Following Fish: Travels Around the Indian Coast (18 page)

For a beverage that is intended to act as a digestive and go easy on the stomach, sol kadhi has a complex cross-section of tastes. Drinking Sushegad Gomantak’s sublime sol kadhi, coloured a pretty litmus purple by the kokum, I first tasted the coolness—if coolness can even be a taste—of its coconut milk, then the citrus of the kokum, then an intense riot of spices (‘Pepper, mint, ginger, garlic, cloves and cumin. We spice our sol
kadhi much more than Malvanis.’), and then, like an ingenious reprise, the coconut milk again, but this time for a final note of sweetness. I could, I think, have sat there all day drinking sol kadhi, but my instructor had further plans.

‘Our curry,’ she said, pushing a dish of mackerel gravy towards me, ‘is heavier on the coconut, and less spicy. The Malvani curries will look and taste fierier.’ Then she indicated another saucer containing a couple of small, dark seed pods. ‘One thing we do have in common is that we both use split triphala in our curries.’ I picked a pod up, turned it over with my fingers, and exactly one second before she remarked that it was best not to eat it raw, I popped it into my mouth.

This triphala was the product of a single plant, but there is also a synonymous Ayurvedic formulation of three distinct fruits (hence ‘tri-phala’) that is widely acclaimed for its medical benefits. When I was six or seven years old, my eyesight weakening from reading too much in poor light and my first pair of spectacles looking inevitable, my father procured a bottle of solution of the Ayurvedic triphala, having been told that it was good for the eyes. So, every morning for a few months, he would pour out some of the solution into a dark blue, eye-shaped cup, and I would sit at our dining table bathing each eye alternately. It was essential that I kept my eyes open as they marinated, and so, battling my blink reflexes, I would stare sightlessly into the stinging depths. When I emerged, I remember, I could feel each eyeball burning right around its circumference, but I persuaded myself that it was just the triphala at work. (It wasn’t. I’ve been wearing glasses ever since.)

I mention this now because, very coincidentally, what that triphala did to my eyes, this triphala did to my tongue. After what felt like a miniature explosion set off inside my mouth, every individual taste bud began to quiver furiously, as if it were trying to shake itself loose of my tongue and escape into the
recesses of my throat. It wasn’t the tingling that comes with the heat of pepper; instead, this weird electricity rendered my tongue entirely numb to any other sensation. I drank two glasses of water and two shots of sol kadhi. Then I ate a couple of the fried pellets of shark, which I had found far too salty only minutes ago. It was no use: At least an hour passed before I was able to taste anything else.

The chatelaine of Sushegad Gomantak had placidly continued to hold forth during this traumatic period. ‘You can think of Gomantak food in terms of the Goan influence, whereas Malvani food is specific to the region around Malvan, in the Sindhudurg district,’ she appeared to be saying through the haze. ‘That’s a huge difference, whatever people may think.’

So did she like Malvani food?

‘I wouldn’t know,’ she said with a tight smile. ‘I’ve never had any.’

Only a few months later did I manage to make it to Malvan itself, driving for five hours from Goa into Maharashtra, and then following a pockmarked, gradually narrowing road into the small town—all just to eat lunch, wander around, and then eat an early dinner before driving back to Goa. I found a restaurant named, rather redundantly, Malvani, and decoding my old scribbled notes as I ate, I saw that my hostess had been perfectly right. Her sparse personal acquaintance with Malvani food notwithstanding, everything matched. The sol kadhi was paler, with less kokum but more pepper and ginger; the curry was ruddier and oilier, and its snarling heat was practically a declaration of war; the fried shark and fish had been rolled rapidly in pepper before they hit the oil. Beneath all that, of course, it was still the nobly pungent mackerel or bombil, humouring the minor, inter-regional tiffs of its supporting players like a truly magnanimous star performer.

Yeshi had told me, shortly before he fell asleep during our bus ride back from Sassoon Docks, that I would have a hard time finding an authentic Koli restaurant, and he was right. The Koli restaurant is a considerably rarer animal than the Gomantak or the Malvani restaurant, and the ubiquitous Prawn Koliwada and Chicken Koliwada are known to be utter fakes. The only way to eat Koli food, it appeared, was to shamelessly abuse somebody’s hospitality and invite oneself over at mealtimes. That was how I met Gobind Patil.

