Following Fish: Travels Around the Indian Coast (15 page)

This contest between the tourism and fishing industries was really no contest at all. The creep of shacks has slowly edged the fishing canoes off the beaches, the jet-skis and power-boats have kept the coastal waters in constant churn and driven away the fish, and the beachfront developers have bought or grabbed all the land they could. ‘There used to be twenty to twenty-five fishing boats at a time on Baga beach, but now there are barely
a couple,’ Alvares said. So the fishermen, deprived of the space to practise their profession, had to give it up and turn, in the blackest irony, towards the only viable source of employment: tourism. They bought shacks, or they opened water-sport businesses, or they joined the hotels. Thus, in Alvares’ narrative of capitalism gone bad, the industry grew fatter still, forced more fishermen out of business, lured them into its folds and crevices, grew fatter still, and so forth.

‘Then there’s the sand,’ Alvares went on. ‘Go look at Anjuna beach—it is that weirdest of things, a sandless beach. They’re carting away the sand dunes to put into the plinths of all these new buildings that are coming up. Studies say that by 2020, with a rise in the sea level, 5 to 10 per cent of Goa will go under. But still they’re destroying these protective sand dunes.’ He had written about some of this, he said, in his book
Fish Curry and Rice,
which aggressively identifies itself, in its subtitle, as
A Citizens’ Report on the Goan Environment.
‘But funnily, nobody wants to read about these things in Goa, because nobody seems to care,’ Alvares lamented. ‘You’d probably have a better chance of finding that book in Mumbai or New Delhi.’

Alvares had two pieces of advice for me. The first was to stop talking to him, and to others like him, and to instead start visiting the beaches themselves, to talk to the fishermen I would meet. The second was to simply walk along the stretch of beach between Calangute and Candolim, to the rusting hulk of the
River Princess, a
ship that had run aground in north Goa in the June of 2000 and still remained in exactly the same place eight years later. Only then, Alvares said, would I be able to learn for myself the extent of the government’s greed and inefficiency, and to see in process the destruction of the fisherman’s habitat.

On the way out of Alvares’ office, I stopped at the stationer’s in the same building to ask for
Fish Curry and Rice,
but they didn’t have it in stock. Over the next two days, I must have asked
for the book in at least half a dozen bookstores across Goa. I didn’t find a single copy.

Following Alvares’ advice, I began my own variation on the beach-hopping itinerary that every tourist in Goa seems to follow, and for this I relied largely on the wisdom and street smarts of George Francis Borges. Borges is a short, pugnacious individual, so baby-faced that it came as a faintly obscene shock to learn that he was thirty-seven, and that he was married with children. When he was a young man, he left Goa to work in the Middle East, returning when the first Gulf War began. ‘Then I was a boating instructor on and off, but mostly I just sat around drinking. The problem was, I had too many friends, you know?’ he told me with a lopsided smile. ‘Money would come into this hand, go out of this hand. That’s how it was.’ When I met him, Borges was professionally a doer of a little bit of this and some of that. He assisted his friends with their business if he felt like it, and if Bollywood’s movie units came to Goa to shoot, he helped out in his capacity of local guide and gopher. When
Dhoom
filmed there, Borges mentioned, he would zip around town bearing John Abraham on the pillion of his motorcycle, ferrying him from location to location. ‘But otherwise, I just hang around,’ he said. ‘I go fishing a couple of times a week, on a friend’s boat. Here in Goa, even if you don’t like to fish, you go fishing—just to pass the time.’ On our way to the offices of the Mandovi Fishermen Marketing Co-Op Society on the Betim jetty, Borges pointed to a ramshackle, abandoned shed by the riverside, near Reis Magos. ‘You see there? That’s my favourite spot to fish in all Goa.’

