Following Fish: Travels Around the Indian Coast Read Free Page A

oils out, tomix with the mustard oil. The hilsa-enhanced mustard oil is worth saving, to flavour food or even to mix simply with rice, as many Bengalis do.
    Vasanthi’s plump hilsa, on the day, were from Bangladesh, and what they seemed to lack in sharp natural flavour, they made up for in texture. The paturi, unwrapped like a Christmas gift, flaked away in soft layers, its creamy flesh touched with the mustard and tempered by the damp, green taste of the banana leaf. The fried cuts of hilsa, under their crisp swagger, were softies at heart, fresh and warm. I may have done the shorshe ilish some injustice, though. Entranced by its grainy, wicked gravy, I neglected to take any more than passing bites of the fish, although its oils—essence de hilsa—had swept like a marauding army through the gravy anyway.
    My vigilance lulled by a gourmandizing stupor, I could thus turn to the deboned mint hilsa, knowing that even the most careless of bites wouldn’t result in bleeding gums or a lacerated tongue. But after many days of eating hilsa for breakfast, lunch and dinner, my bone-seeking sense seemed to remain automatically alert, and that turned out to be a blessing. In one—and only one—mouthful of hilsa, I bit down gently and landed upon a mass of thorns in the middle of the flesh, emerging from the fish in deadly little tendrils.
    I suspended chewing and pondered the situation. Then I began to work at the mouthful of fish with my tongue, holding the bones steady against my teeth or the roof of my mouth and coaxing hilsa off them in patient little moves. To an observer, I must have resembled a cow meditatively considering its cud. I was left, at the end of my exertions, with just a jumbled clutch of bones, which I neatly deposited to one side of my plate. I ate the rest of my mint hilsa in a glow of satisfaction. It was one of the proudest moments of my life.

    The Park hotel gets much of its hilsa, and other fish, from the Howrah wholesale market, and I had been hoodwinked into believing that the action there began at 3 a.m. When I arrived at five past three on a cold morning, though, there was exactly one truck in situ, its plastic crates and wicker baskets of ice-fraught fish being unloaded onto long handcarts or onto makeshift cushions of folded cloth atop the heads of willing porters. The next truck would not arrive until 4 a.m., and at that morning’s temperature, an hour was a long time to stand around in open-toed sandals.
    The Howrah fish market is a labyrinth of open-fronted shops that looks forbidding when unlit. A bridge running overhead serves as a roof for some of the stalls, with divisions bricked in to separate them. The unloading happens just outside the labyrinth, by the glow of scattered sodium streetlamps, in the underpass beneath the bridge. Between 3 a.m. and 4 a.m., though, not much transpires. I eavesdropped on one loud argument, where a gentleman contended either that fish had been brought here by mistake instead of being taken to the Sealdah market, or had been taken to Sealdah by mistake instead of being brought here—I couldn’t figure out which. In my spare time, I gazed at cracked posters of a film called
AIDS and Blind Sex,
a movie that actually looked like it was promoting the virtues of both pursuits.
    Around 4 a.m., the bridge’s belly began to echo every five or six minutes with the rumble of an incoming truck, and the unloading quickened into the sort of industry that is tiring even to watch. Cartons marked ‘Fis’ would descend from the trucks, ride into the bowels of the labyrinth, emerge vacant minutes later, and would hustle back onto the beds of the trucks with a satisfying clatter. Everybody worked, so I, walking around aimlessly with a notebook, was a noticeable aberration in the scheme of things. Porters started to stop and ask, curiously:‘
Maal aapka hai
?’ Were the goods mine? At first I demurred, not wanting to be mistaken for a fish baron. But this seemed to confound