Following Fish: Travels Around the Indian Coast (10 page)

That year, travelling down the coast of Tamil Nadu in the aftermath of the tsunami, I had seen something of its pitiless impact on fishing villages and harbours. ‘Was there much destruction here?’ I asked, already prepared to commiserate and condole with him and his inevitably woeful story. ‘Did many fishermen die?’

‘Oh no,’ Mariadasan replied. ‘It was the day after Christmas.
Nobody here was at sea. We were all still sleeping off the previous day’s toddy hangover.’

In Kerala, where toddy is as much of a state passion as football or Communism, canvassing views about the relative merits of various toddies is a thankless venture. Every man will have an opinion, for starters, and he will not be stopped until he has expounded every facet of it, accompanied wherever possible by proof of a practical nature. The only vote that approaches anything resembling unanimity is about where in Kerala the best toddy is to be found. That would be in the Alappuzha district, which has long operated under the alias of Alleppey, drawing tourists to its backwaters as a siren would Ithacans. Alleppey is the toddy shop mother lode, where shops glint like nuggets every few metres.

The town of Alleppey is only a few hours away from Trivandrum by train, but that brief trip may as well have taken us into a different quadrant of the world altogether. Trivandrum was dusty and, even at 5 a.m. on a February morning, sticky and airless. Alleppey, at half past eight the same day, was fresh and cool, newly washed by rain, its waters and trees gleaming silver and gold. It was a perfect time to be outdoors. Purely in the interests of research, though, we were in a toddy shop cabana an hour later, by about 10 a.m.

There is a word to be said here about rooting out the best toddy shop in an unfamiliar town. We stumbled onto the most ideal method by chance—to commandeer an auto-rickshaw and solicit its driver’s guidance. The auto-rickshaw driver will be immediately so struck by appearance of people after his own heart—people, in other words, who will get out of an early morning train, exit the station, and ask for a toddy shop—that he may even forget to inflate his rate.

Our man steered us unhesitatingly to T. S. No. 86, calling it one of the most highly recommended toddy shops in Alleppey—thirty years old, plying four hundred customers with toddy every day. It sits off a narrow stretch of a highway, opposite paddy fields with water lilies growing out of their banks of water. Its nerve centre is a two-room affair of kitchen and pantry, and it has four or five cabanas in its yard. It would be too much to say you can’t miss it—you can very easily miss it, in fact. But you shouldn’t.

This shop’s prep kitchen consisted of a couple of tree stumps out back, near a small stream. Having ordered what I hoped was un-faux karimeen, I was shown the gills of the fish, still red, proof that it was fresh. Then our sous-chef peeled the fish like a potato, hacking off the scales with a knife, revealing flesh the colour of pale twilight. For the tougher scales on the top and the back of the fish, he used scissors. From a slit, he felt around with a couple of fingers and pulled out the innards, like a magician extracting streamers from his sleeve. The karimeen then moved into the kitchen, where on a ledge of stone, a wok full of coconut oil was already sitting on a stove. Next to it was a colander, bearing what I was told were turtle parts. On an open wood fire in another corner, a heavy pot of rice muttered quietly away to itself.

In this kitchen, I finally had a chance to see exactly how much spice went into toddy shop food. The most reliable measure seemed to simply be: A lot. In a little stainless steel bowl, our chef mixed red chilli powder, black pepper, garam masala, salt, turmeric and water, making a paste that was a dark, brooding vermilion. Into this went the karimeen, the paste worked into its slits with a finger; it marinated there for a while, and then slipped into its jacuzzi of coconut oil.

Coconut oil is a funny thing. Outside Kerala, it is known, thanks to the Parachute brand, as primarily a hair-care product,
to be taken off the bathroom shelf on Sundays for a ritual oil bath. In Kerala, it is the frying medium of choice. The mind, of course, knows this vital difference, but as I discovered, the nose does not. When that karimeen hit its wok of oil, there was an overwhelming burst of smell, like an explosion in the Parachute factory. And somehow it smelled very familiar and yet very wrong, as if somebody had decided to make tea with Head & Shoulders or salad dressing out of Brylcreem.

Eyes streaming, I escaped the kitchen into the pantry next door, where, as fortune would have it, the toddy was just being brought in. In most shops, the toddy is stored in huge, black plastic cans that look suspiciously like former containers for kerosene. Here, the toddy was strained through three separate filters, to catch bits of husk and other impurities, caught in white plastic jugs and then decanted into old Kingfisher beer bottles. This toddy had been tapped just a couple of hours earlier, still so sweet that, when it was brought to our table, it managed to attract fruit flies out of nowhere. It was thicker and fizzier than at Trivandrum, backed by the unmistakable aftertaste of fresh coconut, and with only a sotto whisper of alcohol.