Patil, a spry, white-haired man touching eighty, is the local leader of the 9,000-odd Kolis living in Danda Khar, very close to the sea. His father, in 1935, became the first practising advocate from the Koli community; his grandfather, also named Gobind Patil, was an ardent freedom-fighter, and he gave the Bandra municipality the land to build the main road that still bears his name. Patil lives in the ancestral house, more than 200 years old, with a high raftered ceiling and a massive central room, various parts of which have been designated to serve as living room, dining room and bedroom. ‘Sixty years ago, you could look out of this window and see paddy fields and the sea,’ Patil said, in his scratchy, wheezy voice. When I looked out of the window, I saw row upon row of pinched tenements, lives piled upon lives, a community collapsed upon itself like a dying star.

Patil has been cooking since he was in school, and cooking so well that his three daughters keep pressing him to write his recipes down. ‘In primary school, after lunch, my two sisters and I would steal into the kitchen to make ourselves sirah, a type of kheer with milk and ghee and saffron,’ Patil said. ‘But what will I write down, you know? So many times, I change the ingredients of a dish at the very last moment, on intuition, and it always works. You can’t write down that kind of thing.’ Then an attack of acute shyness seized him, and he murmured almost to himself: ‘The lunch we’re eating today? I cooked it.’

In never becoming a professional chef, Patil had clearly missed his calling. At lunch, there was a ruddy kheema with plump prawns, a tuna curry, fried black pomfret, a side of greens that he cheerfully urged me to ignore, and paper-thin rotis made of rice-flour instead of wheat. The balance was exquisite: Less coconut and kokum than Gomantak or Malvani food, the pomfret fried in just a dusting of salt and spice, the curries subtle but not entirely without heat. ‘The kheema is usually green, just made of ginger, coriander, green chillies, and garlic. But we weren’t sure if you could take something that raw, so I made it with tomatoes and onions,’ Patil told me with a wicked smile. Then he segued smoothly into a culinary gripe: ‘So many Kolis today have stopped making their classic thick, green curry. Too many gravies are made of onion and tomato and curd. That’s not the way it should be done.’

On topics related to food, Patil was a ready conversationalist; on topics unrelated, he would somehow reorient the compass of the discussion back towards food. Nearly everything we talked about seemed to remind him of a prawn masala he had once eaten, or air-dried, ‘half-fresh’ fillets of bombil fluttering on a line like strange flags in the winter breeze, or what Mumbai’s mackerel used to taste like in the good old days. Once, I asked him about Koli fishermen, and about their fishing techniques. ‘They’re so lucky,’ he sighed. ‘They take pre-cooked rice and gravy out to sea on their boats, and when they catch fish, they just pop a couple into that gravy, and cook and eat them right there. They get the freshest catch of all.’ I never found out anything from him about Koli fishing techniques.

About fish, Patil became particularly lyrical and expansive. ‘It’s so important to us that we sometimes even grind prawns or tuna or eel into our chicken or mutton masalas.’ When he talked about the boiled fish, bland and easy to digest, that constitutes the first mouthful of solid food for many Koli children, he grew
so sentimental and nostalgic that I had to wait a few minutes for him to break out of his Proustian moment. When he narrated the quiet, elemental joys of ukkad, a dish of very fresh pomfret boiled with salt and turmeric, he made it sound like a parable of the virtues of a simple life. When he described the Kolis’ annual pilgrimages to Varanasi, during the monsoon, he dwelled with near-spiritual fervour on the dried Bombay Duck they would take along for the journey. When, en passant, the subject of the traditional Koli mud stove came up, he grabbed a wedding invitation lying on the table and proceeded to sketch in detail its circular cooking chamber and long flue. When he mentioned a dish called nisot, prepared often for the ailing, Patil halted himself abruptly, said, ‘Nisot. We must have nisot now,’ and over my feeble protests of not wanting to be any more trouble than I had already been, he dispatched his daughter Pravara into the kitchen to whip some up.

