Following Fish: Travels Around the Indian Coast (13 page)

But Boloor’s love for officialdom soon began to interfere with his love for fishing. When he was in school, he joined the Rashtriya Seva Dal, which gathered the sons and daughters of fishermen into a juvenile union of sorts. ‘We met weekly for debates, and we would campaign to publicize the difficulties of fishing families,’ Boloor said, with the pride of a mother in her first-born. In college, he majored in active protest, including that Mysore agitation of finger-breaking intensity. When he started working at the Karnataka Electricity Board, sure enough, he promptly set up the first KEB Employees Union. Only after his retirement from the KEB did Boloor accept the various honorary positions in the various fishing bodies, merging his penchant for organizing people with his roots in the fishing community.

Boloor asked me where in Mangalore I had eaten, and as if I’d entered a confession booth, I told him about my impromptu love affair with the rawa fry, but also rather defensively about my inability to find the Mangalore fish curry as I remembered it. ‘That’s not surprising,’ Boloor said, and orated a little on the declining quality of fish in general. ‘But you should know better, after all. The best Mangalore fish curry is not made in restaurants but in homes.’ Having said that, without any ado, he led me out of the living room, across his front yard and through a gate in the compound wall, into the house next door. ‘This is my brother’s son’s wife, Shailaja,’ he said, introducing me to a beautiful young woman in an orange-red salwar-kameez, her long hair tied into a bun, still wet from her morning bath. ‘She’ll make you some fish curry right now.’

My desperate reluctance to impose had no effect. Boloor went back into his house to complete some work, while Shailaja brought two large mackerel out of her house and began to cut and de-scale them on a curved blade, sitting by a well in the courtyard. She removed the innards of the fish, wrenched their jaws off, cut them rapidly into thick fillets, and washed them with well water, making conversation all the while. ‘I’ve been making this curry since I was a teenager, when I learned it from my mother,’ she said. ‘And we make it at home every day. There’s almost no meal without it.’

In her kitchen, with its sloping roof and its blue and orange walls, Shailaja showed me the huge tub of masala that she made afresh every two or three days, and the tins of ingredients that went into the masala. ‘For every coconut, there are thirty-five to forty dried chillies, a tablespoon of turmeric, a handful of coriander seeds, a fistful of tamarind, and some cumin and fenugreek and mustard seeds and salt,’ she recited, the measurements getting more inexact as she progressed. ‘You fry everything except the coconut, and then you grind it all into this paste.’

Shailaja scooped up a few handfuls of the masala, thick and bright orange like clay, and mixed it into some water in a pot until it flowed off her hands with the consistency of thick tomato soup. How did she know how much she needed? I asked. ‘The hand knows,’ she said, with a smile that made my knees wobble. Expertly, she cut and added some ginger and three long, green chillies to the pot, and then some salt. On one of the stove’s two burners, the gravy began to simmer, throwing clouds of heat into the tiny kitchen. Our foreheads erupted in honest sweat. Behind Shailaja, her mother-in-law stood with a toothy grin and eyes that watched and weighed every step of the process. Just outside, in the living room, the television was going berserk with
commentary about a Sanath Jayasuriya fusillade in an India-Sri Lanka cricket match.

Eight minutes later, when the surface of the curry started to resemble bubbling lava, Shailaja slipped the fillets down the sides of the pot into the gravy. ‘Don’t stir the curry with a ladle, because that’ll break the fish,’ she warned. Instead, she grabbed the rim of the pot with a cloth and gently shook it around. Really enraged now, the curry began to spit out hot little flecks into the air. With a spoon, Shailaja dabbed a little curry onto her palm and tasted it, and then she added another twist of salt, shook the pot once more, and turned off the stove. The entire operation, from gutting the fish to finishing off the curry, had taken roughly twenty minutes.

And that was how, on the morning of my departure, sitting on a small kitchen stool with a large bowl in my hands, with the television still audible and with Shailaja and her mother-in-law watching me with round eyes, I fell back in love with the Mangalore fish curry (and also, I must admit, fell temporarily in love with its chef). The heat of those thirty-five to forty dried chillies rampaged through my sinuses and made my nose run, but in an odd way, the mackerel tamed that heat—so much, in fact, that I imagined I could feel past the heat and pick out every individual spice. The mackerel, fresh and firm, came away easily in big, moist flakes, and I rolled each bite around in its gorgeous, fiery bath before eating it. On its way down, the curry scalded my mouth, seared my tonsils, and sent parades of flavour marching up and down my tongue. The most perfect rawa fry could have danced itself off the plate and in front of my eyes at that moment, and I wouldn’t have accorded it a second glance.