Sitakant Kashinath Parab, the chairman of the Society and like everyone else in Goa, a friend of Borges, has eyes that are appropriately reminiscent of a fish, blank and unblinking. His
brief does not so much include the hundred-odd kilometres of Goa’s coastline as the two-hundred-and-fifty-odd kilometres of its river systems. On the subject of the beaches, therefore, he was vague; he ventured that perhaps 50 per cent of the coastal fishermen had moved into tourism, but he offered this suspiciously round statistic uncomfortably. When we started talking about the rivers, however, he began to give us his fullest attention, his eyes leaving the piles of papers on his government-green metal desk and only rarely thereafter flickering to odd spots on the room’s ugly blue walls.

Parab was eager to blame the ongoing demise of fishing on what I had thought, until then, were unquestionably pillars of social progress. The improved highway system, for instance, now trucked fish into Goa from Tamil Nadu, Orissa and Gujarat, and Parab considered it competition that Goa’s fishermen didn’t need. Education had improved, but because of this ‘literation,’ Parab moaned, fishermen began to aim for sophisticated, white-collar jobs. ‘It’s not just fishermen, in fact,’ Parab said. ‘One of my friends comes from a family of toddy tappers, and in their village, there used to be a thousand people just tapping toddy. But in the next generation, there isn’t a single person who knows how to climb a coconut tree. And my friend now owns a tourist boat.’

Then there are the trawlers. ‘You know,’ Parab told us, ‘the government of Goa stopped issuing licenses for new trawlers some time ago. But they do still issue renovation licenses.’ So instead of officially buying new trawlers, Goa’s fishing magnates constantly ‘renovate’ their old vessels magically into trawlers with bigger holds and newer engines. ‘What can we do? We can’t even tell our fishermen to continue in this loss-making profession,’ Parab said. ‘And if a fisherman who earns Rs 100 a day can sell his land for Rs 10 lakhs, start a lease-a-motorbike service, make Rs 1,000 a day by renting out five motorcycles, and sit at home
all day playing cards and drinking, who wouldn’t do it? People are too idle, and that type of idle income is possible only in a tourist economy like Goa’s.’ Perhaps I was mistaken, but I thought I caught a wistful note in Parab’s voice as he outlined that landscape of laziness.

I asked, at this point, about the riverboat casinos that I had seen in Panaji, and it was like setting off a depth charge in already choppy waters. ‘Until a few years ago, there was only one riverboat casino—the
Caravela,’
Parab exploded. The
M. V. Caravela,
named after the first Portuguese armada to visit Goa in the sixteenth century, has been operating its Casino Goa since 2001. ‘Now there are five more. Every night, each boat hosts between three and five hundred guests, in addition to a hundred-odd staff. So in one night, untreated waste from thousands of people, not to mention plastic and other litter, is released into the river.’ Parab estimated that the Goan government received a Rs 1 crore license fee from each casino; in fact, a couple of months after I met him, the government increased that figure to Rs 5 crores. ‘When that’s the kind of money coming in,’ Parab said, ‘why would the government even listen to us?’

It isn’t, he added, that the fishermen haven’t tried. ‘I’ve gone personally to the fisheries department to ask them why they were sitting idle’—that word again—‘and why they weren’t doing something to protect the fishing community.’ But the department itself, Parab muttered darkly, had sold its soul—or to be more exact, had rented it out. ‘They used to be on the ground floor and first floor of a building, with a jetty attached,’ he said. But the department had given over the jetty as well as the ground floor offices to the owners of the
Caravela.
‘The fisheries department itself owns three trawlers, but now it has nowhere to park them,’ Parab said. ‘What will this kind of department do?’

