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

medicine, travelling under policeescort, had reached the venue only at eight o’clock, snared in the traffic rearrangements organized for their benefit.
    By the time I arrived, the little road leading to the Grounds’ Ajanta Gate was clogged with people, flanked on either side by what Narisetti had called the ‘auxiliary businesses.’ Spread out on tarpaulins on the ground or on rickety pushcarts were T-shirts, children’s shoes, toys with crazy lights and wailing sounds, and bags in cloth and plastic. Nothing, as far as I asked, was priced at more than Rs 20, and the vendors, instead of looking excited at the prospect of a twenty-four-hour sales extravaganza, were following with forlorn eyes the crowds that rushed past them.
    By 5 p.m. on that day, the Bartronics people had told me, around thirty-five thousand advance tokens had been given out, but the entrance into the Grounds was surprisingly serene. On low, broad concrete platforms, people squatted, ate, slept and played, patiently waiting for the time slot printed on their tickets. On the public address system, between bursts of shehnai music, an announcer, already hoarse, was warning people not to pinch their plastic bags of fish close. ‘The fish will suffocate. Keep the mouth of the bag open.’ And then again the same announcement followed in Hindi and Telugu.
    Walking past police and medical assistance booths, stalls for free food, stalls for water, and a slumbering fire engine, I entered the maze that led up to the dais. Under a temporary tin roof, these passages, formed by iron railings and rickety wooden staves, were designed to direct the crowds to one of thirty-three counters up front; they reminded me of immigration queues at large international airports. The token system may have mitigated the crowd within those passages, but it could do nothing about the way everybody pressed up densely near the counters. Two-thirds of the maze was empty, but near every one of the thirty-three counters, people clamoured to go first, holding up their little bags of fish like cigarette lighters at a rock concert.
    Pushing my way through the stifling heat of this mosh pit and squeezing out with a pop at the front, I found Harinath, in his yellow shawl and white dhoti, in an oasis of relative calm. ‘At my age,’ he said, ‘I can’t stand at those counters and work at that pace.’ The others worked faster, often pushing fish into five or six mouths per minute, standing in a crowd and unaware or uncaring of the growing pools of muddy water around their feet. Harinath, for his part, positioned himself one rank behind the rest of his family, near a little raised stage area where he could occasionally sit and contemplate the ocean of people in front of him.
    An old matriarch of Harinath’s family, sitting behind him and rolling out miniature cannonballs of medicine, handed me one. It was a livid yellow from the turmeric, but it smelled and tasted of almost pure asafoetida, a spice whose very root is the word ‘foetid.’ I have not been able to stomach the taste of asafoetida ever since, at a very young age, I mistook a hunk of it in my upma for a peanut, bit eagerly into it, and proceeded to throw up violently. I rolled that lump of medicine around in my fingers only for a few seconds, but I could still smell the asafoetida the next morning.
    As soon as I reached Harinath, he began collaring familiar faces from the crowd and bringing them over to make introductions. ‘This woman, she’s come from Maharashtra two times already, and her asthma is much better,’ he would say. ‘Go on! Tell him how much better your asthma is.’
    ‘Much better,’ the woman said sincerely.
    ‘See, she’s much better,’ Harinath beamed.
    Even aside from these testimonies for my benefit, people would rush up to Harinath to thank him, or to even just touch him, as if that were supplementary blessing. One man with a witheredleg somehow jettisoned his crutches to kneel and touch