Following Fish: Travels Around the Indian Coast

by Samanth Subramanian

  When the No. 1 bus let us off near Sassoon Docks, Yeshi became even more authoritative; the Docks, after all, had been a part of his life for nearly every one of his sixty years. ‘The guard at the gate there, you see him? He gets a bribe of Rs 50 per truck, otherwise he won’t let it leave the Docks,’ he said. ‘Each cop here makes at least Rs 2,000 every day as bribes. You see that man, walking away from us, dressed in white? He’s one of the six local dons.’ Then, with unalloyed glee at the prospect, Yeshi added: ‘Each one of those dons has six or seven women all to himself.’

  The Sassoon Docks was completed in 1875, when its eponymous builder Albert Abdullah David Sassoon had already been made a knight, and when baronetcy lay a few years into the future. The first ‘wet dock’ in western India, Sassoon Docks was built over three years on 200,000 square feet of land mostly wrested back from the sea, with an uninterrupted view of a bumpy little island called Oyster Rock. Over the years, it has come to be dominated almost exclusively by the fishing trade, therefore serving, every morning, simultaneously as a wharf and a marketplace. When I visited, it was one of the few docks still open to visitors, but a withered paper notice pasted near the entrance warned that, very soon, only people with entry permits would be allowed in.

  Through a pair of large metal gates, past a double row of stalls selling frail plastic watches, monkey caps, flowers and breakfast, was a long concrete platform that extended into the ocean, packed with docked fishing boats on either side. Part of that stretch was roofed, so that it resembled a large open shed, virtually every square inch of it agitating with activity. Koli fisherwomen sat and argued over prices, or they walked purposefully about, cane baskets on their heads, elbowing aside whatever stood in their way. Spot auctions progressed in a sign language that Yeshi had to explain to me. (‘Put your little finger up, and you’re raising the bid by Rs 100. Then every subsequent finger raised is another Rs 100, or you can put up half a finger for Rs 50. Put up all five fingers at once and you’ve raised the bid by Rs 1,000.’) In the odd static clumps, little girls sat meditatively deveining prawns with nimble fingers.

  Writers are fond of detecting rhythms of movement in even the most crowded, frenetic places—a reflection of the very writerly desire to impose order upon the disorder around them. At Sassoon Docks that morning, however, it was full-blown chaos. The only rhythm I could spot was a sort of reverse Brownian motion, particles of humanity rushing to avoid each other, people ducking and weaving out of each other’s way, sidestepping and feinting and jostling and second-guessing. It was a waltz of discomfiture, a dance with a narrative that sought valiantly to preserve even a minimal bubble of personal space—a dance, really, choreographed across all of Mumbai, nearly all the time.

  Sassoon Docks teems with

  early-morning commerce

  Yeshi seemed to know, even with a glance, exactly where every lot of fish was headed. ‘That octopus will be exported to China,’ he’d say, or, ‘That tuna is going to be tinned. You know all the tinned tuna that’s sold here in Mumbai as “Made in Japan”? Well, it isn’t. It’s tinned right here in Mumbai.’ He stepped nonchalantly over long, thick tentacles that crept out of their cane baskets and straggled across the floor, as if they were about to engage in a climactic piece of dirty business in a horror movie. I didn’t even recognize some of the truly odd-shaped monsters; one, I could have sworn, was a whole hammerhead shark, but with a wonky nose, dumped casually on a scrap of torn blue tarpaulin.

  As the day brightened further, Yeshi walked me up and down the waterfront, past the ice machines and the groups of fishermen playing cards and the Indian Oil Corporation trucks. His arm draped fraternally about my shoulder, he had moved on from talking about fish to imparting well-meaning lessons on life. ‘I had a cousin, older to me, who was greedy—always after money, looking for ways to get richer,’ he said, for instance. ‘He died at the age of forty-five.’ Then, a few steps further, another moral: ‘My own father lived to be a hundred and five. He told us, his five sons, to never be fearful. If you are, you’ll die of fear before you accomplish anything.’

