Following Fish: Travels Around the Indian Coast (8 page)

Captain J. Berchmans Motha

Motha’s sentiment formed a part of a curious ambivalence towards the Church that I grew to sense in the Paravas. Their belief in the Catholic faith still runs strong, and a deep
knowledge of their Church’s history is surprisingly common, as if it had been carried and spread by the region’s gigantic flies. When I sat in that staff room in Manapadu, a group of teachers of assorted middle-school subjects debated the chronology and geography of Xavier’s travels with the zeal and knowledge of university academics. When I sat in Fernando’s mobile recharge shop, he pulled open a drawer and shyly showed me a clutch of notebooks, with page after page of neatly written notes on the history of Tuticorin. I can think of no other mobile recharge shop to offer that sort of service.

But regularly, the Paravas’ pride in their past reaches further back, past the advent of the Portuguese, and then it appears laced with regret or anger at the loss of so much heritage. This was true not only of Motha, who had lost something tangible, but of a man like Joe D’Cruz, a Chennai-based author and a successful businessman, and such a human dynamo that it is impossible to sit still next to him. D’Cruz was my gateway into Tuticorin’s Parava community; he is so well known there that Fernando lubricated many of my interviews by simply saying: ‘Joe sent him.’ In our very first conversation, D’Cruz had foreshadowed my meeting with Motha. ‘The Church has destroyed the lineage of leadership in Tuticorin. It just used the fishermen to spread Christianity,’ he said, as we swung one evening between his house and his office in his car, his BlackBerry emitting occasional, soft chirrups of light. ‘My blood is Hindu—it has been for years. Only my name is Christian. Why should I take on an alien culture or religion when my own is so glorious?’

Motha claimed that some of the Church’s stated history was sheer fabrication. ‘You must have seen the signboard saying that Our Lady of the Snows was consecrated in 1582?’ he asked. I nodded. ‘Well, it wasn’t. The original church was right here, on Kerecope Street, in front of this house,’ he said. ‘On that site was a lodge for foreign missionaries and travellers. The present
church was built only in 1712, but in their history, they have just fused the two buildings.’ Motha also insisted that the Church denied the authenticity of one of its relics—a strand of the Virgin Mary’s hair—and, in search of proof, stalked away into another room to rummage among some documents. Fernando and I sat very still and looked at each other. Somewhere in the house, a MIDI version of
Silent Night
was playing.

After a few minutes, Motha returned with an armload of files, each sated with thick sheaves of documents. These were letters in English or Tamil or Portuguese, between his ancestors and Portuguese regents or officials of the Church, the papers all jaundiced with age, their edges cracked and curled like untended toenails. Some of these letters Motha had, in the manner of an earnest schoolboy, copied painstakingly onto fresh sheets of ledger paper. ‘See here now. This is the certificate of authenticity for that strand of hair, from 1789,’ he said, pointing to a letter from a Portuguese Church official. It was nearly falling apart. ‘There are even older papers in that room, but they would crumble into a powder with a single touch.’

Even more nefarious motives, according to Motha, were afoot. In the church, he said, his voice dropping a little, there was a box full of the jewels with which the idol of Our Lady of the Snows was decked out for the Pon Ther procession. ‘Traditionally, there have been two keys for that box, one kept with the jati thalaivan and one kept with the parish priest,’ Motha said. ‘But now they’re even trying to take that key away from me.’ His face clouded with anger. ‘The jati thalaivan could hold his own against the Church even until the nineteenth century. But after that, it all just slipped away.’

Motha, a widower, has two daughters, one living in Chennai and one right down the street from him. His only son is a geologist in Australia, and Motha said he was unlikely to return to Tuticorin. If that proves to be the case, Motha will be the
last of a grand, centuries-long line of local leaders, rubbed out partly by design but partly also by the inexorable forward march of history. When I understood that, I could understand better his sadness of seeing a noble family tradition wither away on his watch, and his frustration of being able to do nothing about it.

Puzzlingly, throughout the Portuguese presence on this stretch of Tamil Nadu, its cuisine remained as untouched as its religion stood transformed. I came across no Portuguese influences in my meals in Tuticorin and its neighbouring villages, but, thinking I’d missed something or simply eaten in all the wrong places, I later sought the wisdom of Jacob Aruni, a food consultant and researcher in Chennai. ‘It’s true, and it’s a mystery,’ Aruni said. ‘In Goa, for instance, the use of cinnamon and garlic and wine in food caught on from the Portuguese. But in the coastal area around Tuticorin, they still use salt, tamarind and coconut more dominantly—the ingredients they were using even before the Portuguese arrived.’

Aruni is a queer fish. After graduating with a Bachelor’s in Physics, he leaped sideways into the wholly unrelated craft of cooking. He was a chef in the industry for exactly one year when he realized that he would rather be teaching; he was a teacher at a catering college for exactly six years when he realized that he would rather be researching. ‘My students would bring their lunch boxes, and I’d always be interested in eating that food, in finding out how it was made, and what people still made at home,’ he said. ‘So I started researching the cuisines of Tamil Nadu.’ Travelling from village to village and invading kitchens with his boundless curiosity, Aruni first dredged out forgotten recipes of the Kongunad region, around Coimbatore, and of Nanjil Nadu, running from Madurai to Kanyakumari. Then, in
a streak of culinary archaeology, he resurrected some ancient dishes from the Sangam Era, dug up a strain of cooking that used flowers as primary ingredients, and polished his knowledge of Ayurveda-balanced food.

