Drinking Fish, Pinching Crabs

I was disappointed when I learnt that people don’t like their faces to be studied when they eat. As a child, eating was only exciting if I could imitate how adults ate. Especially those that looked like adults but were closer to us in age: older cousins on the cusp of their teens, with their fledgling facial hair and cracked voices. I also enjoyed watching my father eat, particularly bone marrow. His temples bobbed in and out of his forehead and I was often tempted to touch that little delicate dot.

Adults were oblivious to the power they had over knowing what to order, how to eat, and how quickly to eat. They fed themselves—and us—with as much inattention as possible, wiping clean whatever was on their plate, while also doing far more demanding tasks simultaneously.

When I was seven, I was told by my mother’s sisters that she used to drink fish like a cat. They’ve seen her slurp down a plate of fish curry to the point where washing the plate would have been unnecessary. My father says that when she was pregnant with me, she’d polish off a whole plate of fried bolenjir or silver fish in seconds, like both Tom and Jerry would. When I imagine the bolenjir on hot Mangalore afternoons, I see them stacked like crispy chaklis on a steel plate, gleaming like the teeth in Happy Dent chewing gum ads. Her sisters also tell me that she knew where to pinch a crab to make it confess its complete innards, how to crack it open even with a fragile fist. This is a version of my mother I will never know.

I was still seven when I watched her roll around on the floor of a temple in a yellow saree. My father watched angrily, muttering curses and adjusting her pallu. She had given up on placating him but more importantly, she had given up on fish. I learnt later that this is called mada snana, a practice involving rolling on plantain leaves after the food served on it was eaten by Brahmins. She was hellbent on doing this, much to family protests, because a poojari had convinced her it was the only way to save her jaundiced three-month-old infant who lay dying in a hospital. Eggs, meat, seafood—all things she loved eating had to be given up.

It is odd and also rather stupid that this is the memory I have of my mother instead of her seafood-devouring face which I will never know. My brother survived, but my mother hasn’t eaten fish since then. She cooks it, smells it, touches it, cleans it, dreams of it, but can’t eat it. Every time we talk about fish, she tells us that it’s the one thing she wishes she could eat again.

On Sundays, my mother made fish curry and everyone at home except her ate it morning, noon, and night. The fish curry made on a Sunday tasted fishier on Mondays but its best use was found in our tiffin boxes on Tuesday afternoons when the curry was its sourest, tangiest, fishiest. Slices of white bread were most suited for this Tuesday fish curry. On Wednesday morning, after a couple of respectable innings, the vessel emptied of fish curry assembled under the lone tap in the kitchen sink, where it was cleaned in soapy water, single streaks of yellowish-orange curry still tracing along its edges. I’d spend the rest of the day smelling my hands, waiting for the next Sunday-Monday-Tuesday.

On the Tuesdays that I took fish to school, I happily danced with my lunch dabba. I was 12 but still felt seven. In the steel dabba was a pool of kane meen curry with a piece of kane bobbing up and down. When I walked with it, I imagined a single, gleaming fish eye looking up at me, its twin probably swimming at the bottom somewhere. I imagined what it would be like to hold the eye between my thumb and index, not squashing it, just delicately threatening to. I wondered if it tasted like it felt—smooth, creamy, silvery. On these days, I couldn’t wait for lunch. Even the back-to-back math class was tolerable. All I had to do was stare at the teacher and think about fish curry. 

My mother would also wrap a few pieces of kane fry in my dabba—first in tissues, then newspapers, then more newspapers. Finally, she would tie the carrier in a towel to not only contain leaks, but also its smell, so the many sensitive adults and children who attended this very Brahmin school weren’t alarmed.

What is a Brahmin school? Well, it looked like a school, it took donations, and promised excellence, so my parents put us there. But we should’ve known. It had a long first name, a longer middle name, and the longest last name, all surrounding the name of a prominent Hindu god in the middle. On bad days, we were sent back home to wear bindis and then return to school. And on good days, opening dabbas with eggs or meat had classmates running in horror to the corners of classrooms.

One unfortunate Tuesday afternoon in school, there was a dabba explosion and my fish curry seeped out and made a delirious Marquez-level, magic-real attack in the corridor. It had somehow managed to escape my mother’s fish-curry rekha—the trio of carrier, newspapers, and towel, each uselessly laying on top of each other, collectively upturned, the dabba’s side clips unlocked.