Following Fish: Travels Around the Indian Coast (6 page)

Not surprisingly, the results were often disastrous. One girl, who must have been twelve or thirteen, attempted to throw up as soon as she was let go; her father, equally adamant, tried to force her mouth shut. Other children, even young infants, swallowed their fish perfectly, but they instantly began wailing in horror, as if instinct, or the enforced feel of the whole exercise, had told them that something unnatural had just happened. One boy shouted in alarm: ‘It’s in my throat, ma, I can still feel it!’ His mother began rubbing down his gullet, hoping to encourage the fish to complete the journey to its doom.

The adults didn’t always fare better. Many, it is true, took approximately two seconds to swallow and move on. In a feat of physiological control, one composed gentleman was even able to indicate, to his minder, that his fish had gone down the wrong length of piping, bring it back up into his mouth, and then swiftly re-ingest it. But one woman, with the fish in her throat, thumped herself on her chest and brought it back out. Harinath picked it up off the coir matting on the floor, checked
if it was still alive, swirled it around in a bucket of chlorine water, and tried again.

And then, suddenly, it was my turn.

The most disconcerting moment of the entire process was a few seconds of stasis, when Harinath held the fish up, medicine gleaming in its mouth, and I stood with my mouth open as if it were the Eucharist wafer, dimly aware that I could still twist away and run. Then the stasis broke, and Harinath’s hand, full of fish, was in my mouth.

From all the first-hand observation that evening, I must have somehow learned how to swallow right, because the fish went down, tail first, much easier than I expected. It was slippery and small, and although I felt an initial tickle, I think it had expired by the time it was a third of the way down my throat. Right away, though, I realized that it wasn’t the fish that was making people retch; it was the asafoetida, so strong and vicious that tears started in your eyes in that very first second. Then, as it slid down, it burned such a trail of further pungency down your throat that your hair stood on end and your fingers clenched involuntarily. Eyes still streaming, I grabbed at a bottle of water behind Harinath, although somehow, my mind had inscrutably fixed on its own preferred solution to the asafoetida’s pungency: fresh-cut mangoes.

For a few further hours into the night, I sat behind Harinath and watched the crowds. I watched many, many people come right up to Harinath, their nerve screwed up, fully aware of what lay before them—and then they backed out, hope and false courage defeated by the immediate reality. As they walked away, they seemed puzzled and distressed, not so much by what they’d narrowly avoided as by their sudden loss of faith. It was almost as if they had desperately wanted to believe but had been finally let down by their closest accomplice: their own body.

I watched Harinath too. He rested only in snatches of a few minutes, and he was almost always talking and enquiring and
blessing. Not for the first time, I wondered what was in it for him—whether it was the sense that, at least for one day every year, the Bathini Gouds were the most important and influential people in Hyderabad. Whether it was that their fish ‘remedy’—remedy or not—defined them, gave them an identity. Whether there was some hidden commercial motive, or whether the Gouds really believed that they were sending people home asthma-free. Really, there was no way to tell. But for a few moments, watching Harinath at work, I was reminded powerfully of my grandfather and his healing sessions, of his roaring faith, and of how, in that charged slice of time, for both the healer and the healed—and even for me, watching with a child’s easily suspended disbelief—anything was possible. We could all be well again.

I
n Manapadu, on the southern coast of Tamil Nadu, some imaginative soul has enlivened the uphill walk to the Church of the Holy Cross by installing reminders of Christ’s parallel struggle up the hill of Calvary. Every few metres, there are little plaster-of-Paris dioramas of the various stages of that journey: Here of Christ first shouldering the cross, there of Him stumbling under its weight, and further on of Veronica offering her veil to wipe His perspiration away. The series may well have been commissioned by a sly church elder, as if to challenge his lazier parishioners by saying: ‘You complain about this stroll uphill? Think of the trek your Lord undertook for you!’ But if that was the case, the dioramas are unnecessary, for not only is the slope gentle and forgiving on the ankles, but the Church of the Holy Cross is also irresistibly attractive—worthy, in fact, of a much steeper hill.

On the December morning I visited, the wind hurried strongly off the sea, careening around the top of the hill in mad eddies, shrieking around the corners of buildings. The sun was not hot
but bright, and it was impossible to look without squinting at the brilliantly whitewashed walls of the church. The sea resembled a vast stretch of aluminium foil, slowly folding and unfolding itself. Standing near the church’s northern wall, I could see Manapadu’s perfect natural harbour, a long, sandy crescent of coast, with fishing boats pulled up the beach in ragged lines, and the water so shallow that the dirty brown of the seabed showed through the shining water. It was the Monday before Christmas, and I thought I was the only one there.

