Following Fish: Travels Around the Indian Coast (4 page)

Innaiah Narisetti, a former journalist and the chair of the local Center for Inquiry chapter, is a dignified, articulate man, with a track record like the back of a porcupine, bristling with sharp needles of attack against irrational belief and superstition. ‘This is a cult organization,’ he said. ‘The doctors say it isn’t scientific. It isn’t hygienic. No patient records are maintained; there are no follow-up visits. But still they claim a cure! That is bogus.’ I mentioned to him Harinath’s tic, of labelling it a ‘prasadam’ instead of a cure, and Narisetti laughed. ‘The courts won’t get taken in by that. They’ll see through it, they’ll see that it’s just a strategy.’

Part of Narisetti’s harangue included the understandable grievances of the wronged taxpayer. Until 1997, the Gouds had conducted their event, at their own expense, in their ancestral
home in the old Doodh Bowli quarter of Hyderabad. ‘People would sleep in the alleys near our house, on the sidewalk, just for this,’ Harinath remembered. ‘You’d get tears in your eyes just listening to them cough all night.’ In 1997, though, following some communal turmoil, a curfew was imposed in Doodh Bowli. N. Chandrababu Naidu, then chief minister of Andhra Pradesh, started to allow the Gouds free use of larger public spaces—for a year, the Nizam College’s football fields, and subsequently the Exhibition Grounds in Nampally, its new home.

Eleven years later, when I attended, there was even more evidence of government support—eight ambulances, 1,100 police personnel, six closed-circuit televisions, and an assured power supply of 1,000 kilowatts. Navin Mittal, the district collector, did some rough mental arithmetic and told me that the government would spend roughly Rs 60 lakhs of taxpayer money in manpower and resources for the event. Which only proves that Milton Friedman was right: There is no such thing as a free lunch, or even a free snack of nutritious murrel fish.

But that’s not all, Narisetti hastened to point out. ‘There are huge losses because the state supplies the fish as well, selling them to the crowds for Rs 10 each,’ he said. ‘All these fish are ordered, but word has spread that this treatment is not working, so the crowds have come down. Last year, there were thousands of wasted fish.’

But, I feebly ventured, my boyhood bubble quivering some more, ‘Harinath said there were four lakh attendees last year?’

‘Not at all,’ Narisetti said. ‘There were twenty thousand.’

The next morning, I hunted down the Department of Fisheries to clarify this number. V. Raghothama Swamy, the joint director there, was in the midst of aggregating, from various ponds and tanks in Andhra Pradesh, thousands of murrel fingerlings,
remotely monitoring their journeys to Hyderabad like an anxious chaperone.

‘So how many fish, exactly, did you distribute last year?’ I asked.

‘Forty-five thousand,’ Swamy said.

Again, I mentioned Goud’s figure of four lakh attendees to him. He smiled indulgently, glanced at a colleague, and then said, as if softening the blow to a child who’d discovered that Santa Claus was fictional. ‘Well, there were also ten thousand or so vegetarians and they take their medicine in jaggery. And many attendants for the asthmatics were also present, you must remember. So the crowd was large.’

‘But was it four lakhs?’

‘No. Definitely not,’ Swamy answered.

On my way down the stairs, I saw a poster hanging on the wall. It showed many fish, lying quite dead in a net, being pulled in from the ocean. The caption read: ‘Fish is our health.’ Suddenly, I wasn’t so sure.

The bleeding taxpayers aside, the other prong of the opposition to the Goud treatment attacks the medicine itself, the yellow paste that the family claims is concocted on the principles of Ayurveda. A few years earlier, the Gouds had sent samples of the paste to the Central Drug Research Institute in Lucknow and to the Indian Institute of Chemical Biology in Kolkata. The latter’s report, which Harinath photocopied and handed to me, refused to offer any opinions about the paste’s curative abilities. It would only offer, grudgingly, that the paste wouldn’t actually kill you—because an assay revealed heavy metal concentrations to be within the limits prescribed by law—and that it had no steroids secretly working against the asthma.

Harinath also had another letter, which, mystifyingly, he freely showed me. It was from the Department of Ayurveda,
Yoga and naturopathy, Unani, Siddha and Homoeopathy, or AYUSH, a government body that purports to govern such alternative medicine. The AYUSH letter refused to classify the Gouds’ cure as Ayurveda, calling it ‘at best … a folklore medicine practised by a traditional healer, who is not institutionally qualified.’