The unimaginative or the technically inclined would, I suppose, describe nisot as just a watery fish stock, but so much is lost in that translation. Nisot is the Koli challenge to chicken soup, a hearty brown broth perked up by a ground mixture of tamarind, small onions, chillies, coriander and garlic, in which a succulent mackerel or Bombay Duck has been boiled vigorously. The mackerel in Pravara’s nisot had been cooked so thoroughly that it disintegrated into creamy flakes at the merest touch. Even the heady scent of that steamy broth—aromatic from the spices, piquant from the tamarind, and full of a wonderful, fishy infusion—should be sufficient to raise men from their deathbeds, let alone their sickbeds. On the invalid’s tongue, the strong flavour of nisot must dance like champagne bubbles, homing in on the sinuses and restoring life to taste buds dulled by medication. It is nothing less than an elixir, the sort that seems worthy of being decanted into little round gourds, to be worn on the waists of fantasy-novel adventurers setting off for unknown lands.

After lunch, Patil pulled his ritual bottle of VAT 69 whisky towards him, offered me a glass, and poured himself three fingers’ worth. ‘I wish I could offer you some of our country liquor,’ he said. ‘It’s made of dates and jaggery, and it tastes terrific.’ The Kolis always drank a lot, he added, ‘because the fishermen would find themselves working in both extremes of weather, hot or cold.’ When he was in school, Patil told me, his father would host parties every Sunday, hosting luminaries like the Marathi author Prahlad Kesha ‘Acharya’ Atre. At the end of each such evening, Patil would nip downstairs, pour the leftover liquor from half a dozen bottles into a single glass, and drink that revolting cocktail neat.

Eventually, as afternoon slumped into evening, I asked Patil the question I had been asking everybody on this trip: What did he think of Raj Thackeray’s chauvinistic formulas? It was the first time, and the only time, that I heard something different. ‘I agree with him entirely,’ Patil said. ‘If people came to your city, Madras, and took away all your jobs, what would you do?’ North Indians, he added, had even stirred up the fishing trade, buying fish wholesale and then undercutting the prices of Koli vendors. ‘They’ve captured so much of our business. How, then, can we disagree with Thackeray?’

Patil told me that his father, Krishna Motiram Patil, was a member of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, but that he was respected more for his knowledge of Hindu philosophy than for his position as a Hindu leader. ‘My grandfather made bombs to use against the British,’ Patil said. Once, family lore has it, when the police came around raiding the neighbourhood, his grandfather was on the top floor of the very house where his grandson lives today. ‘Panicking, he packed up all the bomb material and hurled it into the sea from his window.’ In case it was still unclear, Patil explained that this grandfather did not believe in ahimsa, Mahatma Gandhi’s non-violent path that was
captivating the imaginations of so many other Indians at the time. ‘“Ahimsa? What ahimsa?” my grandfather would say,’ Patil remembered. ‘“If they attack you, you attack them.”’

All right, I said, so perhaps he agreed with Thackeray’s principles. But did he also agree with his methods?

To that question, I never got an answer. Patil had worked through most of his third glass of whisky, and he seemed content to just sit on his chair by the window and gaze out at the heaving street. When he spoke, a few minutes later, he had changed the subject completely. ‘You know, in 1939, the Kolis in this village got two mechanized boats. They were the first ones we ever had,’ he said, his voice now softer and more wistful. ‘So a large group of us went down to Malvan to catch mackerel. That was the biggest haul of mackerel Mumbai had ever seen.’ He stared out of the window a while longer and then repeated what he’d said earlier. ‘From our house, we could see the sea, with all the boats lined up and their flags waving. It was just beautiful.’

O
n the coast of the misshapen lower jaw of Gujarat, in a town called Mangrol, a long, narrow road runs from the town’s centre to its incredibly cluttered harbour. For most of its length, the road is flanked by rectangular plots of land marked off from each other by high compound walls. These walls hide much of the activity happening behind them, but they cannot keep to themselves the sounds of hammering and raspy sawing, or the sight of blond beams of wood rising into the air, looking like mutant orchards of very naked trees. Occasionally these strange trees will bow and curve towards each other, tending towards definite shapes that give the game away: Here is the tip of something that resembles a prow, and there is the broad back of a stern-looking object. And about a hundred times a year, the wide metal gates to these yards will swing open, and a flatbed truck will rumble out, bearing a fully finished boat on its back, and head down the road to the harbour to set it to sea.

There is a similar but even bigger boat builders’ row in the neighbouring town of Veraval, the leading producer of fish in
Gujarat. This amalgamation of yards is much less shy, free of divider walls and open for gawking. On the waterfront, one yard runs without fuss into the next, and a walk down a long chain of project lots can feel like watching a vaguely obscene boat strip-show; in stages, the craft divest themselves of their wooden planking, going from completed to semi-complete to barely clothed within a few hundred yards. The lovely, sharp smell of sawdust is everywhere, and the wooden boats are so ark-like in their shape and appearance that it isn’t difficult to picture pairs of giraffes and racoons and hippopotami peering over the gunwales at the commotion below.

