Following Fish: Travels Around the Indian Coast (20 page)

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.

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.

M
y 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.