From Betim, Borges took me to Coco Beach on the Mandovi estuary, which popular opinion regarded as the most degraded stretch of beach in Goa. There was, in reality, not much beach left. I saw Coco as a grubby bar of mud, covered with a thin film of sand that was only cosmetic in its presence, and overrun by a litter of nets and fishing paraphernalia. After hectic, unplanned development had weakened the soil, the beach had been eaten away by the sea and the monsoon rains. ‘There would be shacks from there to there,’ Borges indicated, his arm moving in a wide arc over the beach. As Coco got narrower, the shacks began to trespass onto a traditional fishing stronghold, and the fishermen protested loudly enough to, in a rare victory, have them shut down. But the damage had been done; Coco now looks like something the tourism monster has masticated and spat back out.

It was a hot day, and a group of fishermen was just launching a boat out to sea when we arrived, so we waited in the shade of a scraggly clump of trees for Reginald Silvera to finish issuing his instructions to them. Silvera, thirty years old, had been a fisherman at Coco Beach since he left school in the eighth grade to follow his father into the profession, catching mackerel, sardines, prawn and kingfish in the sea. His hair had the brittle, thirsty appearance that is bestowed by too much salty air, and his skin had been stained a dark walnut by the sun. In his immediate family, he was the only Silvera still fishing actively. ‘I set up a shack on Calangute beach a few years ago, but my brother runs that. And my other brother has a tourist boat business,’ he told me. ‘But you know, with a shack, you have to be on the beach for twelve hours every day. Who wants to do that?’ (I could think of a few people, I thought to myself.) ‘Here, I can go fishing even at night, if I want to. Fishing is my life, and it’s a good life. But not everybody feels that way. Many of my friends have drifted away into the tourism business.’

Silvera, like other Goan fishermen I would meet over the next
few days, seemed to consider it a matter of pride and honour to insist that he had stayed true to his fishing roots, and that he had stopped his ears to the seductive call of the tourism business even as his colleagues succumbed to it. A further fillip of honour was to be derived from pointing out that, unless you are on a trawler, the fishing today is more difficult than ever. During a lull in our conversation, when Silvera went further down the beach to talk to another man, Borges advised me not to believe everything I heard. ‘Many of these guys own their shacks on one side, have somebody else in the family run them, and fish only when they really feel like they want to,’ he said. ‘You just watch. He’ll come back now and tell you about how hard it is to even get a decent catch of fish these days.’

Sure enough, Silvera returned and, as if he were picking up where he had left off, lunged with urgency into the subject of the ‘hook long line’ and the evil it had brought to Goan fishing. The hook long line, Borges had to explain to me later, is a rope of nylon that floats on the surface of the ocean, lashed to buoys at either end, and with thirty or more hooks suspended, by thinner lines, at intervals along the length of the rope. It is artisanal fishing’s equivalent of the bulldozer, but it is deployed with the sweet, almost childlike hope of the ultimate bonanza—of pulling it up again with fish on every single hook, like a clothesline of stockings stuffed to capacity with Christmas presents.

The scourge of the hook long line, Silvera said, had hit Goan fishing hard. ‘We Goan fishermen don’t use it ourselves—it’s used more by fishermen from outside the state, especially fishermen from the south of India,’ he said. ‘They bait a line with even a hundred hooks at a time, and it’s very effective, especially with kingfish. But it catches fish of all ages, so between that and the trawlers, the waters are completely overfished. Earlier, our boats would go out, and every single boat would
land a catch. Now, one day I may catch some fish, tomorrow you may catch some. Nothing is certain any more.’

A few hours later, on the road to Aguada, Borges spotted a man riding a coughing moped ahead of us, suddenly exclaimed: ‘That’s Alex!’ and asked the driver to work the horn as he yelled out of the window for Alex to stop. (Borges did this often. We would be driving along, and suddenly he would whip open the window, stick his head out like a dog, and holler at people whom he thought he knew. On at least a couple of occasions, he received confused glances in response, but as he ducked back in, he philosophically shrugged off these cases of mistaken identity as one of the regrettable facts of life.) Alex reined in his miserable steed, parked it in the middle of his lane, and sauntered into our car for a chat. Around us, the traffic accommodated uncomplainingly, making do with half a road instead of one.