Following Fish: Travels Around the Indian Coast

by Samanth Subramanian

  During one of my vigils at Razzaq’s yard, I watched two men mark off a section of planking, to be cut to fit a particular slot in the boat’s frame. With a length of thin rope, they obtained the measure of that slot, and then they carried the rope over to the wood. One man held his end firmly down, while the other strode along the plank, chalking the measured length of the rope. When he finally reached his end of the rope, the chalk traced a long, straight line, ready to be guided into the saw. Except that, the first time, the line wasn’t quite as straight as the men would have liked it, and after standing over it in hushed conference for a few seconds, they began at opposite ends and scurried towards each other, carefully brushing the chalk off with their hands as if they were flicking insects off the wood. Then they repeated the exercise until they got it right. It was a charming, inch-tape-less vignette.

  A short walk from Razzaq’s lot was the yard of Arjanbhai, another of Bapu’s friends. Arjanbhai’s yard was quieter and less manic, and Arjanbhai himself, working as he was on just a single small fishing boat at the time, was more patient and welcoming. (He also had a dark sense of humour. ‘You know why a wooden boat is better than a fibreglass one?’ he said. ‘If it sinks, you can always hold on to the planks and save yourself. But if it’s fibreglass …’) The boat, nearly completed, sat in the dead centre of the rectangular yard; its two future owners sat in plastic chairs, under the bulk of their vessel, trees managing to provide shadow long after they had been stripped of foliage and turned into lumber.

  Via a rickety ladder, Arjanbhai led me on to the boat’s planked deck, smelling strongly of that morning’s coat of linseed oil. He pointed out two perfectly square gaps—one leading to a hold for ice, and the second to a larger hold to store fish—that would soon be covered by metalled hatches. Another gap in the deck waited for the installation of the boat’s wheel; peering through it, I could see the drilled-out hole in a longitudinal beam far below, through which the wheel would connect with the rudder. Within the boat’s innards, a carpenter was laying down pre-cut sheets of plywood to serve as the floors of the holds.

  ‘Is there anything happening today that is being done exactly as it was a century or two ago?’ I asked Arjanbhai out of curiosity.

  Oh definitely, Arjanbhai said, and led me back down the ladder and towards the prow of the boat. Here, a boy in his late teens was dipping strands of braided cotton into a mix of oil and resin, and then inserting the strands into the crevices between the planks with the help of a chisel and a mallet, pounding them into place until the crevices were full. He worked with his face turned up, and drops of resin-oil mixture fell occasionally onto his forehead or his cheeks, mixing with his perspiration and running down to stain the collar of his shirt an even deeper brown. And thus he caulked the boat into absolute watertightness, the cotton and resin-oil unique to the boats of the Arabian Sea, but the technique itself, in its essence, exactly the same as that used for hundreds of years by boat builders all over the world.

  Choosing one particularly sweltering afternoon, Bapu decided that I should visit the Shiva temple at Somnath, less than half an hour’s ride away on his motorcycle. ‘I’ve seen it dozens of times,’ he said when we reached there. ‘You go on and look around. I’ll wait here for you and have a Pepsi.’

  It was not an afternoon conducive to temple-going. I walked barefoot towards the shrine in an overheated daze, lurching painfully from burning flagstone to burning flagstone, and standing much longer than necessary in the occasional puddle of shade. Indoors, the temple seemed too crowded for a weekday—too crowded, in any case, for my patience, which like paper had been charred into brittleness by the sun—so I ducked out of the southern entrance and walked towards the edge of the very low bluff upon which the temple sits. I could hear the ocean even some distance from the perimeter railing, and once at the edge, the wind arriving cool and fresh off the sea, I felt calmer and more comfortable.

  From the railing, I could look down at the small beach of blackened sand just at the foot of the bluff, and at the dense crowd that slowly roasted itself upon that sand. Above me, to my right, stood a remarkable stone pillar with an arrow that pointed out to sea; a legend, inscribed on the pillar, states that there is no other land between that arrow on the seashore and the northern lip of Antarctica. As on that bench in Diamond Harbour, in West Bengal, I stood again on a cusp. To my right was the unimaginable vastness of the open ocean, running past Arabia and Africa to stretch nearly all the way to the South Pole, the bottom of the world. To my left was all the hulking peninsular mass of India.

  I stood at the railing for twenty minutes, staring into the infinite distance, until my feet complained. Then I made my way out of the temple and towards the parking lot, where Bapu was waiting near his motorcycle.