The Church of the Holy Cross is a plain white building, trimmed in deep blue, a very Mediterranean-looking sort of structure. They say it holds a relic—a sliver of the true cross—that was brought to Manapadu in processional pomp from Cochin, over eight months in 1583. The sliver was, unfortunately, not on display, and I’m not sure it ever is. In front of the altar, an old woman sat with her hands clasped, praying noiselessly; if it hadn’t been for me, she would have had the small church entirely to herself. Near the giant cross in the apse, an old Bible stood open on a trestle table, its pages looking weary from use; on either side of the apse, blue windows creaked and groaned, buffeted by the wind. Despite that racket, and despite the ceaseless slap of the waves on the coast, I remember the church as being quiet. It can’t have been, of course, but memory often confuses tranquillity with silence.

At this church, a rusted metal signboard will tell you, St. Francis Xavier offered Mass in 1542, his first on the eastern shores of India. He had arrived by sea from the opposite coast, hugging the southern Indian peninsula and making frequent stops all along. At Manapadu, he landed and, for reasons known only to himself, took up residence for some weeks in a cave. The cave still exists, a short walk down a sandy path leading from the church to the sea, past a newer and smaller shrine to the saint, on the rocky lip of the coast. There, a sign reads:

As grottoes by the sea go, this one seemed remarkably unnatural, having been augmented at some point by wooden ceiling beams, square pillars hewn out of rock, blue paint on the walls, and a wooden lintel under the arched doorway. At the cave’s deepest point, against its back wall, there was a small statue of Xavier and a Mirinda bottle half-full of oil for the two lamps. To the right, just inside the entrance, was a shallow well, fed allegedly by the ocean just outside. ‘It’s true—you put a lemon into the well, and it will wash out into the sea a few minutes later,’ I was told by many people. (Oddly, in every version of the test that I heard, it was always a lemon, as if the use of a banana or a tin can would be like using something other than litmus to settle the acid–alkali confusion.) The ‘miracle’ of the well is that, despite its connection to the sea, the water is supposed to taste sweet and fresh. I drank half a cup, out of a pail standing near the well, and while the water tasted faintly brackish, it certainly wasn’t half a cup of seawater.

The Church of the Holy Cross was here when Francis Xavier moved into his cave. In the 1530s, a Portuguese trading ship called the
Santiago
foundered near Manapadu, and its mast washed up on the beach. ‘But somebody accidentally stepped on it, and a terrible thing happened,’ Valentin Ilango, a high school Tamil teacher and a passionate historian of Manapadu, told me with dramatically rolling eyes. We were sitting in his staffroom, the school cloaked in the anxious hush of examinations. ‘This man became gravely ill, and his body swelled up. Then the captain of the ship had a dream that the mast was to be erected as a cross, and that it was to be washed and oiled. When the captain did that, in 1540, the poor man recovered.’ By 1582, a church had grown up around that original mast, which remains now as the
spine of a bigger, newer cross. It is still washed and oiled on feast days.

Xavier arrived here a couple of years after the mast became a cross. ‘He lived in that cave, and he prayed all night. If he ate at all, it was only one meal a day, and he would eat the food that the local fisher folk brought him—rice gruel, dried fish, things like that,’ Ilango said. ‘From the cave, he wrote, I think, twelve letters to St. Ignatius of Loyola, which are said to be in the Vatican’s library in Rome.’ When Xavier finally emerged, he set off for Tuticorin, on the project that had brought him to these parts: Cementing the conversion to Catholicism of the fishing community in the area.

In a chapter in Jules Verne’s
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea,
the narrator, M. Aronnax, is watching Captain Nemo fondle a gigantic, perfect pearl when he sees a shadow in the water. He fears it is a shark but, as he writes, it is only a man:

The
Nautilus,
at the time, was lurking off the final sandy curve of India’s east coast, which makes Aronnax’s Indian, in all
probability, a member of the pearl-fishing community living between Rameshwaram and Kanyakumari, concentrated in particular in Tuticorin and its neighbouring villages. The fishermen may date themselves back to antiquity, but there is still debate, academic as well as popular, about their very nomenclature. Tamil Sangam literature, from the years between 300
BCE
and 200
CE
, refers to them as ‘neithalimakkal,’ or ‘people of the coastal tracts,’ but this seems too poetically generic. For long, the fishermen were known by their caste—Parava—but many today prefer to be called Bharathas or Bharathakulas, which instantly confers a martial lineage dating back to Bharatha, king of Ayodhya and brother of Rama. Another, rather more extreme theory believes the Paravas to be one of the lost tribes of Israel. But Hindu or Jewish roots notwithstanding, they are now almost overwhelmingly Catholic—and that happened because of one man’s ear lobe.