It was during a trip to Muttom, in the Kanyakumari district, that Aruni first came across a version of ‘fish
podi,’
a dried fish powder that he would later find, in other age-old variations, in Nagapattinam, in Velankani and near Tuticorin—‘in fact, in every single fisherman’s house I ever visited in Tamil Nadu.’ The
podi,
Aruni insisted, was a singularly Tamil preparation. ‘It isn’t there in Andhra Pradesh or Kerala or anywhere else. It’s ideal for fishing families, really. It doesn’t spoil, because it has been dried, and it can use whatever fish they have left over, even tiny prawns that they’d never be able to sell. With it, you just need hot, steamed rice, and you have a meal.’

Aruni described the oldest, most basic version of the
podi
for me. First the fish—any fish—was cubed and fried. Then grated coconut, peppercorns, cumin, curry leaves and raw rice were individually roasted and dried out in the sun. In the final step, the fried fish and the roasted ingredients were combined and pulverised. ‘Some versions use coriander seeds, and others use fried tamarind,’ Aruni said. ‘The powder keeps for ages. I always have three large jars of these powders on hand at home.’

A couple of days later, Aruni scooped out a hefty portion of his dried mackerel
podi
and sent it to me in a plastic tub. The
podi
looked like powdery jaggery, speckled white in places with coconut, and it had a deep, spicy aroma, shot through with the strong presence of fish. Tasted raw, it races to the back of your throat and proceeds to set your tonsils on fire, but with rice and a liberal spoon of ghee, it settles down and thereafter only singes your mouth with occasional bursts of playful fieriness. But Aruni had selected his mackerel well: They were mackerel with character, bursting out of their envelope of spice like strong actors
out of a crowded script. For at least two days, the room where I opened Aruni’s tub smelled faintly and deliciously of spiced, fried fish. If this was what the good fishermen of Manapadu offered Francis Xavier in his seaside grotto—and they very well may have—I can understand why he decided to stay.

One day, I accompanied Father Kattar to Veerapandiyapattinam, his home village of roughly five thousand fishermen, forty-five minutes’ drive from Tuticorin and less than two kilometres from the temple town of Tiruchendur. It was the feast day of St. Thomas, Veerapandiyapattinam’s patron saint, and Kattar had been invited to participate in the evening’s Mass. ‘You know, Xavier once wrote to Rome that the residents of Veerapandiyapattinam were practitioners of sorcery,’ Kattar said with a smile. Nearly everybody in the village is a Catholic now, and the focus of the town is the Gothic-styled Church of St. Thomas, dating back to 1886. The church is a long building with a bright white, vaulted ceiling and an inexplicable, cement-coloured finish, as if it were forever young, forever on the verge of being completed.

In the hour before Mass began, Kattar went to visit his mother, and Fernando took me to Father Stephen Gomez, a loose-limbed, thoughtful, middle-aged priest who is the director of the Valampurinatham Institute for Research in Society and Religion, located barely a kilometre from the Church of St. Thomas. Gomez listened politely to Fernando’s introduction (which included the statutory mention of Joe D’Cruz) and to my expressed interest in the religious history of the Parava community. ‘Yes, it’s an interesting subject,’ he said finally. Gomez was the only person to articulate what I’d found so fascinating about the Paravas: ‘The community has, in a way, fossilised in the state that it was four hundred years ago.’ He waved an arm vaguely to his right. ‘That church is the centre of their daily lives,’
he said. ‘Their houses are built around it, and their lives revolve around it.’

The glowing twilight slowly dwindled into a pensive dusk, and the front steps of the Church of St. Thomas came alive with harsh tube lights and the hubbub of its parishioners’ conversation. I stood for a while just outside the church, with a group of men that had arrived too late for seats within. Later, I went up to the balcony where, in front of a circular mural of Christ and his disciples, I watched the choir, led by a short organist with jasmine flowers in her hair, her electronic keyboard rattling off many of the same disco classics I heard at Our Lady of the Snows. Looking down from that balcony, I could see the entire length of the church, the multicoloured saris and shirts of the congregation looking like the individual panels of a very big work of stained glass.

The service was first led by a woman, and half an hour into the proceedings, when she issued an instruction, many of the men in her audience stood up and slipped on shoulder vestments, either in red or blue. (They also had circular headbands, which to a man they delayed putting on until the last possible minute, keeping them tucked under their arms.) ‘These are the two sabhas,’ Fernando told me. Then, searching for the right English word, he said: ‘They are the groups of acolytes.’ And this proved to be the case: At some point, they took up a cross and banners and candles and moved in a procession into the verandah of the church, where we were already standing. Near us, an orchestra of pipes and drums burst into song.