The big, bright red motorboat moored far away in the distance lapped lazily back and forth, dancing with the gradual ebb and flow of the waves that followed their invisible lunar directives. The Arabian Sea looked very calm this morning. The old man had told me earlier that the southwest monsoon winds weren’t due for two more weeks. He was sitting right beside the few logs that made up his kattumaram, which he fashioned by lashing together thick logs of light wood. Like a good fisherman, he understood how important it was to tie the logs together securely. As a young boy, he practiced until his fingers could tie and untie the knots in his sleep. Very early, he also learned why he must untie the logs after a fishing expedition and dry them in the sun. This prevents moss from forming on the logs. Slippery logs are dangerous in the sea, especially when a fisherman is hauling in a net full of fish. Or when the sea is rough. Right now, he was squatting next to his drying logs, busy patching in a couple of tears in his tired-looking net.
He had told me that he was a prawn-catcher by tradition and birthright: his father, his grandfather, his great-grandfather and others before them had all fished the depths of the Arabian Sea for chemmeen.
He knew no other aquatic life form better than the Heterocarpus gibbosus or the deep-sea prawn—from long years of sailing in huge catamarans with hardy fishing crews, he knew the best spots to find them. He could predict their seasonal movements as the monsoon blew the choppy Sea inward to the peninsula.
“But I’m old now,” he said as he threaded a long needle with twine. “I cannot battle the tempests alone anymore. My sons, they never wanted to do this work—it is beneath them, they say. So I do what I can do on my own, but even the bravest fisherman of the Malabar coast won’t dare go after chemmeen without a crew in a strong catamaran.”
“What do your sons do?”
“Oh, one of them is a local trade union leader, while the younger one—the smarter one, if you ask me—has gone to work in the Persian Gulf. He works at the Abu Dhabi airport. He makes good money, I guess—keeps writing back that next time around, he’ll come and buy me a fancy catamaran with a motor and everything. Ha ha ha, tell me, why would a simple old fisherman like me need a kattumaram with an engine?”
His skin was the shiny black of lignite from the Neyveli mines in Tamil Nadu. The wrinkles in his face were deep crevasses that formed natural pathways for the sweat from his forehead to trickle through, creating natural deltas on his face. His back was slightly bent with age, but his body still retained the strength and nimbleness of his youth. With the net spread out over his varicose-veined legs, his wizened yet deft hands quickly went about their work.
We set out as the sun approached its zenith and a mild zephyr blew into the swaying emerald green array of coconut palms, transporting the faint scent of our evaporated sweat along with the sharp tangy odor of the sea back to the shore. The sun was now high and bright in the nearly cloudless azure sky, the catamaran bobbing gently up and down. Not used to this weather, I was tiring very quickly out in the hot sun. The old man seemed in his element, and started singing an old fishing song in his native Malayalam, as he slowly paddled and set off:
“The wind blows from the south
Bringing salty memories of my brothers
Who thought they could brave the sea
And stare into the eye of a storm.
Meanwhile,
My heartthrob waits at the shore’s edge
Scanning the horizon, anxious for a sign
That her loved one has made it back safe
From the bosom of the sea into hers.”
As the catamaran skimmed along over the tepid waters under the old man’s gentle urging, I lay down inside the canoe with a wet coarse linen towel placed over my eyes as a sunshield. I dozed off before we even lost sight of land. I woke up with a start when the old man started chanting some incantations to propitiate his sea gods who would ensure him a good catch before he cast his nets. I laughed and mockingly asked him, “Was that a prayer to Poseidon or to Brahma?” He said, “I’m just a foolish, illiterate fisherman, what do I know of all that? That is for college-educated smartasses like you to figure out. I pray, like I do every time I sail, to my Amma, the sea, to take care of me. Rest I leave in Krishna’s able hands.”
He stood up to cast his nets without seeming to affect the balance of the boat at all, and then sat down and brought out his little bundle of beedis. He offered me one and in response, I just brought out my pack of Gold Flake Kings and lit up. The old man didn’t light up—instead I watched him as he carefully untied the beedi and took out the tobacco. He brought out a small pouch from the multipurpose money belt he always wore around his lungi and opened it up with deliberate, smooth movements. Deftly picking out a few buds of marijuana (which to me looked heavily encrusted with tiny white crystals), he mixed it up with a little tobacco and went about the delicate business of tying the beedi back. Then he lay back on the catamaran and lit up his joint. His aged cheeks resembled deep, uneven pits as he inhaled deep. After a couple of drags, he sighed and sank further down into the boat. A few minutes later, as he spat into his palm and stubbed his beedi out in his saliva before throwing it into the sea, he began to reminisce.
“You know, my boy, things used to be so much better before. The waters were so bountiful. Everyday used to be a great day for fishing. Now we are more likely to find shoes, plastic bags and other garbage in our nets.” He stretched his limbs and laced up his hands behind his head. He continued, “Surely, it’s a sign that Kaliyuga is upon us. Now only the giant deep sea trawlers with their big motors and scientific machines who prospect for days at a time come back with any kind of catch worth the while.”
“Then why do you keep doing it?”
“I and my ancestors know no other life. But the cycle has already been broken—neither of my sons will do this. I’m the last of my line, so to speak.”
“Well, I suppose it’s still a living,” I said, very blasé.
The old man didn’t respond. A minute passed, while he looked out towards Kanya Kumari, way out there in the middle of the horizon, where if you could see far enough, Vivekananda’s Rock marked the spot out like an ‘X’. Then he suddenly fixed a calculating stare on me, hardly looking like someone who was just getting high. Rather too sharply, he said, “My Amma weeps, for she is sad. Her honest followers have all disappeared gradually, leaving her to the mercy of faithless plunderers. Look at what they have done to her. The waters are muddy, where I could once dive 50 feet down and you could follow my progress from up here. The fish are drying up because they catch far more than what they need. And now Amma retaliates by sending terrible hurricanes and cyclone winds up the Arabian Sea and making the chemmeen harder to find with each passing season. But there is nothing I can do as a dutiful son—nothing I can do to protect her honor.” There was anger in his voice.