I visited Veraval and Mangrol during the period of limbo, full of anticipation, unique to the Indian subcontinent—when news of the monsoon’s descent upon Kerala has percolated to the remainder of the country, and so when, even in Gujarat, the air can feel a few degrees cooler, purely as a consequence of monsoonal hope and imagination. In both towns, when fishing halts for the rainy season as required by law as well as by common sense, the building of fishing boats is the only related trade that continues apace. ‘Actually, it’s even more hectic now,’ one boat builder told me, ‘because all the fishermen bring in their boats out of the water, to be repaired, repainted, weatherproofed, all that stuff.’

This unnatural reverse exodus of some boats, from water to land, had started. In one large area of the Mangrol dockyard, a crane had been lifting fishing boats off flatbed trucks all morning and setting them down gently on block supports, their rudder blades choked solid with plastic bags. Here they would wait under tarpaulins for the end of the monsoon, to be worked upon and restored, until they could go out to sea again. There were a dozen boats perched on blocks already. ‘In a day or two, this entire space where we’re standing will be filled with boats,’ my boat builder predicted.

There are a lot of boats here—squads of operational fishing and cargo vessels, of course, but also many half-constructed boats, skeletons waiting to be fleshed out. As the state with the longest coastline, Gujarat, not surprisingly, is one of the country’s top producers of fish, but most of its produce is promptly iced and trucked off to other parts of India. Few Gujaratis—one in ten, according to one statistic—eat any meat at all, so the state’s relationship with fishing is almost a purely commercial one; Gujarat’s fish now appear even in markets in Kolkata, not to mention most of the rest of North India. There is a thriving industry in the catching of fish, but also in the building of boats to catch fish, and this part of Gujarat is one of the premier commercial boat building sites in India. Since 1947, over 16,200 boats have been registered in Veraval and Mangrol combined, and nearly a quarter of that number is still active in Veraval. These are mostly wooden boats—roughly 1,200 fibreglass craft to 3,750 wooden ones in Veraval, because fibreglass is considered tackier and inferior—and so mostly manufactured in the immediate vicinity. The boat builders of Veraval and Mangrol, and of Porbandar further to the north, call themselves consummate fishing boat specialists; they tackle some cargo carrier projects, by apparently just scaling up their fishing boat designs, but the real hub of the cargo boat-building trade is the district of Kutch, elsewhere in Gujarat.

I had come to Gujarat because I had heard and read so many stories about the fishing boat builders of Veraval and Mangrol: about how carpenters had been building fishing boats here for many generations; how they continued to build them to exactly the same design; how the entire boat was worked by hand, without a power tool in sight; how the engine was the boat’s only recent, grudging concession to modernity. (One source may even have murmured something about a long chain of boat design stretching right back to the Indus Valley Civilization.) Looking
back, I’m not sure now what I had expected. I seem to remember visions of a little Mediterranean boat yard basking in the sun, where a carpenter with a practitioner’s deep knowledge of naval history worked languidly on the construction of a boat a year. Possibly I had imagined meeting an old boat-building codger who would complain about the decline of his art and about how power tools had sullied his trade now, just because these damn youngsters wanted to build faster to make more money, and that’s all they were interested in anyway, money, money, money. I know certainly that I had expected the gentle, educational pace of artisanry rather than the cold gallop of industry. And I know that I hadn’t expected so many boats.

Over the last three decades, the boat-building business has been nurtured, by the government and aid agencies and private well-wishers, into thriving life. On one particular stroll through the Veraval waterfront, I counted thirty structures in advanced stages of boatishness, plus numerous other avant-garde installations of wood that would become boats in the very near future. My fellow flâneur, a gangly, bearded man named Allah Rakha Sheikh (and nicknamed, as seemed the case with one out of every three middle-aged men I met, ‘Bapu’), pointed out boats that would go to Maharashtra or Karnataka, and he introduced me to the leading suthars—generic carpenters turned specialized boat builders—we encountered. The seven biggest suthars in Veraval, Bapu estimated, employ more than a thousand people between them; next to fishing itself, this is one of the town’s most vital industries.