On my way out, I stopped again at Boloor’s house to thank him. He was leaving home as well, and as we walked to the
gate together, I filled his ears with praise of Shailaja’s fish curry. ‘Really, that good, was it?’ Boloor asked. ‘But then, I wouldn’t know,’ he went on, this stalwart president of the Mogaveera Vyavasthapaka Mandali and secretary of the Akhila Karnataka Fishermen’s Parishad, of the National Fishworkers’ Federation and of the Coastal Karnataka Fishermen Action Committee. ‘You see, I don’t eat fish.’

L
ike all fishermen, Danny Moses best remembers the one that got away.

A few years ago, Moses was angling on the Angria Bank, a huge submerged coral reef, more than a hundred kilometres from his home state of Goa. Around three in the afternoon, when a day at sea is at its most deliciously torpid, Moses’ big lure suddenly popped. ‘The fish bit and then it just kept diving,’ Moses remembers. ‘It was just a small reel, so we were a little scared. But we were sure it was a marlin, trying to go deep and throw us off as they usually do.’

After a few pregnant minutes, though, the fish modified its battle plan. Rocketing to the surface, it performed a complete somersault at some distance from the boat; only when it repeated the cartwheel at closer quarters did Moses recognize it as a sailfish, one of the most elusive, mighty quarries of the deep-sea angler. ‘We could see the lure snagged at the corner of its mouth,’ he says. ‘It was shaking its head so violently that the rod was whipping about from side to side—thaap! thaap! thaap!’

The sailfish fought Moses every second of the ninety minutes he took to reel it closer to his boat. Then, putting on his gloves, Moses began pulling in the braided shock-leader line, hand over hand, inch by arduous inch. ‘It was seven or eight feet long, and probably fifty kilogrammes in weight. Its fin alone was two-and-a-half feet high,’ he says. ‘We were fishing on a catch-and-release basis, so all I needed to do was to touch and tag the fish to claim it as a catch.’

But sometimes, Moses admits ruefully, the size of a fish can just freeze you. When the sailfish was three feet from the boat, Moses found himself staring right into its rolling, furious eyes. ‘He was going gold and purple with rage, and these huge black bands were running down his side,’ he says. ‘The sailfish’s bill is like a razor—you put your hand out, and you might get it sliced off. That was the dilemma.’ And in that moment of indecision, Moses panicked. ‘I decided not to reach out.’

It takes a lot to push Moses into panic. He is a big man with powerful arms and shoulders, and like many Goans, he has been an inveterate angler for almost all of his life; even his keychain is a fluorescent yellow fishing lure. I had heard much about his vast experience with game fish, and when I met him, Moses gifted me this weighty thought: ‘My son fishes because I fish; I fish because my father fished, and that’s how it’s always been here.’ For the better part of two decades now, he has worked runs out to sea with sport-fishing clients, out of the states of Goa and Maharashtra, acquiring a formidable knowledge of the waters and their fish. But on that day, the sailfish froze Moses. ‘I’ve tried to justify it to myself so many times since then,’ he says. ‘Maybe at the time, I was still a little green when it came to sailfish. But I flunked. There’s no two ways about that.’

By the standards of the Indo-Pacific sailfish, or the
Istiophorus platypterus,
Moses’ adversary wasn’t even
particularly a monster. A really hefty sailfish can weigh as much as a hundred kilogrammes and stretch over three-and-a-half metres from rapier-like bill to muscular tail. On its back, like the eponymous sails of a grand schooner, is a black, ribbed dorsal fin, sometimes taller even than the body’s own width. ‘When you spot one, it’s a real sight, particularly in the dark,’ Moses tells me. ‘You just see the head and the bill first. Then, under the boat’s lights, you can see through the water, which is as clear as glass, and its fin begins to unfold and rise ominously.’

