Following Fish: Travels Around the Indian Coast (5 page)

The Bathini Goud Brothers; Harinath sits second from left

We must have sat there for at least an hour in this manner, and attentions began to flag. The filmmaker filmed from less bravura angles, the baby whimpered louder, Harinath sweated more, and the children, losing patience, began to make sorties downstairs into the cooler confines of the house. A little while later, some men began to bring up huge wicker baskets of cooked rice, sweets and pooris, and steel buckets of sambar and rasam. In the heat, and in the restricted confines of the canopy, the wonderful, dense smell of the food rose and hung, like a spice-seeded storm cloud, above the family. Attentions, unsurprisingly, wilted further.

Harinath finally broke a coconut, a girl came and tied a red-and-yellow thread, with a betel leaf, around the wrists of us observers, and the priest performed his
arati,
offering up cubes of sugar and diced bananas to the deity. It seemed like the end, but then the group moved downstairs, first to the house’s stuffy pooja room and then to the real focus of all this consecration: the well.

When we’d first met, I had asked Harinath whether he had ever considered taking his treatment across India, like a travelling apothecary. He had bridled at the suggestion and then said, cryptically: ‘We need our Doodh Bowli well.’ Later I had persuaded him to explain that statement, and he told me about the importance of making the medicine with the water from the well in the Doodh Bowli house. ‘Only that water. Nothing else will do,’ he had said. One summer, he claimed, every well in Doodh Bowli had gone dry, and Hyderabad had thirsted for water—yet the well in the ancestral home had gushed with sweet, cool water.

That well is really a small, square hole in the ground, set to one side of the courtyard past the entrance of the house. Just above it, built into the staircase leading to the terrace, is a sacred
tulasi
plant in a bower, as if it were benignly conferring its holy status upon the well all year round. The water is not too far below the surface, but it remains so cool that even leaning over it, during the summer months, feels like passing through a blast of air conditioning.

The priest now took position over the well and consecrated it with rice, vermillion and turmeric. As if he were a trainer pepping his boxer for the big fight, the priest flattered the well water in his recitations, calling it the embodiment of the Ganga, the Yamuna, the Narmada, the Kaveri and the Sindhu rivers. In the pooja room behind us, the women had gathered independently and were singing in low, tuneless voices. Only after that was it time to eat.

After lunch, the Bathini Goud residence was flooded with visitors—neighbours dropping in to see how things were going, more members of the family, reporters and camera crews to interview Harinath, who seemed to have been designated communications director for the event. His daughter Alka took charge of his two cell phones, answering some calls and giving others to her father. It was, by now, past three in the afternoon, and I asked Harinath: ‘But when will you actually begin making the medicine?’

‘We’ll probably start in the evening, or later at night, when all this has died down.’

I thought about that, and then asked: ‘Can I stay to watch?’

Harinath smiled a slow, sweet smile, and said: ‘You know that isn’t possible.’

I knew. I’d just figured that there was no harm in trying.

With little to do until the start of the treatment the next evening, I wandered back to the Exhibition Grounds and sat in the little office building, near the Bartronics desk. Bartronics, a Hyderabad-based company, had installed automated entry systems into other locations with teeming crowds, such as the Vaishno Devi shrine in the Himalayas and the Tirumala temple at Tirupathi. The previous year, Bartronics had been engaged to implement a similar process at the Exhibition Grounds, and with needless zeal, a sophisticated biometrics system, involving fingerprints and photographs, was installed.

‘But it began to take a long time to check the biometrics, and people started shouting and complaining,’ a Bartronics employee told me. ‘Besides, there’s no real danger of any malpractice here, since it’s all free.’ So biometrics sat it out on the bench this year. Instead, people came to the office two or three days in advance to pick up two tokens—one for the fish counter, and one that
allotted them to a specific, one-hour window of time. Then they walked away planning to come early anyway. ‘You know, just in case,’ one man said.

Sitting next to the token-dispensing desk, I began to detect, in Harinath’s prospective patients, the same hesitant hope that I’d seen in my grandfather’s visitors many years ago. A number of them asked: ‘Does this really work?’ and the beleaguered Bartronics lady was forced to say that she was just giving out the tokens. Some scrutinized the token intently, as if it held some clue to their prospects. A few hung around, after they’d pocketed their tokens, to look at the others who came after them, as if the appearance of their fellow ward-mates would give them a better idea of this unorthodox hospital.

One middle-aged man had flown from Montreal to be at Hyderabad during the treatment. ‘My lungs operate at about 38 per cent capacity. I have to travel with a bag full of medication,’ he said, showing me a plastic pouch crammed with tablets, nebulisers, capsules and a syringe. He looked in the bloom of health, but he said he’d spent his life trying medications of various provenances. ‘I can’t even travel alone; I need a friend with me all the time.’ He’d read about the Bathini Goud remedy on the internet. ‘Right about now, I’m willing to try anything.’

Amarendra Kumar, an automobile dealer from Bihar, came with his wife, both looking to be able to breathe freely again. He had arrived in Hyderabad the previous morning, mistakenly believing that the treatment would start the day I met them. ‘I had booked my return tickets for tomorrow afternoon’s train,’ he said, worried. ‘Now I’ll have to cancel and rebook for Sunday.’

The most uncertain visitors of the afternoon were a Jain family of four. They entered together and stood next to me, silently watching the tokens change hands. Then the father tapped me on the shoulder and asked: ‘Does it work better with the fish?’

‘It’s supposed to,’ I told him. ‘There’s a vegetarian version, but the fish is said to be more effective.’

