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

Shankar,’ Harinath said. Shankar, though, was more prolific; he had five sons and four daughters. ‘Between us, we’ve been conducting this treatment since our father passed away in 1962.’
    In 1845, that annus mirabilis of Veeranna Goud, a sage from the Himalayas had descended into the plains and was wandering India. It was the start of the monsoon, and when Veeranna encountered him, the sage was wet, hungry and homeless. ‘Veeranna fed and clothed him—expecting, of course, nothing in return,’ Harinath said. ‘The sage saw that he wouldn’t commercialize this gift, that he would use it to help his fellow man. So he taught him the art of making this medicine.’
    The recipe for this medicine has not left the Goud family since; in fact, even Goud daughters never learn it because, Harinath said, ‘after all, when they get married, they go into another family.’ All that’s known is that it is a lumpy paste, in a vivid shade of yellow. The paste is rolled into a ball, stuffed into the mouth of a month-old, two-inch-long murrel fish, which is in turn stuffed into the waiting gullet of a patient, to be swallowed intact. ‘As the fish wriggles on its way down, it helps disperse the medicine more effectively,’ one pseudo-scientific argument in favour of the treatment goes, conveniently forgetting that asthma plagues the bronchial tubes, not the oesophagus.
    Two days before Mrigashira Karthi—the day that signifies the advent of the monsoon every year, and the day on which the Gouds spend twenty-four straight hours thrusting fish down throats—Harinath’s house in Hyderabad’s Kawadiguda section was surprisingly peaceful. Cell phones were ringing more insistently than usual, there were stacks of pink and blue flyers on nearly every available surface, and squadrons of relatives,descended upon Hyderabad to help with the cure, paraded past us on their way in or out. But I’d expected secrecy and urgency, murmurs of incantations, perhaps even the odd sniff of brewing medicine—a Witches’ Sabbath of activity. Instead, I had Harinath relaxing on a sofa, and two grandchildren, fresh out of their baths, anointing themselves liberally with Nycil talcum powder in front of a mirror.
    Harinath handed me one of the flyers that would be distributed on the day of the treatment. In Telugu, English and Hindi, the flyers listed a strict diet, consisting of exactly twenty-seven items, which had to be followed for forty-five days after the treatment. It was an unusual menu. It included old rice and dried mango pieces but also goat meat; it recommended idlis but not chutney; it painstakingly listed, as individual items, even spices like turmeric, salt and pepper. Oddest of all was Item No. 27, which read like a bizarre chemistry experiment: ‘Heat an iron rod. Soak it in cow’s buttermilk and drink it.’
    ‘And you have to take the medicine as well, every fifteen days during that forty-five-day period, in the form of little pellets,’ Harinath said. ‘And then come back for the fish treatment for the next two years.’ Although these days, he added vaguely, because of all the fertilizer in the food and the pollution in the air, it could even take three or four years for the treatment to dig its feet in. At that, the bubble of my boyhood vision quivered violently. This sounded nothing like epic or enigmatic or miraculously curative. Why, it even had pellet-sized dosages of medicine! It may as well have been homeopathy!

    As he spoke, Harinath exhibited a strange verbal tic that puzzled me at first. He talked easily and at length, in almost pre-crafted sentences, about his family’s history, but every time he said the word ‘dawai’—‘treatment’ or ‘medicine’—he stumbled, caughthimself, and replaced it with the word ‘prasadam.’ Selectively and specifically, he was bowdlerizing his own speech.
    Behind that tic, I was to discover, lay a decade-long back-story of rising opposition in Hyderabad to the Goud fish