Following Fish: Travels Around the Indian Coast (17 page)

Thackeray had been arrested in the late afternoon, when I was at the Mumbadevi Temple in the heart of Zaveri Bazaar, a busy labyrinth of commerce that perfectly symbolized the city to which the goddess had given her name. Even one of the entrances into the Temple’s complex has been pinched almost into non-existence by the shops to either side of it. ‘Without all this Raj Thackeray lafda, we’d have a lot more people here by now,’ a security guard said as he waved me through a beeping, utterly useless metal detector. ‘You’d have had a difficult time even squeezing through.’

Climbing the few steps up into the temple—each rendered permanently sticky underfoot by the spilled juice of hundreds of smashed coconuts—I entered a small sanctum with two individual shrines. One, containing a moon-faced idol of Annapurna flanked by two heavily mustached bronze soldiers, seemed forlorn and ignored; instead, the crowds congregated in little clumps around the other shrine, bearing a low statue of Mumbadevi, a fierce-looking, orange goddess with ten arms. The idol was more face than body: It was easier to spot, for instance, the large ornament in her left nostril than the diminutive lion she rode. Long stalks of purple and pink flowers fanned out behind her, and she wore a classic Maharashtrian green saree, which was constantly being adjusted this way or that by the bored priest sitting alongside her.

On the silvered doors of the shrine, the Koli legend of Mumbadevi has been etched in simple panels. There once lived, in these parts, a powerful giant named Mumbarak, who wangled from Brahma the boon that he would never meet his death at another’s hands. Unsurprisingly, this power went to Mumbarak’s head, and when he began to throw his considerable weight about as indestructible giants will do, the gods sought the protection of the other two members of the trinity, Vishnu and Shiva. Out of their combined power, a lion-riding Devi was born, and in a
fight that must have lasted many exciting rounds, she beat Mumbarak to within an inch of his life. Then, in an act of grace, she granted Mumbarak a final blessing: that his name should be joined with hers, to be perpetuated on Earth. The city of Mumbai, it would appear, is the fulfillment of that dying wish.

Mumbadevi may have begun as a Koli goddess, but she became, long ago, the patron deity of her entire city. Mumbaikars across communities, castes and languages visit her temple; when I was there, I heard Marathi and Hindi, but also Malayalam, Punjabi and Gujarati. Mothers brought their babies in to be blessed. Businessmen prayed for their businesses in between cell phone calls. Students with a month to go for their final exams looked to Mumbadevi for divine inspiration. A trio of grandfathers sat in front of the shrine, their lips fluttering in silent prayer.

Squatting on the floor, taking notes, I was approached by a boy who must have been five or six years old, offering me a crumbling lump of peda in his open palm. I broke off a little for myself. Then he looked curiously at my notebook and asked: ‘What are you writing? Are you doing your homework?’

‘Yes,’ I said. I wasn’t at home, but apart from that, it was a pretty good approximation.

‘Homework!’ he said, made a face of utter disgust, and ran away. Meanwhile, behind me, his mother continued to pray that her son would work hard and excel at his studies.

Of the many migrant communities who gravitated to Mumbai and who, over decades, began to regard themselves as ‘authentic Mumbaikars,’ the mill-workers of the nineteenth century are among the most prominent. The first cotton mill opened in Bombay in 1851, and demand jumped in the 1860s, when Great Britain found its access to cotton from the American south cut
off by port blockades during the American Civil War. The workers driving Bombay’s mills were largely from the city’s hinterland, particularly the Konkan districts of Ratnagiri and Sindhudurg, where agriculture was often disrupted by floods or excess rain. According to one estimate, there were over 100,000 mill workers in the city by 1892, living in the cramped tenements that we know as chawls. Most were men, who having left their wives and families behind in their villages, had to find a way to feed themselves.

This would turn out to be the genesis of a network of ‘lunch homes’ or ‘khanawals,’ Mumbai’s variant of the unfussy working-class canteens that exist, in one form or another, in every city in India. In a book called
Dharma’s Daughters,
Sara S. Mitter describes how the chawls’ residents had little facility or energy to cook, and they were certainly too impecunious to eat at regular restaurants. So housewives began to offer daily board to small batches of mill workers, covering their own family’s food expenses in the process; the mill workers would pay for their meals at the end of the month, when they got their wages. The lunch home was a hard-nosed, businesslike affair: You came in purely to eat your stolid way through a plate of food, not to socialise or dawdle over your meal. But the food was good and cheap, and as Mitter writes, it tasted of home, which helped ease ‘the anomie of a workingman’s existence.’

One of Mumbai’s best remaining khanawals, I was told, is Anantashram, which I located with considerable difficulty in the madness of Girgaum, in a small lane named Khotachiwadi. Like the other houses around it, Anantashram is an old wooden structure, and only one round signboard announces its presence. Next door is the Girgaum Catholic Club (‘Members Only’), and just opposite is a little roadside chapel. When I finally found Khotachiwadi, squarely in the middle of lunchtime, the only signs of life were two men playing cards in the back seat of a dusty,
lifeless Premier Padmini, and the constant ebb and flow of Anantashram’s patrons.

Anantashram must be close to a century old, although it is difficult to ascertain this with any exactitude when its employees wear their antipathy to questions—and to photos, and really to anything that is not a single-minded pursuit of lunch—almost as a part of their uniforms. The waiters spoke only in extreme emergencies, and the customers—all men, when I went there—followed that lead. The dishes of the day were chalked up in Marathi on a blackboard; one waiter took one look at me and loosened his lips long enough to tell me that the English version, hanging in a back room, was severely outdated. Just inside the entrance—under portraits of Hanuman, Radha and Krishna, and an old gentleman who presumably founded Anantashram—sat the manager behind a high table. As each customer entered, the manager would utter one word—‘Bangda’—and clam up again. But that was sufficient to deliver the message: The fish of the day was mackerel. In the kitchen at the back, a thin, sweating man in a vest and shorts wrestled with a long pair of tongs, flipping rotis on a griddle in the midst of so many open fires and bubbling pots that the scene looked positively infernal.