He stepped back into a moment’s silence and then said, almost to himself: ‘But we don’t eat meat.’

More silence, and then, sensing that the family was not quite as well informed as they should have been, I said: ‘You do know that the fish is alive, don’t you?’

This ignited a conflagration of comical reactions. The father sank deeper into worry. The mother, though, laughed almost hysterically. She then walked resolutely to the door and started to mock-retch graphically, holding her stomach, a mischievous smile playing over her face. ‘Come on,’ she’d say between heaves, ‘no fish, let’s go.’ Her older son, aged approximately ten, looked fascinated by the newly gruesome lustre to this treatment. His younger brother, who must have been six or seven, tugged at his father’s shirt, pulling him away, his face crumpling slowly in horror like a sheet of cellophane.

The father wrestled with himself for five whole minutes. Then he stepped up to the Bartronics counter and asked for two tokens for his children. ‘Only in case the fish is needed,’ he justified to his family. But if the quest for his sons’ perfect health did win out over the tenets of his religion, who could blame him?

Saturday evening proved to be hot, sticky and humid, the sort of weather that prompts the imagination to believe that moisture can simply be wrung out of the air. Hyderabad’s traffic, re-routed near Nampally to keep the approach to the Exhibition Grounds clear, was at its thorniest best. I entered the Grounds at half past eight for a treatment that was supposed to have begun an hour earlier. But I needn’t have worried. The Bathini Gouds, leaving Doodh Bowli with their vats of medicine, travelling under police
escort, had reached the venue only at eight o’clock, snared in the traffic rearrangements organized for their benefit.

By the time I arrived, the little road leading to the Grounds’ Ajanta Gate was clogged with people, flanked on either side by what Narisetti had called the ‘auxiliary businesses.’ Spread out on tarpaulins on the ground or on rickety pushcarts were T-shirts, children’s shoes, toys with crazy lights and wailing sounds, and bags in cloth and plastic. Nothing, as far as I asked, was priced at more than Rs 20, and the vendors, instead of looking excited at the prospect of a twenty-four-hour sales extravaganza, were following with forlorn eyes the crowds that rushed past them.

By 5 p.m. on that day, the Bartronics people had told me, around thirty-five thousand advance tokens had been given out, but the entrance into the Grounds was surprisingly serene. On low, broad concrete platforms, people squatted, ate, slept and played, patiently waiting for the time slot printed on their tickets. On the public address system, between bursts of shehnai music, an announcer, already hoarse, was warning people not to pinch their plastic bags of fish close. ‘The fish will suffocate. Keep the mouth of the bag open.’ And then again the same announcement followed in Hindi and Telugu.

Walking past police and medical assistance booths, stalls for free food, stalls for water, and a slumbering fire engine, I entered the maze that led up to the dais. Under a temporary tin roof, these passages, formed by iron railings and rickety wooden staves, were designed to direct the crowds to one of thirty-three counters up front; they reminded me of immigration queues at large international airports. The token system may have mitigated the crowd within those passages, but it could do nothing about the way everybody pressed up densely near the counters. Two-thirds of the maze was empty, but near every one of the thirty-three counters, people clamoured to go first, holding up their little bags of fish like cigarette lighters at a rock concert.

Pushing my way through the stifling heat of this mosh pit and squeezing out with a pop at the front, I found Harinath, in his yellow shawl and white dhoti, in an oasis of relative calm. ‘At my age,’ he said, ‘I can’t stand at those counters and work at that pace.’ The others worked faster, often pushing fish into five or six mouths per minute, standing in a crowd and unaware or uncaring of the growing pools of muddy water around their feet. Harinath, for his part, positioned himself one rank behind the rest of his family, near a little raised stage area where he could occasionally sit and contemplate the ocean of people in front of him.

An old matriarch of Harinath’s family, sitting behind him and rolling out miniature cannonballs of medicine, handed me one. It was a livid yellow from the turmeric, but it smelled and tasted of almost pure asafoetida, a spice whose very root is the word ‘foetid.’ I have not been able to stomach the taste of asafoetida ever since, at a very young age, I mistook a hunk of it in my upma for a peanut, bit eagerly into it, and proceeded to throw up violently. I rolled that lump of medicine around in my fingers only for a few seconds, but I could still smell the asafoetida the next morning.

As soon as I reached Harinath, he began collaring familiar faces from the crowd and bringing them over to make introductions. ‘This woman, she’s come from Maharashtra two times already, and her asthma is much better,’ he would say. ‘Go on! Tell him how much better your asthma is.’

‘Much better,’ the woman said sincerely.

‘See, she’s much better,’ Harinath beamed.

Even aside from these testimonies for my benefit, people would rush up to Harinath to thank him, or to even just touch him, as if that were supplementary blessing. One man with a withered
leg somehow jettisoned his crutches to kneel and touch Harinath’s feet. Others would tell him, like children proudly reporting their mathematics scores to their parents, that they were ‘75 per cent better’ or even ‘98 per cent better,’ as if they were able to keenly calibrate even a 2 per cent remainder of their asthma.

But the unmistakable soundtrack to the Bathini Goud marathon cure was that of crying and retching. The cure was hardest on the young—the young fish, of course, but also the young children. Parents would lift their children bodily, holding them and keeping their mouths open. Harinath would slip the murrel fish out of its plastic sac, pinch its neck to open its mouth, and insert a dose of medicine. Then, with two long and dextrous fingers, he would stick the fish all the way at the back of the throat, snap the child’s jaw shut, and squeeze the nose, forcing the child to gulp and swallow.