Following Fish: Travels Around the Indian Coast (14 page)

We were barely on our way when we hooked our first catch. One rod had been loosely resting in its stock, and Yvan was just beginning to cinch it in when it leapt out of his hands; a few seconds earlier, and the rod would have been in the water.

The rod jerked back and forth, and Yvan puffed as he sought to stay in control. ‘Emil, get the belt around him,’ Baptista shouted. Emil, scrambling from his seat, picked up a white belt with a large plastic buckle, used by the standing fisherman to brace the rod against his belly as he played the fish (or as the fish played him).

‘Get the belt on him, Emil,’ Baptista hollered again.

‘I’m trying, Uncle, but he’s too fat,’ Emil hollered back, laughing. He paid out a few more lengths of belt, looped it right over Yvan’s bulky fishing jacket, and pulled it tight. Yvan himself was largely unaware of this exchange as he peered into the sea, as if he were willing the fish to submit.

It turned out to be a golden trevally, a yellow tropical fish that had been trailing in the boat’s wake and that had received a hook in the corner of its mouth for its troubles. The trevally had fought as trevallies usually do—by presenting its flat side to the direction it was being pulled in, to create as much resistance as possible. ‘A trevally to open your season, Yvan,’ Emil said. ‘That’s not bad.’ Yvan shrugged.

We continued to seek more open waters. To the east, the skies were beginning to flare with the first approach of dawn, and the
air was tinged with salt and the acrid perfume of diesel. The sea went from inky to dull quicksilver to sparkly satin. Baptista pointed out patches of water that were rippling with acute energy—shoals of sardines, pursued overhead by diving birds. To occupy himself, Emil baited a line with a rubbery fluorescent yellow-and-green lure and threw it into the ocean to attract squid.

Orbiting an old lighthouse, waiting for a sailfish to bite

We were headed, eventually, to a sprinkling of rocky islets rising out of the sea, the biggest of them sporting a stubby lighthouse that looked abandoned but wasn’t, and some houses that looked abandoned and were, in fact, abandoned. ‘Here, there are more rocks under the water, and some of the bait fish tend to hide beneath them,’ Baptista said. The predator fish often swam these waters, poking under the rocks to rustle their prey out. Gunning the motor down, we began making slow, laborious sorties around the islets, the three fishermen hunched over their rods, staring into the sea.

As if even sparring with a sailfish was an honour, many fishermen tell proud stories of their defeats in the battle with the monster at the end of their line, as Moses did with me. Participating in the extended sailfish mythos is sufficient in itself, and a mythos it has certainly become. In his memoir,
The Sailfish and the Sacred Mountain,
Will Johnson describes the sailfish as ‘a Neptunian being unequaled in majesty and evasiveness, a watery
version of the Himalayan snow leopard.’ To actually catch one is closer to a benediction than a feat of skill. A veteran could fish his entire life without even spotting a sailfish, and a rookie could pull one in on his very first trip to sea, as Johnson says he did in the Florida Keys.

Even a lost battle can often be spectacular. When it is snared, the sailfish leaps out of the water and, fully upright, propels itself across the surface solely on the strength of its thrashing tail, just as a dolphin does. The dolphin appears to do it, though, out of some sense of self-conscious cuteness; with the sailfish, it’s all outrage and menace. Veteran anglers call it ‘tailwalking,’ and they will tell stories—often ones that sound, quite literally, incredible—of how a sailfish tailwalked around their boat for an hour or more

So luminous is the prestige inherent in catching a sailfish, not to mention the attendant bragging rights, that any claim of having landed one can be met with automatic suspicion and doubt. The Sailfish Cup, held in Miami every year, offers a purse of $100,000 to the team that catches and releases the most sailfish over two days, and not unusually, teams must submit video recordings of each catch. What is unusual is the subsequent, very stark stipulation: ‘All winning teams will be subject to and must pass polygraph testing. Refusal to take the test will result in disqualification … Polygraph tests will include but will not be limited to questions on angling and release procedures and species of fish.’ In Miami, the sailfish has to be earned twice over, with the rod and then with the lie-detector; and the second test of nerves is just as wracking as the first.

On the
Vinoba Prasad,
the sun began to beat down more strongly upon our boating party. Uttam steered consistent circles. I thought of breakfast; then, when the water got a little choppier, I tried not to think of breakfast. Every twenty minutes, Emil asked Uttam to slow down, slipped an electronic Fishing Buddy
depth finder into the water, and took sonar readouts of the terrain below. ‘The mackerel are in,’ Baptista said. ‘The big fish should be in by now.’

A few minutes after he said that, something bit heavily into his lure.

