Following Fish: Travels Around the Indian Coast Read Online Free PDF Page A

insects beyond the routine household menagerie of mosquitoes and ants ever bit me. But in my fierce attacks of childhood asthma, my grandfather’s art met its match. Time and again, I would sit in front of him, wheezing and heaving, crumpled from lack of breath, while he concentrated ever harder and traced ever more purposefully. In my schoolbag, as regularly present as the lunch it accompanied, would be a neat newspaper sachet of
vibhuthi,
to be taken during breaks. I came to know its taste the way a caffeine addict knows his espresso.
    But it did no good. An attack would wane, but the next dusty place, or the next change of season, or the next drink of cold water would set it flaring again. Secretly, and the fable of the sceptical scientist notwithstanding, I always wondered if it was because I just didn’t believe hard enough—if, in faith healing, it was as important for the healed to have faith as for the healer.

    Eventually, as I grew older, my asthma started to make only sporadic appearances, as if it had been worn out by my parents’ infinite energy and their kitchen-sink approach to treatment. We tried, almost literally, everything—nebulisers and tablets, of course, but also yoga, exercise, homeopathy, variously controlled diets, an ice-cream-free existence, and Ayurveda. I ate boiled eggs for months on end because one doctor said it would help strengthen my constitution. Another time, I was told to perform the yogic trick of pouring warm salt water into one nostril, having it flush the respiratory passages, and return out of the other nostril. I was seven or eight years old, so unsurprisingly, I did it wrong and snorted myself full of the solution. Sometimes, duringbumpy car rides or airplane turbulence, I imagine I can still feel the saline sloshing around inside my lungs.
    The one thing I did not try, the one nostrum that seemed too exotic even for my parents, was the famous ‘fish treatment’ of Hyderabad, involving the wilful ingestion of a live murrel fingerling that had been stuffed to its gills with an unknown medicine. Perhaps because it was the sole remedy that we resisted, it took on the romance of untold promise; European colonists in Africa, training their gaze on the mysteries of the only unexplored continent, must have felt the same way.
    But the fish treatment was also so visibly and glamorously an Event, far more than boiled eggs and nasal lavage. The bronchially disadvantaged would flock to Hyderabad every summer for this free treatment, often brought in from diverse corners of India on special trains run just for the purpose. As they queued patiently, they would appear on television news reports, which never seemed to tire of the spectacle. The crowds were estimated in the hundreds of thousands, and the medicine itself was said to date back to the mid-nineteenth century. The sheer scale of all this seemed, to my mind, to be entirely appropriate. After all, the treatment of something as elemental as asthma, which robs you of the very breath of life, should be epic and enigmatic and miraculously curative.
    The history of this marathon of healing—or, at least, the history as explained by the Bathini Goud family, which keeps its proprietary treatment a closely held secret—dates back to 1845. In that year, the life of one Veeranna Goud changed dramatically. Till then, he had been a toddy tapper by caste and profession, but he was one of Andhra Pradesh’s more philanthropic toddy tappers. ‘He gave away a third of whatever he earned to the poor, no matter how much or how little it was,’ Bathini Harinath Goud told me. ‘That’s just the type of man he was.’
    When I met him, Harinath was sixty-eight and rake-thin, hiswhite beard matched by equally white, very fierce tufts of hair sprouting from his ears. He’d been participating in his family’s annual ritual for sixty-three years.’ Veeranna Goud was my greatgrandfather. He had one son, Shivram, who also had only one son,