The karimeen arrived soon after, brown as toast, wrapped inside its greatcoat of masala, and dressed with black pepper and raw onions. It was a bony fish, but its meat was soft, picked apart by fingers almost as easily as cotton candy. This was magnificent eating—crisped masala, cut by the sweetness of the fish and the tartness of a squeeze of lemon. Mahesh Thampy, it turned out, was right. If this was real karimeen, the fish at the toddy shop in Trivandrum was a certain imposter.

The fish curry, on the other hand, was beginning to increasingly seem to me like an acquired taste. As at Trivandrum, it arrived in seething red attire, and more mystifyingly, it arrived cold—yesterday’s curry, with hunks of fresh-fried kaari fish slipped in. The kaari was dense and chewy, its flesh looking like
boiled potato. I closed my eyes, dunked a piece of kappa into the curry, and concentrated on really tasting it—and I could still taste nothing but the aggressive rawness of the chilli powder.

When I opened my eyes, my Malayali friend across the table had his eyes shut as well. Then he opened them, looked at me, and said: ‘That was heaven. That tasted like my childhood.’

Our auto-rickshaw driver insisted that we try one more toddy shop nearby, where we stayed away from the toddy and just asked for any fish that was fresh from the backwaters. We got, first, a plate of fried chembelli, a small, inexpensive fish that tasted chewy and fibrous, like a better class of cardboard. Then we got a hideous looking fish called the beral. Deprived of its fins, the beral’s long, thick body looked almost snakelike, and its face was thuggish—definitely the sort of fish to avoid meeting in a dark, deserted bend of the river. But I had maligned the beral too soon. Its homely features concealed, if not a heart of gold, at least fresh, smooth meat and a crisp skin.

By lunchtime, we were in the poignant situation of already having eaten the equivalent of three lunches. It had grown suddenly warm, my friend’s head began to loll in sleep, and I was shuddering at the thought of meeting another masala-heavy product of the backwaters. All three issues were simultaneously addressed by that
marvellous mode of transport: The Backwaters Bus. The Backwaters Bus seems to have been created, in some part, as an exercise in voyeurism. With around eighty passengers on board, at Rs 10 a head, it ambles from Alleppey to Kottayam in four hours, through a maze of vegetation-clogged creeks that appear impossible to remember or navigate. But the only time it really slows down from its amble to a shuffle is in relatively open waters, apparently to give every passenger a view of the bizarre houseboats all around.

A toddy shop, off a highway near
Alleppey

The most basic houseboats were the most logically constructed ones—long, with a single cabin, and extensive deck space. One level up, the slightly larger houseboats warranted a raised sun deck of sorts, where a couple of lounge chairs could sit on either side of a table of drinks. So far, so good.

But then, in a single, befuddling leap, came the top-of-the-line houseboats—raised sun deck, extensive hardwood furniture, baroque cabinets, satellite dishes, and plasma TV sets. It was in one of these that I saw a group of four people, sitting with their backs to the water, watching a golf game on television. Behind me, from the commuters on my Backwaters Bus, there were titters at that surreal vision, and nudges to neighbours to look-look-look. In one stroke, the sightseers had become the sightseen.

It would have been only too easy, I thought, for the residents of this gorgeous district to resent intruders, to be reluctant to share their gold-dappled green waters with anybody else, much less with eyesore houseboats and plasma TVs. But I sensed that nowhere in Alleppey, and it wasn’t just the dry logic of capitalism, of how tourism had improved everybody’s standard of living. Instead, it tended more towards the sort of benevolent tolerance with which grandparents regard grandchildren with wayward minds. As the Backwaters Bus cleared the open waters and entered a tributary on the other side, a few people exchanged
amused smiles, shook their heads in mock wonder, and returned to their newspapers for the rest of the ride.

Later that evening, at Kottayam, our palates rebelled furiously, wanting something other than fish fried in coconut oil. It was a notable meal, if only to observe, in the interests of science, what we ordered instead. My friend, the Malayali, ordered beef fried in coconut oil. And I? I ordered curd and rice—soothing white, free of belligerent masala and pools of silvery grease and shards of bone and the arresting taste of fish. It was heaven. It tasted like my childhood.