From the gloom, a waiter materialized and first brought me water in a squat, broad steel bowl, then a cool glass of the spiced kokum-coconut milk drink known as sol kadhi, and then a superb set lunch that sang of home: Rice, fresh rotis, an elongated piece of fried fish, a bowl of curry, and a piece of curried fish. The curried fish, perched on the rim of a bowl, seemed oddly aloof from its curry, as if they were an arguing couple arriving together at a party, for the sake of appearances, but determined to go their separate ways as soon as possible. The fry, hidden under the slim sheaf of rotis, was so tender that it was falling apart even as I picked it up, splitting down the middle to show off its beautiful palette: golden brown on the surface, green
around the edges where the skin showed through, and a veneer of silver under the batter, like foil on a barfi.

For the entirety of my meal, though, it was the curry that held my attention. It was, more than anything else, a thick fish soup, flavoured heartily with mackerel, smooth with coconut, yellow with turmeric, tart with kokum, and finished with a flourish of tempered mustard seeds. I asked for a second helping of the curry, to go with the perfectly cylindrical serving of rice; of the curried mackerel itself, though, I was not a fan. It seemed to have given its all to its gravy, and it now sat glistening but essence-less on the edge of my plate. When I rose after my meal, in fact, that remaining hunk of fish earned me a scolding from my waiter for not finishing my food.

Like the old khanawals, Anantashram aimed to be strictly dedicated to the act of feeding. Lunch ended not at a fixed time but when the kitchen ran out of food, and many customers sat on a bench facing the wall, ate without a flicker of expression, and left within a quarter of an hour. But some informality sporadically weakened this rigour. The regulars seemed to know each other well, and conversation was sometimes sustained for three or four minutes on end. One surreal exchange, in particular, proved so diverting that I forgot all about my bangda curry for its duration, so that I could watch and listen with my fullest concentration.

A middle-aged man in jeans and a T-shirt, with a pony tail sprouting like an exotic plant out of the back of his head, came in, nodded to a gray-bearded Sikh in a baseball cap, and took a seat beside him. He ordered. A few minutes later, his food arrived, and he began to eat. After a few bites, he turned to his neighbour.

Pony Tail: So how’s it going?

Baseball Cap: Okay, okay.

Pony Tail: In some time, anyway, we will all be naked.

This thought gave Baseball Cap considerable pause. Quite
possibly, he was not a long-term planner; perhaps he had only scheduled his day till lunch, or till the subsequent, honest post-lunch nap. Either way, it appeared that nudity had not really figured in his vision for the near future.

Baseball Cap: What?

Pony Tail, a little elliptically: Ya, it will be that hot in a couple of months, we’ll want to just be naked. Because it got so cold this winter. So the other extreme will also happen.

Baseball Cap, considerably relieved: Ah.

Pony Tail: I’ve never worn warm clothes in Bombay. But I had to this time.

Baseball Cap: Anyway, the cold is over now.

Pony Tail: Yes.

Baseball Cap: Did you try the bangda? It’s good.

Pony Tail: Mmmmm.

Baseball Cap: Bangda is healthy for you. Good for vitamins.

A spell of contented eating followed. There was to be no nudity after all.

In Mumbai, there can be considerable confusion about the precise school of cuisine to which Anantashram adheres. A quick poll revealed it to be decidedly Gomantak, although some also pointed out that popular misconception often held it to be Malvani. Both culinary influences reached Mumbai from regions to its south, further down India’s western coast; both started to dig their roots in when migrants from those regions began to arrive in large numbers in the middle of the nineteenth century. But there are certainly tangible differences, and happily, I was told that the best way to figure those out would simply be to eat my way around Mumbai over the next few days.

So I did. I ate plates and plates of thin, fried bombil, or Bombay Duck; of chewy, salty mori, or baby shark; of mackerel
fried, stuffed, curried or, one deeply unfortunate time, just boiled; of shrimp prepared in a manner that would simply be described as ‘masala.’ I drank many jugs of sol kadhi. I puttered, in taxis or on foot, through the congested lanes of Dadar and Mahim, my eyes restlessly searching for signboards bearing either of the two magic words, ‘Gomantak’ or ‘Malvani.’

At Sushegad Gomantak, a small eatery opposite the Paradise Cinema in Mahim, I received a culinary master course from its rotund, middle-aged proprietress, who bridled at the suggestion that her food could often be confused for Malvani. ‘They’re completely different,’ she snapped, and leaving her position behind the till, she joined me at my table, called over a waiter, and rattled off a chain of instructions in Marathi. He left us for five minutes, and returned with a tray of little dishes. Then he retreated to the rear of the room, to watch the proceedings with a waggle-toothed, smart-aleck grin on his face.

‘First, eat some of that,’ she said, pointing to a shallow saucer holding a few pieces of black, slightly desiccated kokum. Eaten raw, it had the sharp tang of citrus, and it left a lingering bitter aftertaste, not to mention fingers and teeth stained so thoroughly that they appeared to have been dyed in ink. ‘The taste of kokum cuts through even the smoothest coconut-based curry,’ my host said. ‘Now, we use far less kokum in our masalas and curries than Malvani cooks do.’ She paused for a second, considered that statement, and amended: ‘Except in our sol kadhi.’ Then she yelled back into the kitchen: ‘Bring me some sol kadhi.’