All that monstrous bulk can also move frighteningly fast. In the 1920s, a series of experiments attempted to put a number on a sailfish’s speed by measuring the length of fishing line it pulled from a reel. The stopwatch clicked into action, and in three seconds, the sailfish ran away with ninety metres of line. That brings its top clocked speed in the region of a hundred and ten kilometres per hour and makes it the fastest fish in the ocean. Approaching its top pace, the sailfish folds its sail down flat into a groove along its back, like a captain stowing his sheets and starting up the outboard motor.

Even more spectacularly, the sailfish can change colour in an instant, going from its usual dull gray to a regal mix of shimmering silver, blue, purple and gold. On its skin, cells called melanophores, containing dark deposits of pigments, can make themselves transparent. Underneath, like a buried vein of precious gems, is another layer of cells named iridophores, which break and reflect light into an explosion of colours. This neat prismatic trick, said Peter Baptista, a fervent angler from Mumbai, explains the local moniker of the sailfish: the
mor maach,
or the peacock fish.

Baptista, a grandfatherly man who used to be a corporate executive in New Delhi, retired and returned to Mumbai in 1993 with the express purpose of spending his days golfing and fishing. His family originally hailed from Goa as well; in fact, a common
acquaintance had directed me to both him and Moses. Baptista has wrested sport fish out of rivers since 1966, but for the last fifteen years, even as his hair has thinned and whitened, he has taken on the more ferocious game of the ocean. ‘When I came back to Mumbai, I wanted to start angling in the sea,’ Baptista says. ‘But everything I’d learned over forty years in the rivers—none of that held any good in salt water.’ So he started over and worked diligently at his fishing, until he was yanking marlin and tuna and barracuda effortlessly out of the sea.

It was Baptista who first told me about the sailfish, and about its uncannily precise annual visit to the Indian coastline. For much of the year, the sailfish is found in deeper seas, or at reefs like the Angria Bank, which is at least twenty metres deep. ‘They’re predator fish, and they hunt like packs of wolves,’ Moses says. ‘The small fish swim in underwater currents, so the sailfish wait on the edge of these currents, dart in, grab their food, and dart back out.’ With their threatening profiles, the sailfish will often herd terrified sardines into a dense cloud and then batter their prey into submission with their long bills. It’s a complex, almost military way to get dinner.

In September, however, as the monsoon’s rains recede and smaller fish like the flathead mullet make their way down the rivers into the sea, the sailfish makes an excursion of fifteen to twenty days into estuarial waters in search of food. Those are possibly its easiest meals of the year. If the oceanic currents are conveyor belts of intermittent, rapidly moving batches of food, the estuaries are groaning buffet tables of mackerel, sardines and mullet.

The year I went sailfishing, that twenty-day window opened right in the middle of September, on the day that Hindus ritually immerse their clay idols of Ganesha in the sea. (Baptista always uses festivals for his calculations. ‘Somehow,’ he says, ‘the Hindu calendar is amazingly precise about changes of currents. It’s like clockwork.’) But out at sea, the weather was still rough, and
sporadic gusts of rain were still pounding the western coast. Baptista had agreed to take me on a sailfish expedition, but on the weekend we’d planned to depart, I flew down to Mumbai from my home in New Delhi, only to learn that a new squall had set in. I flew back home, and we waited another impatient week, hoping that the weather would turn before our narrow window closed on us.

When the skies cleared, we headed down the Konkan Coast, to a little town between Mumbai and Goa. I’m going to call it Xanadu, because anglers, as a species, are obsessively secretive about the location of their favourite waters, and because Baptista knew from a previous trip that Xanadu’s coast was a rich mine for sailfish. This habit of secrecy is as old as angling itself, and the world today, with its overfished rivers and seas, has retrofitted itself to have that habit make even more sense than before. ‘We don’t even publish our trip photos on the
Indian Angler
web site,’ Baptista said, ‘because you can figure out where it’s been taken from the view in the background.’ I was told the name, I suspect, on a strict need-to-know basis; if I was to get there, I needed to know.

Baptista discovered Xanadu last year, when he was poring over a Wikimapia image of the coast, looking for promising estuarial waters. It is a chubby finger of land, densely wooded, with a creek on one side and the sea on the other; the finger ends where the creek meets the sea. ‘We came here last year, but we weren’t exactly welcomed by the local fishermen,’ Baptista said. ‘We had to work to get friendly with these guys. But we’re regulars now.’