Few human moves suggest the rapid transformation of potential energy into kinetic energy more than that of the fisherman who has finally felt a tug on his line. Baptista stood suddenly to attention, pushed his hat back on his head to see better, and began the rocking motion that is so familiar to anglers—lean back and pull on the rod, then lean forward to hurriedly retrieve more reel. Emil and Yvan hastily pulled their lines in to avoid entangling them with Baptista’s and then started to shout incoherent encouragement. Even Uttam, who had till now kept himself coolly detached from the success or failure of this expedition, appeared to develop a degree of interest in the contest at hand, expectorating once over the side of the boat before putting his chin in his hands to watch the fight.

Many metres from the boat, the fish began to struggle for its life. It fought in one spot for a while and then began to swim furiously around the boat, swinging all the way from Baptista’s left to his right and forcing him to pivot where he stood. At that distance, there was still no way of knowing what fish it was, but its size and power were on obvious display. It was too late for Baptista to strap on his belt, so he painfully braced the end of the rod against his belly instead. The line whistled a shrill, ragged tune as it cut through the water around us.

For nearly ten minutes, Baptista and his fish continued their tug of war, but it was slowly becoming apparent that he had succeeded in working his opponent closer to the boat. Emil grabbed a big net and prepared to help pull the fish in. Baptista, sweating now from the heat and the exertion and the fever of
the hunt, paused for a moment as the fish approached the prow of the boat, and we all leaned eagerly over the edge to peer into the water. It was, quite unmistakably, a huge grouper.

With its mottled skin and bulbous mouth, the grouper is one of the more ugly residents of the ocean, looking uncannily like a boxer with a damaged face and a permanent fat lip. It is also a perfectly respectable catch for sport fishermen. While they aren’t very fast fish, they can be large and shrewd, diving powerfully into the refuge of rocks in the hope of shredding the line that holds them. Landing a grouper is a victory of brute strength, and it is ordinarily a satisfactory trophy—but not if you’ve really been after a prize like the sailfish.

Some of the spirit seemed to leak out of the
Vinoba Prasad
after the grouper was hauled on board. We made a few more revolutions around the lighthouse, and then again around another knot of rocks nearby. Yvan caught a yellowtail, but this only appeared to depress the party further.

After another hour, we headed back towards the coast to trawl the mouth of the creek. Moses had mentioned to me that sailfish sometimes enter the river system in search of food, and he had told me a story of a particularly greedy one that had swum up the River Mandovi in Goa, where it was caught by a lucky fisherman. But the Xanadu creek showed no signs of any lurking sailfish. Baptista caught two red snappers in shallower waters with minimal excitement. Yvan snagged a plastic bag.

At half past noon, we called off the great sailfish hunt. When the boat slid into position at a roughly improvised dock, hands reached out to help unload the grouper, and Kalidas squatted at the river’s edge to gut the fish immediately. Yvan and Emil began stowing the tackle in the car. Baptista stood silently for a few moments, watching Kalidas at work. Then he shook himself out of his reverie and told me: ‘They’re saying the water is still cold at the lower depths. Maybe that’s the reason the sailfish didn’t
bite.’ But he didn’t seem convinced of it himself. ‘At least the snapper should make for really good eating,’ he said, brightening just a little. In return, I could only offer him the fisherman’s eternal consolation—that the sailfish hunt would probably turn out all right next year.

I
may be wrong, but over the course of two trips to Goa, I formed the distinct impression that its milestones and signboards were doctored. Typically, I would be driving—to Candolim, let us suppose—and a board would announce it to be twenty kilometres away. So I would drive on for another ten minutes, humming along at a consistent 60 kmph, and just when I had calculated that I had driven ten kilometres, another board would pop up, bearing the taunt: ‘Candolim: 15 km.’ Then I would drive a little faster, and in another ten minutes, when I had recouped enough confidence in my mental arithmetic to be sure of seeing a single-digit reading soon, a smug milestone by the side of the road would flash by: ‘Candolim: 12 km.’ At this point, invariably, I would begin to feel like I was trapped in a real-world engineering of Zeno’s paradox, forever halving the distance to my destination but never quite getting there.

In some cases, such as my harum-scarum pelt to the airport on my second trip, to catch my flight out, this dilation of distances can prove unnerving, particularly if the ticket in your hand is a
non-refundable one. But if your flight isn’t leaving in forty minutes, or if where you’re headed is instead just your third beach of the day, these episodes of understatement could have the opposite effect. Take it easy, the signboards soothingly say, you’re not that far away. I can see how this would play into Goa’s grander scheme of things, its relentless objective to chill you out.

