FISH
April 15th, 2020. Day 24 of Lockdown.
I’m walking to the fish shop. Saleem has phoned to say he’s received fresh rahu. Juhi and I have been conserving groceries for weeks, and yesterday Modi extended the lockdown till May 3rd. Juhi’s Goan-style fish curry will fortify us for two more weeks of this nightmare. At midmorning it’s already sweltering, but Covid has made the streets startlingly dust-free.
Up ahead, a line of families straggles down the main road with cloth bundles and toddlers too tired for mischief. Bangalore is opening its pores and releasing, drop by sweaty drop, its millions of migrant labourers. These families, heading towards Nagasandra, must be going home to the villages around Tumkur. Some of them look like they’ve been walking for days, from Vellore, perhaps. A bulge-bellied man in khaki stands, arms akimbo, wooden lathi protruding like a slender electroshocked tail. A masked old man approaches cautiously, mewling, brandishing before him the white flag of a doctor’s prescription. The policeman waves him on and resumes his scowling scrutiny of the migrant beeline.
It is not, I remind myself, so bad for us. Normally, Juhi and I would be working all year in different cities, meeting at Holi, Dussehra, and Christmas. Now we work across from each other at the desk all day, then relocate to the sofa for Swiggy home-delivery dinners over true-crime documentaries. For us Covid’s been a long holiday.
As I approach the fish shop, a couple in ice-blue jeans, FabIndia kurtas, and sunhats turn to glare at me. I retreat to await my turn outside the fish shop. Fingering their PM-95 masks to check for good seal, the couple scan me for signs of disease.
Outside Saleem’s shop there are no squares chalked on the pavement, six feet apart, to remind customers to socially distance while queueing. Outside this shop there’s no pavement. There’s unpaved earth and the back alleys leading to tin-roofed hovels.
The couple is inside the fish shop now, still looking over their shoulders occasionally to glare at me. They don’t know me, but I know them. Every morning in Nike Airs and high-tech tracksuits they trot their two snorting pugs beside the lake. Everyone knows Utkarsh and Nikita Sharma.
“Basa, you have?” says Utkarsh, simplifying his English – for Saleem the fish-shop-owner is illiterate – and shouting, though Saleem isn’t deaf. Maybe it’s to project through his own double-masked face that Utkarsh is shouting.
“Yes, fresh basa!” From the small cooler, Saleem produces a lissome, pink-finned beauty. Its scales glitter million-silver in a sunbeam breaking through a hole in the tin roof.
“One kilo. Bengali cut,” says Utkarsh, “no backpieces!” For the dorsal side of the fish bristles with hair-thin bones.
“Backpieces hard to eat,” Nikita explains more mildly, half to me, half to Saleem.
Saleem nods. This shop is poor but this neighbourhood has gentrified. Saleem’s intimate with the whims of the wealthy. He passes the fish to his sons at the worktable.
Eleven-year-old Hasan scales the fish with a broad-faced nail-studded wooden brush, sending scales flying towards the walls, which are brown with congealed fish blood. Then fifteen-year-old Ali guts, cleans, and slices the fish.
“Bengali cut,” repeats Utkarsh, raising himself on his toes ten feet away, keeping on this side of the invisible fence he’s built. Ali nods.
I’m standing in line outside the shop. Over Utkarsh’s shoulders, beneath the counter, I see a cat. White, with adult proportions, but stunted and emaciated. Belly-up on the grey stone floor, she plays with Saleem’s black rubber slippers.
She looks starving. How is she just lying there playing? Maybe the slippers chew like food. Or maybe they’re her pacifier, her hunger-killing opium.
This cat is new here. She must be a migrant too. Perhaps she used to haunt another, bigger fish shop. With so many shops shut, streets empty, and rubbish dumps picked clean, millions of street cats and street dogs have been displaced too.
“Shop open all day?” Nikita interrogates Khadija.
Behind the counter Khadija, Saleem’s leather-faced wife, looks up from her basket-weaving, which provides the Abduls with a side income. Alone in the family, manning the cash drawer, Khadija keeps her hands fish-free.
“No mam. Four hours only,” says Khadija. “We follow government orders.”
“Bet they do,” Utkarsh mutters to Nikita, “with nobody to enforce them!”
“You should follow government orders,” insists Nikita, speaking slowly, as if Saleem were a three-year-old. “Shop open four hours only, yes? Everyone should come morning only. Like us. Then you close. Then everyone safe!”
Khadija nods. Hands and eyes busy with her basket-weaving, she says, “After Their Majesties have transacted their business, everyone should shut up shop and go starve so that Their Majesties stay safe.” She speaks in Kannada, her tone casual as if discussing the wholesale rate for basa.
Saleem smiles affably at Utkarsh and Nikita. The Sharmas, who speak only English, smile back. Saleem disappears into the back room.