If anything, in fact, it is too vital, because there is only so much harbour to go around. Just calling the Mangrol harbour ‘cluttered,’ as I did earlier, cannot sufficiently describe the astoundingly close packing of craft or my difficulty in spotting even a few contiguous inches of water. Veraval’s harbour, built for two thousand boats, now somehow accommodates double
that. ‘There is a difference between having two sons and having six sons, don’t you think?’ Veraval’s port officer, C. M. Rathod, told me with winning wisdom, explaining that just as the more potent father would have a harder time housing his offspring, so the port authority struggled to find room for its boats. In 2003, a Gujarat Maritime Board amendment prevented fishermen with one boat from buying another. Five years later, after terrorists sailed into Indian waters from Karachi, took control of a Gujarat-registered boat called
Kuber,
and ploughed onwards to attack Mumbai, the hand dispensing new boat registrations closed even tighter. In Veraval in fact, Rathod said, the process had ceased altogether, precipitated by security concerns but fortuitously also addressing the space crunch. Naturally, this cramped the style of the region’s boat builders, but not as much as one would think. An old trick came to the rescue yet again: Boat owners continued to commission boats and then simply carried forward the registration of their old vessel to the new. Same identity, but a younger, bigger, stronger body—a transposition that mouth-wateringly approaches immortality.

To build your first boat, I thought to myself in Veraval, must be to move along a chain of seeming impossibilities. There is initially the envisioning of a boat where there is nothing but air, and then the fitting of planks to snatch that boat’s shape out of the air, without any frame or mould to serve as template. There is the counter-intuitive bending of planks, where a long piece of flattened, arced wood can be equally strong at every point along its curvature. There is the effort to make watertight and seamless a structure with so many, many seams. There is the slow bulking of the vessel, accompanied by the dawning bewilderment at the laws of physics that allow something so big and heavy to float
on water. Maritime historian Basil Greenhill, in his definitive
Archaeology of the Boat,
compared boat building at its best to ‘an act of sculpture,’ but it’s actually that and a little more; Rodin didn’t have to float his
Thinker
out to sea and bring back a couple of tons of mackerel in it.

Murjibhai Koria built his first boat twenty-five years ago. His father had been a farmer, and Koria himself, having acquired a bachelor’s degree in Gujarati, had wanted to be a schoolteacher. ‘But there was more promise in this, if you get what I’m saying,’ he said, gesturing at the half-built boat that stood in his yard in Mangrol. Koria was perspiring hard, and streaks of sawdust-infused sweat ran down the sides of his round face; he had just been working over a saw stationed in the sunniest spot in the yard, guiding planks through its teeth to emerge curved and ready for the belly of the boat. (It was the trickiest part of his job, he said.) We stood now in patchy shade, which is all that an incomplete boat can offer, but Koria still shielded his eyes with one hand and squinted at me as he spoke.

In Mangrol, a yard full of incomplete boats

The boat under development was a thirty-ton fishing craft, being constructed (at a price, inclusive of the engine, of Rs 25 lakhs) for a local fishing boat-owner named Veljibhai Dhanjibhai. ‘He already owns four boats,’ Koria said. Then he looked up at the superstructure and said: ‘Can you believe that, when I first began doing this, we used to
sell the boats for Rs 20,000 apiece? And that was such a lot of money at that time.’ He sounded almost incredulous of the contours of a past he had lived through. ‘We’d work on a boat for six or eight months, to finish it. Now it’s two-and-a-half, sometimes three months, and then it’s ready for the sea.’ Those first few days in the harbour, Koria said with a smile, were his favourite. ‘The boat is new, so it sits high on the water, and you can see nearly all the work we’ve put in. Then the wood begins to drink water, and it settles lower and lower.’

Half a dozen years after he has sent a boat out, it will be sent back to him, like an errant child from boarding school, to be whipped back into shape. ‘The international and local woods,’ he explained, pointing first to the light-coloured Malaysian sal used for the superstructure and then to the dense babul that forms the boat’s inner ribs, ‘somehow don’t go well together. So after six or seven years, we have to tear out the insides and replace it all with fresh wood.’ Another six or seven years after that, the boat will have sailed the course of its active life, and it will return one last time to Koria, reeking of fish and utterly spent, its spare parts and healthier wooden sections to be donated like organs into the therapy of Koria’s next case.