking, and I could see the tracks of their former passage—the small, shallow garbage-pits that Alex had mentioned. To my left, there were deep gouges in a higher level of sand, so regular that they were clearly artificial; some of them were broad and semi-circular, and when they occurred one after another, it looked as if a giant mouth had taken a clean bite out of the coast. The beach had little sand to spare; the ground felt hard under my feet, not as if the sand had been packed by water but as if there was brick or clay just beneath.

  It took me thirty minutes to come near enough to the River Princess to be able to spot the irregular gashes above her waterline and the individual flakes of peeling paint on her skin. Surprisingly—or, in the light of everything else associated with this mess, perhaps not so surprisingly—there were no signs posted to urge people not to go wading or swimming near the wreck. The wind swept in and out of her hull with forlorn whistles. At such close quarters, the River Princess stopped being an eyesore, because it was easier to see her for what she was: An honest vessel, left to desolation and decay through no fault of her own. Alvares had called the River Princess a symbol of the inefficiency of Goa, but that didn’t feel quite right. She was more a symbol of the indolence of Goa, of a state that had come to be unfortunately infected with the idleness of its guests.

  8

  On seeking to eat as

  a city once ate

  Every minute of the half hour I waited for Yashwant Chimbaikar outside his house, I worried that he simply wouldn’t turn up. When I had met him for the first time a few days earlier, at 7.30 in the evening, he was already tipsy, and I worried that he wouldn’t remember our appointment or even remember me. I worried that the wedding he had attended the previous night, from which he’d reportedly returned at 2 a.m., had proven to be such a fount of liquor that he wouldn’t stir for the rest of the day, and certainly not at half past five on a chilly Mumbai morning. I worried at the prospect of banging on what I uncertainly suspected was his door, and thereby rousing an entire extended family—possibly the wrong extended family. So I just stood and shivered and repeatedly did what he had asked me to do: Call his mobile phone.

  Chimbaikar, a fish vendor, lives in Chimbai, one of the many Koli settlements within Mumbai; traditionally, these were discrete villages, but as a city grew up in the gaps around them, they might now be called, less charitably, ghettoes. Chimbai’s Kolis, Chimbaikar among them, are largely fisher folk, either fishermen or fish sellers. Every morning, just before dawn, little posses of Chimbai residents leave in two or three trucks for Mumbai’s docks, returning around half past nine with great quantities of fresh fish, to be sold through the remainder of the day. That trip to the docks was ordinarily the preserve of Narmada, Chimbaikar’s wife, but Yeshi (as he insisted I call him) was making an exception for me. ‘Come
by at 5.30 on Saturday morning and we’ll go to the docks together,’ he had said. ‘Stand outside the Hotel Usha and just call this number. I’ll come right out.’

  Eventually, just before six, Yeshi did emerge, having apparently taken the extra minutes to look good for me. His thin grey hair was slicked neatly into place, and he wore a spotless white shirt, steel-coloured polyester trousers and a large pair of dark glasses with the brand ‘Planet’ inscribed on them. From his neck hung a gold chain with two pendants, one shaped like an anchor and the other like a ship’s wheel. He could easily passed for the captain of a private yacht on the Riviera. ‘Did you wait long?’ he asked. Without waiting for my answer, he headed towards a small shrine for a prayer—the village of Chimbai is half Christian and half Hindu—and then into the Hotel Usha for a glass of tea. ‘Come, sit, there’s no hurry,’ Yeshi said. ‘Besides, I really need the tea.’

  Even at that time of the day, the No. 1 bus from Chimbai to south Mumbai was surprisingly full. We passed Mumbai in various stages of the act of waking up—still lolling in bed half-asleep at Mahim, sitting up and rubbing its eyes on a flyover near Byculla, and heading out for a jog at the already active Chor Bazaar. ‘If your car is ever stolen,’ Yeshi said, as we passed the Bazaar, ‘within an hour, it will have been brought here and stripped for parts.’

  Yeshi is, in general, a fund of information about all sorts of Mumbai commerce. Once, he told me about how lemons were sold at the wholesale market. ‘No words are involved, nobody says anything. The guy puts his hand in your shirt and holds up some fingers,’ he said, and by way of immediate demonstration, he stuck his clammy, rough hand up my shirt and raised a finger and a thumb. ‘You touch that hand, feel the bid, and respond. The bargaining goes on like this, all blind, so that nobody else can see the prices you’re getting.’