At false dawn, a little before six in the morning, Baptista, his adult nephews Emil and Yvan Carvalho, and I drove through Xanadu’s woods and its clustered hamlets of fishing communities, all wide awake already. Near the mouth of the creek, close to a temple, two local fishermen named Uttam and Kalidas waited for us with the
Vinoba Prasad
—a bright blue,
twenty-foot boat with a fitted outboard motor, powerful enough to take us the fifteen kilometres out to sea. Uttam lit a clutch of incense sticks and stuck them into a hole in the prow of the boat. A kilometre out, he would make another offering to the gods of the sea—a coconut, betel nuts and leaves tossed into the water—and circle this once with the boat before chugging further.

As we left the creek, mullet leaped out of the water around us. ‘The fish are certainly running,’ Baptista said. Just the previous evening, Xanadu’s fishermen had deployed a net known as the rampon—a massive, semi-circular net, with either end held fast on shore. By just waiting a few hours and then drawing the rampon net in, they had snagged seven tons of pomfret. ‘They’re certainly running,’ Baptista said again.

Tatters of fog hung over the coast, filtering the dim light unevenly, the patchwork sky like something out of a Turner seascape. There were already other fishing craft in the creek and just outside its mouth; in them, men sat wrapped in shawls, with a solitary line, tied to one of their fingers, leading from their hand into the water. They were so still that they might have been asleep; only occasionally they would jiggle the line to keep their bait moving. Off to the side, one slice of the horizon was a dense sheet of gray. Somewhere, not very far away, it was raining.

Marcel Proust once wrote about the abrupt thrill of a fish breaking the surface of water, comparing it to the flash of a metaphor in prose. The sight of a worthy catch is breathlessly anticipated; the thrill of the sport resides in how suddenly it can turn. But for the rest of the time, the art of fishing is really the art of waiting in thin disguise—waiting not only from hour to hour, as we were doing at sea, or from day to day, as with the fisherman Santiago in Ernest Hemingway’s
The Old Man and the Sea,
but even from year to year, as for the annual Indian
visitation of the sailfish. There is no room in the boat for impatience; I can’t think of any other sport that so effectively screens its participants on the basis of a single quality of temperament.

Big-game fishing in India is one of the British Raj’s many persistent legacies, although environmental degradation and conservation laws have now threatened the sport with extinction. For years, the prize catch in India was the golden mahseer, a gleaming river fish that British anglers used to call the Indian salmon. The mahseer can be huge; in 1870, in a book titled
Thirteen Years Amongst the Wild Beasts of India,
an Englishman named G. P. Sanderson claimed to have once caught a one-hundred-and-thirty-pound monster. But the population of the mahseer has now dwindled in many Indian rivers, and angling for it is sharply restricted.

Thus constrained on the rivers, many sport-fishing enthusiasts turned increasingly to India’s coast, vying with commercial fishermen for the tuna, shark, marlin, sailfish and barracuda that lay in the waters. ‘But even at sea, overfishing is becoming a problem,’ Baptista said. Massive trawlers scrape the bottom of the seabed to pluck every possible fish into their holds, wrecking the ocean’s ecology and scooping in worthless fry before the small fish can mature into adults. In such conditions, the post-monsoon blooms of fish become bonanzas, for fishermen as well as predatory fish.

In the
Vinoba Prasad,
Emil had already bolted black metal stocks to the gunwale and to the boat’s benches, to help hold the rods steady. The fishermen then assembled their fibreglass rods, heavy in the hand, with smooth reel locking mechanisms that purred satisfyingly as they let their line go. ‘In estuaries, with all the underwater rocks, there is a greater danger of abrasion to the line,’ Baptista had told me earlier. ‘So we use a really strong microdynamic reel—made of the same stuff they use to make
bullet-proof vests. You put a finger to that line when a sailfish is dragging it at top speed, and it will just get lopped off.’ At the end of the line was a lure known as the Giant Trembler—a silvery fish-shaped object, about four inches long, with twin three-pronged hooks, glinting odd colours in the uncertain light. The lure was filled with ball bearings, Yvan told me. In the water, it would vibrate and make an intriguing enough sound for a predator fish to take a second look at this strange new snack.