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

Harinath’s feet. Others would tell him, like children proudly reporting their mathematics scores to their parents, that they were ‘75 per cent better’ or even ‘98 per cent better,’ as if they were able to keenly calibrate even a 2 per cent remainder of their asthma.
    But the unmistakable soundtrack to the Bathini Goud marathon cure was that of crying and retching. The cure was hardest on the young—the young fish, of course, but also the young children. Parents would lift their children bodily, holding them and keeping their mouths open. Harinath would slip the murrel fish out of its plastic sac, pinch its neck to open its mouth, and insert a dose of medicine. Then, with two long and dextrous fingers, he would stick the fish all the way at the back of the throat, snap the child’s jaw shut, and squeeze the nose, forcing the child to gulp and swallow.
    Not surprisingly, the results were often disastrous. One girl, who must have been twelve or thirteen, attempted to throw up as soon as she was let go; her father, equally adamant, tried to force her mouth shut. Other children, even young infants, swallowed their fish perfectly, but they instantly began wailing in horror, as if instinct, or the enforced feel of the whole exercise, had told them that something unnatural had just happened. One boy shouted in alarm: ‘It’s in my throat, ma, I can still feel it!’ His mother began rubbing down his gullet, hoping to encourage the fish to complete the journey to its doom.
    The adults didn’t always fare better. Many, it is true, took approximately two seconds to swallow and move on. In a feat of physiological control, one composed gentleman was even able to indicate, to his minder, that his fish had gone down the wrong length of piping, bring it back up into his mouth, and then swiftly re-ingest it. But one woman, with the fish in her throat, thumped herself on her chest and brought it back out. Harinath picked it up off the coir matting on the floor, checkedif it was still alive, swirled it around in a bucket of chlorine water, and tried again.
    And then, suddenly, it was my turn.
    The most disconcerting moment of the entire process was a few seconds of stasis, when Harinath held the fish up, medicine gleaming in its mouth, and I stood with my mouth open as if it were the Eucharist wafer, dimly aware that I could still twist away and run. Then the stasis broke, and Harinath’s hand, full of fish, was in my mouth.
    From all the first-hand observation that evening, I must have somehow learned how to swallow right, because the fish went down, tail first, much easier than I expected. It was slippery and small, and although I felt an initial tickle, I think it had expired by the time it was a third of the way down my throat. Right away, though, I realized that it wasn’t the fish that was making people retch; it was the asafoetida, so strong and vicious that tears started in your eyes in that very first second. Then, as it slid down, it burned such a trail of further pungency down your throat that your hair stood on end and your fingers clenched involuntarily. Eyes still streaming, I grabbed at a bottle of water behind Harinath, although somehow, my mind had inscrutably fixed on its own preferred solution to the asafoetida’s pungency: fresh-cut mangoes.
    For a few further hours into the night, I sat behind Harinath and watched the crowds. I watched many, many people come right up to Harinath, their nerve screwed up, fully aware of what lay before them—and then they backed out, hope and false courage defeated by the immediate reality. As they walked away, they seemed puzzled and distressed, not so much by what they’d narrowly avoided as by their sudden loss of faith. It was almost as if they had desperately wanted to believe but had been finally let down by their closest accomplice: their own body.
    I watched Harinath too. He rested only in snatches of a few minutes, and he was almost always talking and enquiring