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

the porters even more, so I opted for a curt half-nod that left the matter open to interpretation.
    At half past four, the market began to come to life in a concentric fashion, first awakening in the centre and then radiating outwards in waves of activity. Fish began to go both ways, now leaving in small retail batches as well. Owners opening up their stalls for the morning would rise and stretch, scratch, and then look over their standing orders of fish that had been deposited while they were still asleep. A grumble was almost obligatory: ‘He’s delivered more ice than fish in this crate, the rascal,’ or ‘I can’t even see these fish, they’re so small.’ They would holler for the boy selling tea, wrap a ceremonial agarbatti around the rim of their balance pans to consecrate the day’s sale, and only then scout the growing crowd for prospective buyers.
    Howrah was clearly a seller’s market. The vendors laid out baskets of white-bellied pomfret, catla at least the size of adolescent sharks, Bangladeshi hilsa on ice, and little sharks. When crates of shrimp arrived, they were tipped onto the muddy floor of the market and shovelled into weighing pans for sale. There was next to no negotiation. A buyer sidled up, wrapped in a muffler and clutching a standard-issue striped cloth or plastic bag. The vendor barked out his day’s prices as a statement and then lay in wait, like a spider in its web, watching his prey engage in an internal debate. He could take it, or he could leave it; when he left it, the vendor indifferently watched him walk away, and then turned to bark at the next internal debater.
    Wandering from stall to stall, I could put my hilsa education to test. Every single specimen was soft and plump, with the telltale streak of pink across its underbelly; they were all from Bangladesh, having ridden trucks through the night to arrive atHowrah from Petrapole. They were also the pride of every stall’s exhibit, placed front and centre on deep beds of ice. ‘They’re fantastic hilsa,’ one vendor told me, although I doubt he would have told me differently even if they’d been laced with arsenic. He then asked me if I owned a fish shop. I reprised my trusty half-nod and moved on.

    Hilsa—always a fish stall’s star turn
    Dawn broke at twenty minutes to six, and some moments later, the first woman walked into the market. By then, every stall had opened, and the market was an orchestra of sound: the sotto scrape of crates being dragged, the fortissimo yodel of fish prices, the cymbal-crashes of balance pans, the persistent notes of conversation that stayed in the background like second or third violins, and the occasional tuba-like burst of the horn of a truck waiting to be unloaded. By half past six, though, that overture had given way to the rest of the concert, as Kolkata awoke and the noise of traffic washed over the market, as it would until nightfall and beyond.

    Despite the pessimism of the Bengali classicists, I managed to eat inordinate amounts of hilsa in Kolkata. At the upscale Oh! Calcutta, I ordered my first boneless hilsa, smothered with asmoky-sweet sauce that failed spectacularly in masking the aggressive, dense taste of hilsa fat. On Mirza Ghalib Road, in New Market, I encountered my first hilsa egg in a dish of shorshe ilish. It looked, at first glance, vaguely like a kidney. The ‘egg’ was really a fused mass of thousands of little eggs, compact and veined with slender black lines. It tasted chewy on the tongue, crumbling into granules with every bite. Eaten thus from the hilsa, I decided that it was an acquired taste, although I could well see how Vasanthi’s fry-up with onions and green chillies would work.
    The proprietor of that establishment, Bhupen Shah, was a small, round, soft man, rather like a Padma hilsa himself. He had settled in Kolkata decades ago, but he had grown up in Bangladesh, near a point on the Padma that is reputed to yield particularly good hilsa. ‘When I