Following Fish: Travels Around the Indian Coast by Samanth Subramanian Read Free Book Online

biometrics sat it out on the bench this year. Instead, people came to the office two or three days in advance to pick up two tokens—one for the fish counter, and one thatallotted them to a specific, one-hour window of time. Then they walked away planning to come early anyway. ‘You know, just in case,’ one man said.
    Sitting next to the token-dispensing desk, I began to detect, in Harinath’s prospective patients, the same hesitant hope that I’d seen in my grandfather’s visitors many years ago. A number of them asked: ‘Does this really work?’ and the beleaguered Bartronics lady was forced to say that she was just giving out the tokens. Some scrutinized the token intently, as if it held some clue to their prospects. A few hung around, after they’d pocketed their tokens, to look at the others who came after them, as if the appearance of their fellow ward-mates would give them a better idea of this unorthodox hospital.
    One middle-aged man had flown from Montreal to be at Hyderabad during the treatment. ‘My lungs operate at about 38 per cent capacity. I have to travel with a bag full of medication,’ he said, showing me a plastic pouch crammed with tablets, nebulisers, capsules and a syringe. He looked in the bloom of health, but he said he’d spent his life trying medications of various provenances. ‘I can’t even travel alone; I need a friend with me all the time.’ He’d read about the Bathini Goud remedy on the internet. ‘Right about now, I’m willing to try anything.’
    Amarendra Kumar, an automobile dealer from Bihar, came with his wife, both looking to be able to breathe freely again. He had arrived in Hyderabad the previous morning, mistakenly believing that the treatment would start the day I met them. ‘I had booked my return tickets for tomorrow afternoon’s train,’ he said, worried. ‘Now I’ll have to cancel and rebook for Sunday.’
    The most uncertain visitors of the afternoon were a Jain family of four. They entered together and stood next to me, silently watching the tokens change hands. Then the father tapped me on the shoulder and asked: ‘Does it work better with the fish?’
    ‘It’s supposed to,’ I told him. ‘There’s a vegetarian version, but the fish is said to be more effective.’
    He stepped back into a moment’s silence and then said, almost to himself: ‘But we don’t eat meat.’
    More silence, and then, sensing that the family was not quite as well informed as they should have been, I said: ‘You do know that the fish is alive, don’t you?’
    This ignited a conflagration of comical reactions. The father sank deeper into worry. The mother, though, laughed almost hysterically. She then walked resolutely to the door and started to mock-retch graphically, holding her stomach, a mischievous smile playing over her face. ‘Come on,’ she’d say between heaves, ‘no fish, let’s go.’ Her older son, aged approximately ten, looked fascinated by the newly gruesome lustre to this treatment. His younger brother, who must have been six or seven, tugged at his father’s shirt, pulling him away, his face crumpling slowly in horror like a sheet of cellophane.
    The father wrestled with himself for five whole minutes. Then he stepped up to the Bartronics counter and asked for two tokens for his children. ‘Only in case the fish is needed,’ he justified to his family. But if the quest for his sons’ perfect health did win out over the tenets of his religion, who could blame him?

    Saturday evening proved to be hot, sticky and humid, the sort of weather that prompts the imagination to believe that moisture can simply be wrung out of the air. Hyderabad’s traffic, re-routed near Nampally to keep the approach to the Exhibition Grounds clear, was at its thorniest best. I entered the Grounds at half past eight for a treatment that was supposed to have begun an hour earlier. But I needn’t have worried. The Bathini Gouds, leaving Doodh Bowli with their vats of