  AFTERWORD

  A few weeks after I’d returned from Gujarat, somebody happened to ask me what had surprised me most about my travels. It was a wisely worded question. Travel does nothing better than swinging a wrecking-ball into even your most meagre expectations. A place is always hotter or wetter or colder or drier than you suspect it will be; people will always turn out to have stories different from the ones you set out to hear; a society will, when you think you’ve got it all figured out, always turn itself inside-out like a sock, to reveal its frayed threads, its seams, its patterns of stitch work. The real process of discovery works not by revealing things you knew nothing about, but by revealing how wrong you were about what you did know.

  The standard India story rightly emphasizes the gamut of differences from one state to the next. What struck me more, however, were the similarities of the coastal communities I visited, right around the country. A fisherman in Tamil Nadu looked very much like a fisherman in Gujarat, as slender as a mast and scorched dry by sun and salt. Already fragile livelihoods rose and fell with the fishing calendar. The histories of these societies, the first points of contact for maritime explorers coming to India, proved uniformly cosmopolitan, readily absorbing the influences they received. And throughout my travels, I encountered the fisherman’s quietly articulated complaints against the modern age. In a common paradox, traditional fishing families were moving away from their trade, and yet harbours and ports were crammed past capacity with motorized fishing boats and trawlers. The owners of these craft were pure businessmen, concerned with volumes above all else. The inevitable consequences, everywhere I went, were overfishing and degraded coastal waters, stripped as thoroughly of their riches as a king consigned to exile.

  The rhythms and habits of lives on the coast are so alike because they have been shaped by the same force of nature. For all its variations in salinity or fauna or temperature gradient, the sea is the same everywhere. It is moody, dangerous and inscrutable, imposing particular disciplines upon those who depend on it. In fact, now that farmers have controlled their land—or doped it into submission, depending on your point of view—with chemistry and genetics, the fishermen are the last remaining people in India to work closely and daily in an untamed natural world. The GPS may have replaced the compass and the stars, and the engine may have helped to permanently stow oars and sail. But as Yeshi Chimbaikar pointed out to me in Mumbai, short of dredging the ocean floor, there isn’t yet a substitute for spending long hours on the water, praying for a misguided fish to wander onto a line or into a net. Fishing is still elemental in the most elemental sense of the word—an activity composed of water and air and light and space, all arranged in precarious balance around a central idea of a man in a boat, waiting for a bite.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  My gratitude is due first to Kamini Mahadevan at Penguin Books India, with whom I started talking about this project, who encouraged it along during its bleakest patches, and who waited courageously as I overshot deadline after deadline with consummate ease. I should also mention my employers at Mint, who supported my working on this book even as I held down a day job with them.

  Any book involving this much travel could not have happened without
the help of vast numbers of people. Many of them star as characters within these chapters. Many more were anonymous, simply flitting in and out of this journey like moths across a windshield. This is true especially of lower-level government and civic officials, who are ordinarily much maligned in India, but who were unfailingly generous in the small towns and villages that I visited.

  My particular thanks:

  In West Bengal: To the Pals, for their hospitality, and to Nilanjana, for so much more; to Atri Bhattacharya; to Chefs Sharad Dewan and Vasanthi.

  In Andhra Pradesh: To Shalini and Guru; and to P. Anil Kumar for his photographic expertise.

  In Tamil Nadu: To Joe D’Cruz, for all his knowledge and patience and help; to Amalraaj Fernando, for giving of his time so unstintingly.

  In Kerala: To Freddie Koikaran, for proving to be such a great travel companion, and to Neesha, for loaning me Freddie for a week; to Ashima and Arjun and their two lovely daughters; to Mahesh Thampy and to Madhu Madhavan.

  In Karnataka: To Vasudev Boloor and his family; to Shamanth Rao, V. V. Ramanan, and Jaideep Shenoy.

  In Maharashtra: To Peter Baptista, Emil and Yvan Carvalho; to Danny Moses.

  In Goa: To Maria Couto, for her invaluable insights; to Danny Moses again; to Claude Alvares; to Ravi Venkatesh and Vipin Kannoth; and especially to George Francis Borges.

  In Mumbai: To Harini and Nithin, of course; to Vibha and Dilip D’Souza; to Naresh Fernandes and Mario Rodrigues; to Yeshi Chimbaikar and Gobind Patil.

  In Gujarat: To Allah Rakha Sheikh, more gratitude than I can express; to Achyut Yagnik and Ashok Shrimali at SETU; to Lotika Varadarajan, for all her time and patience.