The thing with conviction, of course, is that it can operate to extreme lengths on the side of both belief and disbelief. Harinath, in his quest to persuade me of his paste’s medicinal properties, allowed himself to be swept into a current of questionable rhetoric. ‘We have test-tube babies now, so why don’t we believe the legend of Duryodhana and his brothers being born of a ball of flesh?’ he asked. ‘We have rocket ships now, so why not the
vimanas
of the Ramayana?’

Narisetti, the advocate of rationalism, is no less vulnerable to making flatly provocative statements. ‘The government should be supporting only culture, not religion. Religion is a superstitious belief. It is not a part of culture,’ he told me. But religion, and particularly in India, informs so much of our culture, I offered—the food we eat, the clothes we wear, the festivals we celebrate, the classical music we listen to, the art and theatre we support. ‘That can all survive without religion,’ he said. And then, a step further: ‘The government’s job is to educate people about this, to show that religion is just a superstitious belief. The government should reduce the presence of religion gradually until we finally get rid of it. That’s when we will live in a really secular society.’

The two men, in a sense, were funhouse mirror versions of each other—Harinath with his faith, and Narisetti with his faith in the sheer irrelevance of faith. But somehow, to believe as deeply as Harinath seemed to believe, even in something as unfounded as his asthma remedy, jarred me less than Narisetti’s dismissal of religion altogether. For the first time in my life, I felt more
unsettled by the views of the faithless than by the views of the faithful.

Even if the entire event was a manufactured sham (as opposed to an unconscious sham, and in the intent to dupe lies a vast difference), nobody could tell me exactly what purpose such a sham would serve. One argument had it that the Goud community formed an important vote bank in Andhra Pradesh, and that politicians preferred to support the Bathini Goud family rather than offend the community’s sentiment. But more puzzling still was the Gouds’ own motivation to do this every year, for no remuneration—to prepare their paste, to stand at the head of a throbbing crowd, in the stifling heat that throbbing crowds effortlessly throw off, and stick their hands down dozens of unfamiliar throats every hour. As a mere hobby, that sounds—and is—severely overrated.

Eager theories account for this too. A few years ago, in a significant windfall, the Chandrababu Naidu government was said to have handed over to the Gouds some land in Old Hyderabad. ‘They said it was to grow their herbs,’ Narisetti said. ‘Till then, they claimed they were sourcing the herbs from the Himalayas, and that the land would make their task easier.’ Also, Narisetti added, the Gouds get a cut from the auxiliary businesses that spring up around the centrepiece event every year—shops of toys and clothes, food stalls, pushcarts of religious paraphernalia, all selling to the captive audience at the Exhibition Grounds.

It all sounded just about plausible; there have been more improbably painstaking moneymaking schemes than the caper thus outlined. And yet, the day before the treatment, when Harinath walked into the little office at the Exhibition Grounds, he didn’t head directly to the young girl who was seated behind a desk handing out advance tokens; he didn’t ask to know how
many tokens had been distributed or what the response was. Instead, he strode very rapidly into the office, straight to waist-high stacks of fresh flyers that had just been delivered there, still warm from the printers. He peeled away a flyer from the top and scanned the instructions and the list of twenty-seven permitted items on the diet sheet. Then he relaxed, smiled, and said to his companion: ‘It’s all there, it’s all correct.’ To me, that didn’t seem like the behaviour of a man out to skim a few rupees off the sale of every cheap plastic whistle or multicoloured T-shirt.

The Doodh Bowli section of Hyderabad, lying a couple of kilometres from the Charminar, is an ancient quarter of mosques and thin, confusing streets that regularly double back upon themselves. The Bathini Goud family’s ancestral home, tucked into one of these streets, had been newly whitewashed, and its parrot-green window frames had been repainted. ‘We do a pooja the day before, at the house in Doodh Bowli. It’s usually just the family, but you must come,’ Harinath had said, and so I had gone, curious to see the clan.

By the time Harinath and I arrived, the family was already assembled on the terrace, under a temporary canopy of cloth. In a corner, next to a small altar, the family priest sat murmuring to himself and glaring occasionally at the world at large. Harinath whipped off his shirt and sat down in the front, next to his two older brothers. I took a discreet seat at the back, feeling slightly self-conscious until I saw my fellow intruder—a French documentary filmmaker with a digital video camera, who orbited the congregation like a diligent planet, filming the entire pooja.

Truth to tell, there wasn’t much to film. This was a regular Satyanarayana pooja, performed in many Hindu homes before an occasion of significance. And like almost every one of the
communal poojas I’ve ever attended, there were the requisite distracted children, the whimpering baby, the sombre gentlemen up front, and the comforting white noise of women talking and laughing at the back. Harinath, sweating even in spite of the playful surges of monsoonal breeze that cut through the midday heat, sat very still, eyes closed, hands folded in prayer.