Goa’s is an economy of idleness—not an economy made up of idle people, but an economy that relies on the human desire to idle. To idle is to linger, and to linger is to buy more stuff, eat more stuff and do more stuff on jet-skis: Thence, the Goan economy. But putting that theory into practice is trickier than it sounds, even if, as a state, you can claim to be an idler’s paradise by virtue of being endowed with what seems from the air like roughly a million acres of beach. It is not easy to convince people—or, to be anthropologically precise, tourists—that there isn’t a better shop or a spicier chicken xacuti or a sleeker jet-ski just around the bend of the road, that they shouldn’t be hurrying themselves from sport to sport to banish their regrets. Goa has, by and large, mastered that art of persuasion, but it has had to steamroller a few victims along its determined path to the idylls of tourism.

That list of unfortunates includes fishing, an activity that has for some centuries been a staple Goan pastime, a subsistence profession as well as a flourishing local industry. It is a simple matter, nearly anywhere on the Indian coast, to turn to the person next to you and spark a conversation about fish as food. Only in Goa, however, is it as simple to talk about the act of fishing itself. As if by some vast, ordained consensus, Goans told me, time after time and in the same words: ‘Fishing is in our blood.’ They sketched for me bucolic visions of the Goan villager stepping out of her hut, her son and daughter by her side and rustic rods in their hands, to spend a quiet evening by the river. One person called fishing ‘the only activity that truly cuts across
every Goan religion and caste.’ Another described his boyhood to be of the sort that I thought existed only in Richmal Crompton books, consisting of muddy boys skipping and fighting their way to the water after school, to fish in homework-less oblivion until sunset. ‘Everybody fishes,’ I learned during one particularly effusive discussion. ‘You need to just sit and watch the complete peace with which these riverfront fishermen fish, to understand why they are so passionate about it.’

I unwittingly gave myself a chance to do that when I arrived an hour early to meet somebody for breakfast in Panaji. It was a fresh morning, the sky scrubbed clean of cloud and a breeze blowing in hesitant gusts from the direction of the ocean. With nothing else to do, I began walking the promenade beside the River Mandovi, a procession of lemon-yellow and powder-blue walls across the road to my right, and moored riverboat casinos with names like
Noah’s Ark
and
King’s Casino,
dozing after the previous night’s excesses, to my left. Just before the road began to climb uphill and turn into a flyover, I came upon a woman leaning upon the white concrete balustrade, looking abstractedly over the river. I stopped a dozen metres away and, remembering that piece of earnest advice, took up my station to watch her fish.

Watching somebody fish is very much like watching somebody stand still. This woman stood, in a white floral shirt and a beige skirt, on sandalled feet, her elbows resting on the balustrade and bearing most of her weight. She wore a fraying straw hat with a narrow brim. She appeared to have passed the age of fifty a few years earlier, but her stocky body looked powerful rather than merely thickened by age, her face was uncreased, and her hair was still a deep matte black. She held a thin wooden pole loosely in her hands, from the end of which an invisible line dropped into the water below; by her feet was a Horlicks bottle containing, I presumed, worms or other bait.

For an angler, she did not seem particularly avid about actually catching anything. Every so often, she joggled her rod, keeping her bait bouncing in the water as if for exercise, but mostly she gazed at the horizon, or off into a copse of trees on the other side of the Mandovi. Once, she changed her bait, pulling up her line, flicking a bedraggled, stringy something off the hook and into the water, and replacing it from the Horlicks bottle with what I now realized was a small hunk of dried fish. A dreamy expression had settled upon her face, so when, half an hour after I had started to watch her, the rod started to writhe in her hands, she looked down with an air of astonishment, as if a fish had swum up to her and begged to be taken home.

A little huffily, she gripped her rod between her knees, as if it were a rail-thin bronco, and began rapidly to pull up her line, hand over hand. The fish came up, and with the line still invisible in the sunlight, it appeared like it was being magically levitated out of the river. It was unidentifiable from where I stood, a flapping pale brown creature half the length of her forearm. After she slid the fish off its hook, she barely glanced at it. Instead, she cocked her arm and lobbed the fish mightily back into the river. Then, appearing annoyed at the interruption, she moodily re-baited her hook, sank it back into the river, and went back to her original stance, propped up by the balustrade. In five minutes, she had recovered her beatific smile and dreamy stare. It was as if a fish had never even nibbled at the bait she had so meticulously set out.

Danny Moses, whom I’d also pumped for information on the sailfish, is a vociferous champion of angling as a Goan pastime. ‘It’s a social thing, but it’s also a chance for us to spend some time alone with nature—that’s why we do it,’ he told me, when we first met at a coffee shop in Panaji. Moses has been fishing
for as long as he can remember, and like nearly every one of his fellow Goans, he said, he has a favourite spot for fishing alone: near the jail just off Coco Beach. ‘I like to fish as the tide goes out, and all the mullet come down, so the bigger fish like the bream and the barramundi all gather, waiting to eat.’