  In 1959, when Yeshi was twelve years old, his mother died, and he left school in the seventh grade to start working on boats for 50 paise a day. In his community, and for his generation, that was still an unusually rich education. ‘The other fishermen still come to me to figure out their expenses. I used to like arithmetic in school,’ he said. Then, as if reluctant to divulge one fond boyhood memory without another, he said: ‘You know, I met Jawaharlal Nehru when he came to our school. I even shook his hand.’

  For twelve years, from 1969 to 1981, Yeshi was a member of the Shiv Sena, Bal Thackeray’s political party that dedicated itself to aggressive Marathi chauvinism. ‘But then I quit,’ Yeshi said. ‘They filled their stomachs while our blood flowed. We got nothing out of it.’ He seemed to regard that period of his life with the slightly disbelieving amusement of an old man considering the follies of his heady youth. So what did he think, I asked him, of the events of the last few days—of Bal Thackeray’s nephew Raj and his Maharashtra Navnirman Sena’s campaign to guard Marathi identity, of its violence against north Indian immigrants who allegedly spirited away the jobs of ‘genuine’ Mumbaikars from right under their noses?

  ‘Look, where are you from?’ Yeshi asked.

  ‘Madras,’ I said.

  ‘Right. So say you come here from Madras. And you work hard, you work wholeheartedly,’ he postulated. ‘I’m from Mumbai. Now, if I don’t work as hard, why should you be blamed?’ It was really as simple as that, Yeshi said, and he smiled, this man from the most ancient, most authentic community of Mumbaikars.

  The Kolis, Salman Rushdie rightly pointed out in Midnight’s Children, were here first, ‘when Bombay was a dumbbell-shaped island, tapering at the centre to a narrow shining strand beyond which could be seen the finest and largest natural harbour in Asia.’ They were, almost overwhelmingly, fisher folk, and the very word ‘koli’ translates to both ‘spider’ and ‘fisherman’ because, as the historian D.D. Kosambi once explained, the fisherman uses his net much as a spider uses its web. Even as modern Mumbai marginalized her eldest children, pushing them into their ever-tighter villages, the Kolis left their stamp on the city in nomenclature: their Kolibhat became today’s Colaba, their Palva Bunder became today’s Apollo Bunder, and their goddess Mumbadevi became today’s Mumbai.

  I had come to Mumbai in search of some of these original Mumbaikars, and as if he were doing me a perverse sort of favour, Raj Thackeray began his agitations the day before I arrived, raising again in people’s minds that old question: Who exactly is the original Mumbaikar? It could be the Koli, but it could just as well be any of the members of subsequent waves of migration into the city from Gujarat, Goa or South India—or from Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, the migrant workers who were bearing the undeserved brunt of this particular cycle of Thackeray’s viciousness. When their leader was arrested, the members of the MNS took to stopping taxis on roads and, if their drivers were found to be from North India, beating them and torching their vehicles. ‘There is lafda everywhere,’ I was warned, that wonderful Mumbai slang word for trouble suggesting nothing as much as an inordinate crease or tear in the space—time continuum.

  As a result, at the normally traffic-choked time of 7.30 p.m. on my first day there, the roads were so bereft of taxis and other cars that it might have been 3.30 a.m. When I took a taxi home, my driver entered into hectic consultations with his fellow cabbies about the safest possible route. Then, throughout the journey, his eyes flickered constantly to the sides of the road, alert for any imminent danger. Suddenly every man who held up his hand to cross the road, a regular enough practice on any other day, had to be viewed with circumspection, and it was actually a relief when once we ran into a jammed intersection. ‘You know, I wasn’t even sure about taking you,’ my driver said as I was paying him at the end of the jittery ride. ‘Anybody could be trouble at such a time. Absolutely anybody.’

  Thackera
y had been arrested in the late afternoon, when I was at the Mumbadevi Temple in the heart of Zaveri Bazaar, a busy labyrinth of commerce that perfectly symbolized the city to which the goddess had given her name. Even one of the entrances into the Temple’s complex has been pinched almost into non-existence by the shops to either side of it. ‘Without all this Raj Thackeray lafda, we’d have a lot more people here by now,’ a security guard said as he waved me through a beeping, utterly useless metal detector. ‘You’d have had a difficult time even squeezing through.’

