Following Fish: Travels Around the Indian Coast (2 page)

Somebody, somewhere, must have thrown a switch at this point, because Vasanthi’s actions moved up two gears, and as she whipped between ingredients, my notes began to get scratchier and scratchier. For a baked dish of mint hilsa, she salted one fillet, mixed some mint chutney with what must have been curd (although my scribbles say ‘crud’), mustard oil and desiccated coconut, and marinated the fish in the mixture for ten minutes. She popped the covered plate into a microwave set for eight minutes, power-napped for three seconds, and then turned to the shorshe ilish.

Even on warp speed, Vasanthi made the best shorshe ilish I ate in all my days in Kolkata, days that were so full of shorshe ilish that they now seem to meld together in memory into one bright yellow, mustardy, sinus-rattling streak. ‘To make the mustard paste ahead of time, you soak black and yellow mustard in water, with chillies, for half an hour, and you grind that into a paste. Not too fine, just grainy,’ she said. To that paste, she added curd, turmeric, salt and lemon. ‘Add that immediately after grinding,’ she warned sternly, somehow sensing that I was
exactly the sort of person to dally with a curd-lemon-turmeric mixture in my hand. ‘Delay it even by a few seconds, and the paste turns bitter.’

In a wok, she heated mustard oil and then added, in succession, the mustard paste, water, slices of halved green chillies, salt, quartered tomatoes, and finally, two curry cuts of the hilsa. While the shorshe ilish slowly simmered its way to completion, Vasanthi rolled two other cuts of the fish in the mustard paste and allowed them to marinate. When they were ready, she wrapped them in banana leaves and let them steam in a colander for twenty minutes, like two fat gentlemen, draped in Turkish towels, sweating in a sauna. ‘This is ilish paturi, a very popular, very classical dish,’ she said. The fish were barely in the colander, and she was already tracing patterns on the cutting-board with her knife, itching to move on.

Where Vasanthi really came into her own was in deboning hilsa fillets, a practice that has become popular only in the recent past, to tempt inept non-Bengalis who cannot sieve bones in their mouths. Laying the steamed, softened, mint-crusted fillet flat, she cut it into four long quarters. Then, pressing down hard with her knife, she moved an entire quarter of meat off its skeleton. This is a tricky maneuver; you can take away too little flesh and leave much of the hilsa still sitting on its bones, or you can scrape too hard and take dozens of little thorn-bones out with the flesh. Vasanthi wielded her knife with the delicacy of an archaeologist dusting skeletal remains, careful to leave behind nothing but bone.

The final act was also the most straightforward. Firing up another burner with a loud ‘whooooomph,’ Vasanthi set on it a non-stick pan laced liberally with mustard oil. Into that went two cuts of hilsa, dusted with just salt and turmeric, to be fried until a golden-brown sheath crept across the surface of the fish. The fish she spooned out, and the oil she set aside. The hilsa is a naturally fatty fish, and in a wok, the heat forces its oils out, to
mix 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 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 at
Howrah 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 a
smoky-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 was young, the Padma was deeper, and there were more fish to be had,’ he said. Then, as if to ensure some sort of evenhandedness, he added: ‘The Ganga doesn’t have as many fish now either. The silting and the pollution, you see. The fish come into the river, and they begin to die. And the fish you do catch, they’re smaller now. They’re not as good to eat either.’

The deterioration of the hilsa was a lament I heard often. No food, of course, is ever as good as it was in one’s childhood, but the increasingly muddied and polluted Ganga, and the unchecked overfishing that was providing me with hilsa even in January, have had their effect. ‘Earlier, the fish would swim as far as seventy kilometres upriver,’ one Howrah fish-seller told me. ‘Now they barely make it twenty kilometres inland from the sea.’ Even looking at the River Hooghly is instructional. At Kolkata, of course, it looks like a densely polluted, choked river, but even from Kolaghat, across and up the river in the district of East Medinipur, the Hooghly resembles a static ribbon of silt solution. The fishermen of Kolaghat trawl a tributary, the
Rupnarayan, which looks just as muddy, just as hostile to aquatic life.