Fishy Tales

Following Fish: Travels around the Indian Coast

By Samanth Subramanian

You read a book like this and you are reminded once more that there is little as compelling as truly good travel writing - delving into the idiosyncrasies of people and places with genuine curiosity and empathy, working with journalistic rigor yet bringing in a subjective viewpoint, combining good writing with unexpected insight.Subramanian’s first attempt at a book is an extremely interesting one.

He works his way around the long Indian coastline - Bengal, Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, moving to the west, to Kerala, Karnataka, Goa, Maharashtra, Gujarat. Every state has a story to tell Subramanian, unique yet strangely connected, interesting tales, bringing to life both the diversity of the Indian subcontinent and the commonality of the life on a coast.

In Bengal, he writes about the Bengali obsession with hilsa (“If Bengali cuisine were Wimbledon, the hilsa would always play on Centre Court”) - the right way to chew it, separating the bones from the flesh within the mouth; the difference between the Bangladeshi and the Bengali hilsa; its availability year long, rather than just during the monsoon in an earlier time; and its preparation in the delectable shorsha ilish.

In Hyderabad (not really the coast, but close enough to warrant a fishy tale), Subramanian encounters India’s predilection for faith-cures. The Bathini Goud family’s cure for asthma includes a medical preparation stuffed into a live fish that you then need to swallow - live. Subramanian leaves it to the reader to decide if this is the real thing or plain old quackery.

In the Tamil Nadu coast, he meets the Paravas, an old fishing community converted to Christianity by the Portuguese but whose Christianity is mostly a veneer that envelopes age-old Hindu customs. “There is syncretism in language, in how words such as ‘kovil’ and ‘aradhana’, traditionally intended for temples and Hindu celebrations of worship, are now applied to churches and Catholic feasts. There is syncretism in practice,in the lighting of lamps instead of candles, in the full-stretch prostrations that men performed at Our Lady of Snows, in conducting both the Hindu valakappu ceremony for pregnant women and Christian baptism for newborn babies, even in the respectful act of leaving one’s shoes outside the entrance of the church. And sometimes, there is syncretism in thought, in how a Christian fisherman still propitiates the Hindu god Murugan and refers to him ‘Machaan’ or ‘brother-in-law’, because Murugan’s wife Devayani came from Parava stock - at least according to a Parava legend that has somehow been comfortably ensconced within another faith for five hundred years now.”

In Kerala, Subramanian goes in search of the perfect toddy and realizes that ‘the best toddy, toddy that is fresh and untouched by base additives, should taste only marginally less mild than milk, with a slight sweetness, a faint note of ferment, and the occasional granule of coconut husk.” He is introduced to a world where work can literally stop for toddy, where certain types of it are rigidly sold only to certain types of people, where toddy food is only meant to increase your appetite for toddy itself, where the fish fried in coconut oil is truly an acquired taste and where toddy can make sworn brothers of men who otherwise were vastly different.

In Karnataka, he goes looking for his childhood memory of the perfect Mangalorean fish curry - and finds it after considerable effort in the home of a local official of a Mangalorean fisherman’s co-operative. In a small town between Goa and Maharashtra, he goes fishing for the fastest fish in the sea - the sailfish. He does not find one, but in the process, he gives his readers a peek into the joys of recreational fishing - “The sight of a worthy catch is breathlessly anticipated; the thrill of the sport resides in how suddenly it can turn. But for the rest of the time, the art of fishing is really the art of waiting in thin disguise - waiting not only from hour to hour, as we were doing at sea, or from day to day, as with the fisherman Santiago in Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, but even from year to year, as for the annual Indian variation of the sailfish. There is no room in the boat for impatience; I can’t think of any other sport that so effectively screens its participants on the basis of a single quality of temperament.”

In Goa, Subramanian finds an entire lifestyle slowly disappearing - where the traditional fisherfolk are giving up their ancient fishing jobs for the easier and more lucrative jobs generated by the tourism industry, where the sand of the beaches is fast disappearing into new construction, where the oh-so-authentic Goan shack culture is actually so completely inauthentic, and where the seas have been so over-fished by trawlers and mechanized boats that most of Goa’s fish is now actually brought in from neighbouring states.

In Maharashtra, he goes looking for the Koli community, the original Mumbaikars, and their food. And discerns the difference between Gomantak and Malvani cuisine, while discovering also the Koli challenge to chicken soup - the Nisot. And in Gujarat, Subramanian meets the boat makers, people who have been making boats for generations, with little change in technique.

In his journey along the coast, Subramanian realizes that inspite of the differences he finds across states, what really surprises him is the discovery of similarities - the livelihoods rising and falling with the fishing calendar, the cosmopolitan nature of the fishing communities, ever willing to absorb influences of visitors from the sea across ages, and the battles with the modern age where the traditional fishing trade is being rapidly displaced by businessmen in motorized boats and trawlers. The similarities are so strong because at the end, as he says, “Fishing is still elemental in the most elemental sense of the word - an activity composed of water and air and light space, all arranged in precarious balance around a central idea of a man in a boat, waiting for a bite.”

It is a thought-provoking book, but equally, it is entertaining. If you enjoy travelling through the eyes of a first rate writer, this one is for you.

Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

By Paul Theroux

This book has been a good introduction for me to Theroux’s travel writing. Ghost Train to the Eastern Star is about Theroux’s journey to the East, as far as Japan, from London. It is one he has been on 33 years before, and the book that came out of that particular journey was The Great Railway Bazaar, Theroux’s first international best seller. He reprises it as an older man, a happier man, traveling like a ghost, seeing places he had seen before with new and different eyes (“It is only with age that you acquire the gift to evaluate decay”). The one big change is the way he gets to Asia from Europe – he cannot get a visa this time to Iran (the last time he traveled, the Shah was in power in Iran) and Afghanistan is for all purposes closed to travel, so he gets to Delhi through Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. He travels alone, by train mostly, eschews luxury for the common class and lets himself stop and stare when he feels like it. It is a fascinating travelogue peppered with often harsh judgements on entire countries and peoples, heart-warming anecdotes about chance encounters, meetings with famous literary figures in the countries he travels through (Orhan Pamuk in Turkey, Murakami and Pico Iyer in Japan, Arthur C Clarke in Sri Lanka) and references to other writers and their travels (Greene, Orwell, Conrad, Woolfe, Twain – none of whom has ever gone back to the same places again, according to Theroux). All along, there is a parallel earlier journey as reference point; and because I have not read The Great Railway Bazaar, some of the references are lost to me.

One of the more quotable chapters is the first one – where Theroux dissects what he likes about travel (“Hating schedules, depending on chance encounters, I am attracted by travel’s slow tempo”) and what he dislikes about travel books (“Most writing about travel takes the form of jumping to conclusions, and so most travel books are superfluous…little better than a license to bore, travel writing is the lowest form of literary self-indulgence: dishonest complaining, creative mendacity, pointless heroics…”). Well, he himself does jump to a hell of a lot of conclusions, is infuriatingly self-indulgent at times, can be intermittently curmudgeonly; yet there is little dullness, a lot of erudition (his references to literary journeys past are quite awe-inspiring) and he does manage to provoke reaction.

I found the pieces on Turkey (he goes into Istanbul expecting a shabby Asiatic city and instead finds “a grand and re-imagined city of laughing children and beautiful women and swaggering men which had been ignored by Europe and sneered at by Islamic republics”), Vietnam (the war might have been forgiven, but there is little forgetting for a guilt-induced American here) and Central Asia were the most fascinating for me – there are many interesting stories here, throwing light on otherwise dark places.

India disgusts him at some level – its crowds, the anarchy, the free-for-all attitude, the “unfeedable, unhousable, uncontainable 1.3 billion people”. “The Indian miracle” to him is a bad joke – fed on people working for a dollar a day – and there is little that has changed in 33 years in real material terms. The biggest change to him is in the attitude – in the new found confidence of a resurgent middle class that talks progress and praises India’s economy. There are incidents that will happen to gullible white men – paying a bribe for a railway ticket (get on the Indian Railways website I want to tell this Luddite; and get to know what a world-class web ticketing system can do for you!), experiencing a buzz while facing royalty (be it the Rajputs in Jodhpur or Prince Charles on a visit). All in all, the sense one got in his last book set in India ‘The Elephanta Suite’ is the same sense a reader gets here – of a man unable to deal with the chaos and deception that a vast multitudinous country like India can dish out to a visitor.

Sri Lanka is idyllic, Burma and Cambodia are tragedies couched in beauty, Thailand is sweet, nice, orderly, filled with pretty willing women, is proud of their king and the fact that they have never been colonized (the fact that the kingdom was long a protectorate holds no significance). Singapore has a special viciousness reserved for it – “No one was fat. No one was poor. No one was badly dressed. But many Singaporeans had…the half-devil, half-child look of having been infantilized and overprotected by their unstoppably manipulative government” and “Singaporeans are encouraged to spy on each other; rats are rewarded”. Lee Kwan Yew, the benign autocrat is articulate but incoherent, is meddlesome and fiddles with people’s lives, is a cold and single-minded control freak and Singapore’s citizens take after him. China is dismissed in a few nasty lines – “Ugly and soulless, China represented the horror of answered prayers, a peasant’s greedy dream of development”. Well, one can only be glad Theroux’s countrymen are less dismissive of this giant. Japanese society confuses him – it is alienating, conformist, “Manga and the graphic novel seemed to represent a dumb, defiant anti-intellectualism”, there is something perverse about the Japanese obsession with school girls and the whole of Japanese culture is ‘sculpted and controlled’.

Theroux’s last leg on the trans-Siberian Express is the culmination of all that is good in his book. In a coming together of literature and travel, he takes us on a journey redolent with Dostoevsky, Nabokov, Solzhenitsyn, Shalamov. And when he concludes his Russian leg by saying that 33 years later, Russia was essentially the same – “a pretentious empire with a cruel government that was helpless without secret police”, one can hardly disagree.

There are many parts of the book that get your back up – especially when he describes places you know intimately, India and Singapore and Sri Lanka and Thailand. At times he comes across as a Westerner sneering at Eastern progress, almost as if he misses the idyllic village that the East once was, almost as if he is romanticizing poverty. Theroux is provocative, confrontational and many a time offensive. But he is hardly ever uninteresting. And even at places where you most disagree with him, you have to admit that there could be a kernel of truth in his point of view.