  Climbing the few steps up into the temple—each rendered permanently sticky underfoot by the spilled juice of hundreds of smashed coconuts—I entered a small sanctum with two individual shrines. One, containing a moon-faced idol of Annapurna flanked by two heavily mustached bronze soldiers, seemed forlorn and ignored; instead, the crowds congregated in little clumps around the other shrine, bearing a low statue of Mumbadevi, a fierce-looking, orange goddess with ten arms. The idol was more face than body: It was easier to spot, for instance, the large ornament in her left nostril than the diminutive lion she rode. Long stalks of purple and pink flowers fanned out behind her, and she wore a classic Maharashtrian green saree, which was constantly being adjusted this way or that by the bored priest sitting alongside her.

  On the silvered doors of the shrine, the Koli legend of Mumbadevi has been etched in simple panels. There once lived, in these parts, a powerful giant named Mumbarak, who wangled from Brahma the boon that he would never meet his death at another’s hands. Unsurprisingly, this power went to Mumbarak’s head, and when he began to throw his considerable weight about as indestructible giants will do, the gods sought the protection of the other two members of the trinity, Vishnu and Shiva. Out of their combined power, a lion-riding Devi was born, and in a fight that must have lasted many exciting rounds, she beat Mumbarak to within an inch of his life. Then, in an act of grace, she granted Mumbarak a final blessing: that his name should be joined with hers, to be perpetuated on Earth. The city of Mumbai, it would appear, is the fulfillment of that dying wish.

  Mumbadevi may have begun as a Koli goddess, but she became, long ago, the patron deity of her entire city. Mumbaikars across communities, castes and languages visit her temple; when I was there, I heard Marathi and Hindi, but also Malayalam, Punjabi and Gujarati. Mothers brought their babies in to be blessed. Businessmen prayed for their businesses in between cell phone calls. Students with a month to go for their final exams looked to Mumbadevi for divine inspiration. A trio of grandfathers sat in front of the shrine, their lips fluttering in silent prayer.

  Squatting on the floor, taking notes, I was approached by a boy who must have been five or six years old, offering me a crumbling lump of peda in his open palm. I broke off a little for myself. Then he looked curiously at my notebook and asked: ‘What are you writing? Are you doing your homework?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. I wasn’t at home, but apart from that, it was a pretty good approximation.

  ‘Homework!’ he said, made a face of utter disgust, and ran away. Meanwhile, behind me, his mother continued to pray that her son would work hard and excel at his studies.

  Of the many migrant communities who gravitated to Mumbai and who, over decades, began to regard themselves as ‘authentic Mumbaikars,’ the mill-workers of the nineteenth century are among the most prominent. The first cotton mill opened in Bombay in 1851, and demand jumped in the 1860s, when Great Britain found its access to cotton from the American south cut off by port blockades during the American Civil War. The workers driving Bombay’s mills were largely from the city’s hinterland, particularly the Konkan districts of Ratnagiri and Sindhudurg, where agriculture was often disrupted by floods or excess rain. According to one estimate, there were over 100,000 mill workers in the city by 1892, living in the cramped tenements that we know as chawls. Most were men, who having left their wives and families behind in their villages, had to find a way to feed themselves.

  This would turn out to be the genesis of a network of ‘lunch homes’ or ‘khanawals,’ Mumbai’s variant of the unfussy working-class canteens that exist, in one form or another, in every city in India. In a book called Dharma’s Daughters, Sara S. Mitter describes how the chawls’ residents had little facility or energy to cook, and they were certainly too impecunious to eat at regular restaurants. So housewives began to offer daily board to small batches of mill workers, covering their own family’s food expenses in the process; the mill workers would pay for their meals at the end of the month, when they got their wages. The lunch home was a hard-nosed, businesslike affair: You came in purely to eat your stolid way through a plate of food, not to socialise or dawdle over your meal. But the food was good and cheap, and as Mitter writes, it tasted of home, which helped ease ‘the anomie of a workingman’s existence.’

  One of Mumbai’s best remaining khanawals, I was told, is Anantashram, which I located with considerable difficulty in the madness of Girgaum, in a small lane named Khotachiwadi. Like the other houses around it, Anantashram is an old wooden structure, and only one round signboard announces its presence. Next door is the Girgaum Catholic Club (‘Members Only’), and just opposite is a little roadside chapel. When I finally found Khotachiwadi, squarely in the middle of lunchtime, the only signs of life were two men playing cards in the back seat of a dusty, lifeless Premier Padmini, and the constant ebb and flow of Anantashram’s patrons.