The cadaverous white cat rises, stretches, and follows. Behind half-drawn dingy curtains, four cots lie pushed together under motley, dingy bedsheets. Here, under the hot tin roof, the family eat and sleep.
An old man shuffles up the empty road. He’s wearing a kurta and dhoti which were once white. His eyes are bloodshot. His left hand unsteadily grips a crooked walking-stick. His right arm is extended palm-up. Seeing us, he frantically jingles the heap of small change on his palm.
“Why can’t they put beggars somewhere inside,” Nikita mutters, “and feed them? Look at him just walking around, spreading disease. This is why the lockdown had to be extended. Here!” She flings a coin at him from twenty feet away. The beggar is alone on the street but he crumples in a panic and gropes in the dust. He drops some of the coins he already has, then makes a fist of his hand and uses his thumb to recover the runaways. His eyes bulge with panic and he gnashes his teeth at an imaginary rival scrambling for his coins. Then he rises slowly to his feet, his knees wobbling, his mouth working with the pain of stiff joints tested, his hand fisted around coins and dust.
When he reaches me, I hand him the two packets of Parle-G biscuits I carry for street dogs. Even in Bangalore, where beggars never were as numerous as in Delhi or Bombay, beggars have become more numerous, now, than street dogs. The Sharmas’ disapproving gaze pierces me.
“He’s not even wearing a mask,” Nikita calls out at me from her sanctum inside the shop.
“Surely he can afford one?” Utkarsh reasons with me. “Those cheap black ones? How much can those cost? Ten, twenty rupees?”
Disregarding them, I finally enter the fish shop – there’s room enough – and approach the fish cooler and select my rahu. The Sharmas edge as far away from me as they can without brushing against the blue walls splotched brown with fish blood.
“Utkarsh,” Nikita mutters, “let’s find another shop. These Muslims” – she eyes me, checking if I’m Muslim too – “everyone’s saying they spread Covid deliberately, congregating in mosques. And just look how they live! Guaranteed to spread disease.”
I watch Ali gutting the Sharmas’ basa in one dexterous motion. Hasan is scaling my rahu. Saleem reemerges from the bedroom, milk bottle in right hand, infant on left arm. He catches me staring.
“My sister’s,” he explains. “She’s in the hospital… What a time to be born, eh!” He laughs at the cat, who’s hunting his trouser hems. “This unfortunate has also newly entered our lives.”
The cat battles with his hem. Has hunger driven her mad? She sinks her teeth into the fabric, gets them stuck, then panics with frantic claws and manic eyes to get free.
“Enough, Monkey,” murmurs Saleem.
The cat ceases and desists, and sits back and meows, her eyes blue saucers.
“I’ll feed you soon,” Saleem tells her. “Have this, meanwhile.” His foot nudges out a cracked and dented aluminium bowl from under the bench where, in better times, customers waited to be served. He squirts some milk into the bowl. The cat drinks.
Ali sets aside the basa’s backpieces and plastic bags the rest for the Sharmas. Will the backpieces go discounted to another customer, I wonder, or into the Abduls’ lunch?
Saleem weighs the basa. “240 rupees, sir.”
“Google Pay?” asks Utkarsh, brandishing his iPhone.
“Cash only.”
Grumbling, Utkarsh counts out the notes to Khadija, receives his change with the tips of plastic-gloved fingers, and sprays with sanitiser the notes that’ve come out of the cash drawer. Khadija snaps the hundred-rupee notes straight as the Sharmas leave the shop.
Whistling, Ali tosses a slice of rejected rahu backpiece. There’s a flash of white and then the cat retreats under the bench to enjoy her lunch.
“Selfish idiots,” I mutter, watching Utkarsh and Nikita stroll away through the heat-shimmering noon.
Khadija laughs. “There’s a saying, mam,” she says in Kannada. “‘People are as stupid as life lets them be.’ When there are floods, potatoes get pricier. But rich people don’t notice. They don’t eat potatoes. They eat kiwi fruit from Australia. If a neighbour moves, or dies, they don’t notice. It’s not like their neighbour used to babysit for them, or steal from them. We notice because we have to.”
Waiting for my rahu, I watch the migrant white cat eat. Emaciated but unhurried, she picks her way around the deadly bones.
Find your copy here
About the author
Amita lives in Bangalore, India. She has a PhD in cognitive science. Her doctoral work examined the valuation and discounting of nonmarket goods. Climate change and environmental destruction being problems caused by human behaviour, Amita believes that solutions must focus on understanding and shifting behaviour. Amita is Senior Research Fellow at Transitions Research, a climate action thinktank. Here, she helps design and test interventions to encourage pro-environmental behaviours: e.g. the adoption of rooftop solar, the use of electric vehicles and public transport, and the segregation of waste at source. Transitions Research also works on developing behaviourally informed policy recommendations, and works with a range of stakeholders to create change.
Amita loves dogs, spending time in nature, and classical music. She blogs at http://amitabasu.com/
No comments:
Post a Comment