But in his lifetime—in less than half his lifetime, in fact—Moses has seen his average catch dwindle, even as Goa has tried to keep its climbing numbers of tourists sated with the seafood they desire. ‘For seven years, this has been a fish-starved state. So much of the fish we buy now comes to us from Karnataka and Maharashtra,’ he said. ‘Ten years ago, in this very bay‘—just opposite our chairs on Miramar Circle—‘you could put in a net and just pull out the mullet. Today, you’ll get nothing.’ Moses twisted in his chair and pointed to a girl sitting with her friends on the opposite side of the café. ‘You see her? Her dad was one of the first people to get a trawler, way back in the early 1980s. He got a whole fleet. Now he has only one boat, because the catch is that much poorer these days,’ he said. ‘People have to realize, within themselves, what they stand to lose. I don’t want to even imagine a world where my son will not see a single salmon in the river. And it’s all just a classic case of greed.’

Moses held up a hand and starting ticking off, on fleshy fingers, the items in this litany of greed; after Number Three, he abandoned the count and simply began karate-chopping the air in despair. He condemned the trawlers ripping up the seabed even in the two-kilometre zone from the coastline that is reserved by law for traditional fishing. He talked, through gritted teeth, about rules broken with impunity or tripped up by corruption, of surreptitious fishing even during the two-month closed season, about the pernicious stake nets, ‘banned everywhere else in the world, but here they’re put up even in the breeding areas of the river, so that all the fry are caught.’ He dissected the perpetual state of confrontation between the trawler owners and the
ramponkas, the traditional fishermen using the artisanal rampon nets. That conflict has been seething since the 1970s, but even today, he said, every year some boats are burned. ‘This is an outright war.’

Moses was fond of tying this dystopian fishing culture to the larger loss of an older Goa—a Goa where, fifteen years ago, if somebody found a lost bag or wallet, they’d put an advertisement in the newspaper, and the money would all be there when it was claimed. There were no such advertisements in the newspapers any more, he said. The Goa of today hangs on exultantly to its lost bags and wallets; it is brasher and greedier and cockier, and often at odds with itself. ‘Earlier, we’d go inland to fish, and you know, we’d catch one fish and have a good time and come away,’ he said. I could almost see the roseate glaze on his eyeballs. ‘Now, you see kids in these four-wheel drives camping out there, with loud music and bright lights, and they’ll catch as many fish as they can. It’s making the locals in these places really angry. If they catch you now, they’ll break your rod and chase you away.’

These were largely the complaints, Moses acknowledged, of a hobbyist fisherman; the situation of the professional fishermen, he said, was far more dire. A couple of days earlier, I had met Claude Alvares, a fierce-looking environmentalist who has for years been railing against the damage that the tourism industry has wrought upon Goa’s beaches and therefore the fishing trade. (His web site, not inaccurately, identifies him as a Typewriter Guerilla.) Alvares’ office is in a hilly section of Mapusa, on the ground floor of an apartment building that also houses a grocery shop and a stationer’s. He is a busy man, forever awash in appointments; he is also prone to forgetting about those appointments when he has built up a head of conversational steam, when his white moustache has begun to quiver with the indignation he feels.

Broken down into its smallest unit, according to Alvares, the
problem was that of the Goan beach shack. Enjoyable as it can be, the culture of the beach shack is premised entirely on artificiality. The shack is an artificial way to be ‘outdoors’ on the public beach, where alcohol isn’t allowed, and to still be ‘indoors,’ where turning down alcohol can constitute a grave breach of the Goan tourists’ social code. It is an artificial way for tourists to feel like they’re being hippies in authentic Goa and communing with the waves all day, even as they know that they will drive back to their air-conditioned hotel rooms for the night. Even the poverty-stricken label of ‘shack’ sits uneasily with the Rs 120 beers and the Rs 220 fish fry being served under its thatched roof. And as the final twist, that roof itself is only as permanent as the visitors it shelters. When a tourist season ends, the shacks are dismantled and put away as easily as if they were made of Lego bricks, to be broken out again only for the next season of beach-bumming and wave-communing. It is as if, out of tourist season, there were really no cafés in Rome.

‘So all the time, in Goa, there is this pressure for more shacks on the beaches,’ Alvares said. ‘This year, for instance, there are three hundred shack licenses being given out by the government, and the funny thing is, this is despite a 25 per cent drop in the number of tourists. Next year, they’ll give out four hundred licenses. Then there are the deck beds—as many as three thousand of them on Goa’s beaches and more to come next year. The people in the government never have any brains, so there’s never any limit to this nonsense.’