I relish Samanth Subramanian’s writing. He crafts the kind
of sturdy, specific, plain-style sentence – first person, active voice, spiced
with a hint of adventure or exoticism – that I devour. “One morning earlier
this year, I took the Delhi Metro to an eastern suburb called Ghaziabad, where
the Aam Aadmi Party is headquartered,” he writes, in his absorbing "The Agitator" (The New Yorker, September
2, 2013), and I instantly think, Okay,
I’m with you. Let’s go!
Subramanian’s wonderful Following Fish
(2010), which I’ve just finished reading, brims with such lines:
One day, I accompanied Father Kattar to his home village of
Veerapandiyapattinam, a community of roughly five thousand fishermen,
forty-five minutes’ drive from Tuticorin and less than two kilometres from the temple
town of Tiruchendur.
With nothing else to do, I began walking the promenade
beside the River Mandovi, a procession of lemon-yellow and powder-blue walls
across the road to my right, and moored riverboat casinos with names like Noah’s Ark and King’s Casino, dozing after the previous night’s excesses, to my
left.
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.
Only on my final full day in Goa was I able to follow the
second part of Alvares’ advice: to walk the beach from Calangute to Candolim.
In Veraval, thanks to Bapu, I wheedled my way for hours at a
time into the yards of two master boat builders.
Following Fish is
a brilliant, delicious travelogue, an account of Subramanian’s meanderings
along “the long, magnificent necklace of India’s coastline,” exploring fish
markets (“fisherwomen with toes reddened by fish blood squat behind cutters,
little steel tubs of still-swimming catfish, and turmeric-smeared cuts of
fish”), toddy shops (“This toddy had been tapped just a couple of hours earlier
and was still so sweet that, when it was brought to our table, it managed to
attract fruit flies out of nowhere”), eateries (“Out of 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”), beaches (“The
beach had little sand to spare; the ground felt hard under my feet, not as if
the sand had been packed by water but as if there were brick or clay just
beneath”), and boat-building yards (“Here, a boy in his late teens was dipping
strands of braided cotton into a mix of oil and resin, and then inserting the
strands into the crevices between the planks with the help of a chisel and a
mallet, pounding them into place until the crevices were full”).
My favorite chapter is “On seeking to eat as a city once
ate,” in which Subramanian describes eating a meal in an old Mumbai “lunch
home” or khanawal called Anantashram:
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.
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