Following Fish: Travels Around the Indian Coast (16 page)

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.

E
very 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.’

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.’