Early in the sixteenth century, a seaman of the Kayalar caste—which had been recently converted to Islam by Arab traders—insulted a Parava woman with an epithet that is unfortunately lost to history. Her husband, when he tried to intervene, got his ear lobe cut off for his troubles, losing his pearl earring in the bargain. With the Ear Lobe Incident, the long-simmering tensions between the Paravas and the Kayalar Muslims appear to have boiled over. The Paravas approached the newly arrived Portuguese for protection, and they were promised this in return for their faith and a monopoly on pearl fishing rights. So, in a mass baptism in the mid-1530s, roughly twenty thousand people from thirty villages converted to Christianity—possibly the biggest such single conversion in history. This was a conversion merely in the most elementary sense of the word: In her book titled
Saints, Goddesses and Kings,
in a chapter on the Paravas, Susan Bayly contends that it only involved ‘being taught to make the sign of the cross and to recite garbled Tamil renderings of the creed and
the Ave Maria.’ For all its simplicity, nearly half a millennium later, the conversion seems to have held fast, at least on its surface.

The heart of Parava Catholicism is the Church of Our Lady of the Snows, on South Beach Road in Tuticorin. Locally called the Periya Kovil, or the Big Church, it is located down the road from the old harbour, where in the bygone days barrels of drinking water would be imported from Sri Lanka, and from where cargo still leaves for the Maldives. Across the road from the church is a slim cross, so evidently a converted mast that it is still festooned with nautical-looking bunting. (The cross-mast is, I would observe, a common, vivid symbol of the twinning of the Church and the fishing community in this area, as is an altar centrepiece at another of Tuticorin’s churches: a large, open oyster bearing a creamy exaggeration of a pearl.) A few doors from the Church of Our Lady of the Snows was a blue, half-timbered structure, bearing a painted sign saying ‘Justin Photo Colour Lab’ and depicting a wild-eyed child presumably in the throes of being photographed. The sign looked as worn as the building it was labeling. ‘That used to be the Pandiyapathi’s house,’ my friend Amalraaj Fernando said as we passed it on his motorcycle. ‘I’ll explain later.’

The Church of Our Lady of the Snows is, like so many local churches inspired by the Portuguese, painted in white and bright blue. It was consecrated, a signboard reads, in August 1582, but to my eyes, the church looked barely two hundred years old. (In 1707, the signboard mentions incidentally, the church ‘saved miraculously’ the town and surrounding villages from a heavy thunderbolt—from, in other words, a very loud sound.) To the tail of the older, more compact, central hall of the church, a new, rectangular room has been tacked on. In its sterile whiteness, this space could pass for a hospital waiting room if the altar weren’t visible through the doors at one end. ‘It was freshly painted for Christmas—that’s why it looks the way it does,’ Fernando told me.

A small, neat man, Fernando nominally runs a mobile recharge shop in Tuticorin but, to the dismay of his wife, spends more time cultivating his earnest interest in the town’s history and in getting to know, nearly literally, everyone. On that first visit to the Periya Kovil, he talked in considerable detail, off the top of his head, about Mary of the Snows. ‘In the fourth century, Rome was going through a severe drought—and yet, on the Esquiline Hill, it snowed,’ Fernando said. ‘Mary appeared in a dream to the Pope Liberius, at the time, directing him to build a church on that hill. That is now the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore.’ The gilded statue of Mary in Our Lady of the Snows, flanked by miscellaneous putti, was a legendary one, Fernando added, brought to Tuticorin from Manila in the sixteenth century.

On a Sunday morning, three days before Christmas, I attended my first two Masses at Our Lady of the Snows. Up front, women sat on the floor with their children; behind them, in the few pews available, were the men and senior citizens. Some of the women sported fine, sheer, Iberian veils, worn on their heads like long conical caps, looking like they had stepped out of the canvas of a Velasquez painting. The men held handkerchiefs and absently swatted at flies, which in Tuticorin come in such XXL sizes that they rivalled the length of my thumb. A faint breeze blew across the church, bearing the distant voices of the harmless, Santa-hatted motorcycle gangs, shouting ‘Merry Christmas’ to passers-by as they sped through the road outside.

I did not follow the Tamil Mass too closely. The service was led by a junior priest with the trudging, uniform intonations of a university lecturer, and his sermon—on compassion, if I recall rightly—was dry and flaccid. He had positioned himself in front of a standing fan, and sporadically, his purple vestments would fly up from his white cassock, like the plumage of an exotic bird shaking itself dry. Next to me, on the floor, a little girl with liquid eyes tumbled into giggles every time this happened. From the
balcony above me, a choir occasionally gave us music, accompanied by a keyboard that reeled off disco rhythms in step with the hymns.