“But surely, you still catch enough to feed you and your family, right?”
The old man shrugged but didn’t answer; he looked away, into the water where his nets were submerged. Soon he was busy fussing with the nets and trying to manipulate the canoe into a better position. As the sun began changing color and the water began reflecting its shimmering, golden-hued brilliance like tiny little pirate’s doubloons afloat on the water, he suddenly began muttering to himself and quickly started pulling the net up.
It came in easily at first, but as the net grew shorter, I perceived it was either heavy or snagged. So I got up to help. The boat lurched a bit and the old man roundly cursed at me but didn’t let go of his net. We got both our hands on it and started reeling it in. Pretty soon, the part of the net holding the catch was right next to the canoe but I still couldn’t figure out what or how big it was. “Do you always catch so many prawns, old man?” I asked. The fisherman sardonically smiled in answer, because the catch had just made contact with the side of the boat, a thumping sound like a box or something. Surprised, I leaned over to look and overbalanced and fell into the sea. The old man instantly dropped the net and jumped right in after me. Before I realized I was drowning, he had me in a vice-like grip and swam back with me to the boat in smooth, easy strokes. He made me hang on to the sides while he climbed in and then helped me clamber aboard.
After I’d finished sputtering and shivering, I realized that he was now circling the canoe around, since it had drifted some way during my accident. With a pang of guilt that overpowered my shock, I remembered that I’d inadvertently caused his day’s catch to fall back into the sea. He paddled this way and then the other and finally, with some built-in homing instinct, he stopped at a particular spot and stripped down to his loincloth. Seeing the confusion in my eyes, he explained, “I lost my net as well, which means I can’t go to work until I find it. I have to go find my net.”
He jumped in and I could hardly make out his dark, amoeboid outline in the murky waters and the gloaming sun. He came up a couple of times for air, and then went down for a long time. I began to fear the worst, worrying more about the fact that I didn’t even know how to paddle right, let alone navigate back to the shore by the night sky. Just when I was giving myself another guilt trip, this time for causing a poor fisherman’s death by drowning, he came up with a piece of the net. “Hold on to this, tight as you can. I’ll go back and see if I can still find the catch.”
In a while, he came back up. He climbed back into the canoe smooth as silk and began pulling up the load. Again, it made the thump on the side, but this time I didn’t dare peek. The sun was now almost down and the light was fading fast. I could barely make out the shape of the catch—it kind of looked like one of those carboys we used to take to the government ration shop to buy kerosene in.
We quickly reeled the rest of the net in and set off back to the shore. The old man lit up another beedi, as the wind gently took us shoreward.
As he began puffing away, I asked him, “You offered me a beedi earlier. So how come you didn’t offer me a drag when you were smoking pot?”
“I had already touched it with my lips. How could I offer you something already tasted by me?”
We both fell silent. As we pulled the boat into shore, I kept trying to sneak a closer look at the catch. The old man first methodically took the nets aside and folded them before pulling the carboy out. It seemed heavy and he dragged it slowly behind him to his hut. I followed him to the hut but waited outside. After a moment, he came back out to untie his kattumaram and spread them out in anticipation of tomorrow morning’s sunshine. Then he invited me into his humble abode.
“I’m sorry I caused a problem out there,” I said, as we sipped some strong Malabar tea.
“Nothing to it. City slickers don’t have any understanding of balance. Happens all the time. But you are lucky, I must say.”
“Well, I’m relieved you didn’t lose your net or catch.”
He didn’t reply. Instead, he took a long sip of his tea and asked, “You asked me earlier why I didn’t offer you a drag from my joint. So what do you say now? Do you want to smoke?” Without waiting for an answer, he went in and brought out the black plastic carboy. “Today’s catch,” he declared, as he opened its watertight seals. He reached in and removed a couple of big red-haired buds. As he proffered them, his eyes twinkled and his mouth stretched in a wide, toothless grin. “Surprised, huh? To the few who are left out here like me, the sea out there is our Amma. It also symbolizes a way of life that has possibly gone out of fashion. We are but like the sea gulls, the scavenging survivors, seeking to balance our old ways against the new. I still go out in my canoeevery day, much like I used to with my brothers in our catamaran, but these days I fish for another kind of chemmeen. That way of life has become too old-fashioned for the people who don’t care, who only consider Amma as a means to transport their drugs and weapons in their fancy trawlers. I see them almost every time I go out fishing. I track them sometimes. And sooner or later, when I get the chance, I try and get one up on them. Like today, when I sank my net at a regular drop-off location of the trawler I’ve been keeping an eye on for a while.”
There was a knock on the door outside. Still smiling, the fisherman went to let the caller in. There was a short conversation between the two and he came back in right away, took some quantity of the stuff out from the carboy, tore a little piece of old newspaper to wrap it in and went back out. Money and bud exchanged hands, yet they stood around chatting—two poor fishermen neighbors chewing the fat on a desultory moonlit night in a little hut on the Malabar coast. Pretty soon, another man joined them and my host returned to obtain some more weed. I finished my tea, brought out my cigarette paper and began breaking up the buds he’d given me. I started rolling a joint, but couldn’t take my eyes off his smiling visage. Definitely not the old man, nor the sea I’d expected. I decided to finish smoking the joint before I made the call on my cell-phone. After all, the waiting group of gunmen wanted this old man caught real bad. They could always wait a few minutes more.
Reflections 