  Anantashram must be close to a century old, although it is difficult to ascertain this with any exactitude when its employees wear their antipathy to questions—and to photos, and really to anything that is not a single-minded pursuit of lunch—almost as a part of their uniforms. The waiters spoke only in extreme emergencies, and the customers—all men, when I went there—followed that lead. The dishes of the day were chalked up in Marathi on a blackboard; one waiter took one look at me and loosened his lips long enough to tell me that the English version, hanging in a back room, was severely outdated. Just inside the entrance—under portraits of Hanuman, Radha and Krishna, and an old gentleman who presumably founded Anantashram—sat the manager behind a high table. As each customer entered, the manager would utter one word—‘Bangda’—and clam up again. But that was sufficient to deliver the message: The fish of the day was mackerel. In the kitchen at the back, a thin, sweating man in a vest and shorts wrestled with a long pair of tongs, flipping rotis on a griddle in the midst of so many open fires and bubbling pots that the scene looked positively infernal.

  From the gloom, a waiter materialized and first brought me water in a squat, broad steel bowl, then a cool glass of the spiced kokum-coconut milk drink known as sol kadhi, and then a superb set lunch that sang of home: Rice, fresh rotis, an elongated piece of fried fish, a bowl of curry, and a piece of curried fish. The curried fish, perched on the rim of a bowl, seemed oddly aloof from its curry, as if they were an arguing couple arriving together at a party, for the sake of appearances, but determined to go their separate ways as soon as possible. The fry, hidden under the slim sheaf of rotis, was so tender that it was falling apart even as I picked it up, splitting down the middle to show off its beautiful palette: golden brown on the surface, green around the edges where the skin showed through, and a veneer of silver under the batter, like foil on a barfi.

  For the entirety of my meal, though, it was the curry that held my attention. It was, more than anything else, a thick fish soup, flavoured heartily with mackerel, smooth with coconut, yellow with turmeric, tart with kokum, and finished with a flourish of tempered mustard seeds. I asked for a second helping of the curry, to go with the perfectly cylindrical serving of rice; of the curried mackerel itself, though, I was not a fan. It seemed to have given its all to its gravy, and it now sat glistening but essence-less on the edge of my plate. When I rose after my meal, in fact, that remaining hunk of fish earned me a scolding from my waiter for not finishing my food.

  Like the old khanawals, Anantashram aimed to be strictly dedicated to the act of feeding. Lunch ended not at a
fixed time but when the kitchen ran out of food, and many customers sat on a bench facing the wall, ate without a flicker of expression, and left within a quarter of an hour. But some informality sporadically weakened this rigour. The regulars seemed to know each other well, and conversation was sometimes sustained for three or four minutes on end. One surreal exchange, in particular, proved so diverting that I forgot all about my bangda curry for its duration, so that I could watch and listen with my fullest concentration.

  A middle-aged man in jeans and a T-shirt, with a pony tail sprouting like an exotic plant out of the back of his head, came in, nodded to a gray-bearded Sikh in a baseball cap, and took a seat beside him. He ordered. A few minutes later, his food arrived, and he began to eat. After a few bites, he turned to his neighbour.

  Pony Tail: So how’s it going?

  Baseball Cap: Okay, okay.

  Pony Tail: In some time, anyway, we will all be naked.

  This thought gave Baseball Cap considerable pause. Quite possibly, he was not a long-term planner; perhaps he had only scheduled his day till lunch, or till the subsequent, honest post-lunch nap. Either way, it appeared that nudity had not really figured in his vision for the near future.

  Baseball Cap: What?

  Pony Tail, a little elliptically: Ya, it will be that hot in a couple of months, we’ll want to just be naked. Because it got so cold this winter. So the other extreme will also happen.

  Baseball Cap, considerably relieved: Ah.

  Pony Tail: I’ve never worn warm clothes in Bombay. But I had to this time.

  Baseball Cap: Anyway, the cold is over now.

  Pony Tail: Yes.

  Baseball Cap: Did you try the bangda? It’s good.

  Pony Tail: Mmmmm.