TRAVELS with the FISH C Y Gopinath Introducing the Fish Nothing is so little fun as seeing the world all by yourself. Quixote had his Sancho, Graham Greene had his aunt, and Phineas Fogg had his Passepartout. So it is a matter of some regret for me to admit, in this very first paragraph, that I have seldom had the pleasure of an interesting travelling companion in my numerous expeditions inside and out of India. I have missed the presence of someone thoughtful and acerbic, someone who could match insight for insight, who was attentive to the foibles and madnesses of foreign folk in their very foreign lands, someone with whom one could together relish morsels of alien culture. It is my pitiful good fortune that the person who comes closest to being a travelling companion of sorts is the gentleman whom I have come to think of as the Fish. We met first on a flight to the Middle East. He was in the seat adjoining mine, offending everyone with his particular acrid brand of cigarette. He was south Indian, like me, but differed in a key respect — he cordially hated travelling. He had always found it much more pleasurable to undertake imaginary journeys in which he could dictate and design everything from the departure schedule to the destination. XII TRAVELS WITH THE FISH We got talking when I began to get interested in the Arabic in-flight announcements. Believe me, this is a thrill, especially for fellows like me who have never heard any sort of Arabic before. At times, it sounds faintly Gallic, especially the glottals, but mostly this helter-skelter language sounds just like a record being played backwards. All announcements end with ‘Shukran!’, close enough to the Hindi shukriya for me to catch on that I had been thanked for my attentiveness. What puzzled me was the length of each announcement. The British language statement might have been something simple like ‘Please fasten your seat belt!’ The corresponding Arabic version would then hold forth for about two minutes. This continued all the way to London: interminable Arabic directives, broken by pithy others in English, French and Hindi. I began to speculate that Arabic might be an ‘atomic language’. “I wonder if Arabic contains a large number of small words,” I remarked to the passenger on my right. He looked up, immediately interested. “Thus, where English would have a single word, say ‘disembark’, Arabic might have ten or twenty words, each with its own fine shade of meaning, so that you could construct the sense of ‘disembark’, so to speak, but with precision far greater than English provides. It is, of course, at the cost of a certain brevity.” He mulled this over and then shook his head, disagreeing. His theory was that since Arabic was written right to left, it was probably spoken backwards too. And that since many of their words contained dots which could “easily be confused with fullstops”, it was probably difficult to figure out where exactly a sentence ended. As a result, people tended to carry on talking long after having said what they really needed to say. We did not reach a clear resolution of this issue till several journeys later, but it was the start of an odd sort of friendship. Back in Mumbai, where he lived in a house that was more archive than domicile, we began meeting, more off than on. I enjoyed his acute-angled mind and his wide-ranging familiarity with utterly useless information. He told me that his friends called him the Fish, for reasons he scarcely understood but had stopped contesting. He had the most extraordinary collection of Condé Nast and National Geographic and, of all things, Gourmet magazine. He fancied strange places INTRODUCING THE FISH XIII and odd faces, but always from the comfort of his armchair. Thus, though we have actually globe-trotted together few times, the Fish has been my constant listening companion. Under his inquisition, my travels have taken on new meanings, sometimes unintended ones. Completely armed with bookish knowledge, the Fish feels free to challenge reality with bibliography. A natural cynic and misanthrope, he always fears the worst, suspects the unspeakable, and anticipates the dreadful. Talking to him is an exercise in self-flagellation. Yet he has served me the way the heron, perched on the buffalo’s back, serves that beast. I have a tendency to imagine better holidays than I actually had, with bluer skies than were, and more poignancy than was. Over time, left to myself, I have no doubt I would not remember which parts really happened and which parts I wished had. The Fish, like some useful creature from lower down on the food chain, nit-picks and cleans my narrative with his peevish questions and his oddball theories. Consider, for example, how we finally settled the issue of why Arabic takes so long to say simple things. After many trips west via the Middle East, it became abundantly clear to me that Arabic is probably not a simple language but quite the opposite, a meta-language. Generalities abound but not specifics. Although oil-money has spurred lifestyles and technology in a very short space of time, the language has not kept up. Thus, words like ‘seat-belt’ (and probably ‘seat’ and ‘belt’ as well) have no equivalents. “Yes,” said the Fish, warming to the new thought. “The metaphor of the desert does not provide for a seat-belt. The only seat in their language is the dromedary camel’s back, and the only upright structure they might ever have leaned against would probably be a date palm.” Thus, saying something like “Please fasten your seat-belt” in Arabic probably involves a complex exercise in laying down axioms first. For example: “There are near you two flat, long, sash-like ribbons, one of which passes through a strange metal affair. It is no use trying to tear these ribbons loose for they are themselves made of a decidedly non-natural — that is, synthetic — substance such as you may never encounter in a desert. These ribbons, which in the language of the white foreigner are called al belt, are fastened XIV TRAVELS WITH THE FISH to al seat, which is the name given to the flat, soft surface on which you find yourself seated. In many ways, it may remind you of a dromedary’s back, especially when the plane — that is, this steel bird that flies through the sky at wondrous speeds — meets a few air pockets. Of course, a camel is infinitely more comfortable to ride. The only difficulty is that a camel cannot be air-conditioned. Anyhow, that is neither here nor there. This strange thing that is called al seat-belt has to be fastened, and that too around the waist. Al waist can easily be found just above…” “Of course,” said the Fish, deciding it was time I stopped blathering, “by this time, very probably, the steel bird that flies through the sky at wondrous speeds has reached its destination.” It has always been like this. The Fish has been my censor, making sure that I never exceeded the mark, even if I sometimes missed. The title of this book, Travels with the Fish, is a small reflection of the fact that the Fish, thinking he could get something for nothing, insisted on being billed as co-author, claiming that he had travelled farther, in his mind and for free, than I had on frequent flyer passes. We argued to and fro, but I tricked him at the last minute by inserting his dishonourable honorific into the title itself, leaving the by-line entirely to me. However, he remains an infiltrator into the narrative, prodding me into saying more than I am comfortable with, and cackling in the background while I unwittingly skate on the thin ice of international travel. By the way, the recipes appended to each chapter neither represent a fair sampling of the best that particular region has to offer, nor are a considered gourmetic selection. They are, for the most part, simple enough fare, of the sort that you might easily toss together in your own kitchen. It just happens that these were the dishes that I ate during various travels, and which, for reasons of simplicity, authenticity, honesty or style, stayed in my memories. Like photographs of a vacation, they instantly recreate for me some of the finest experiences of my life, and that is why they are in this book. “I am beginning to understand what you really did in Cairo,” said the Fish to me. “You are clearly one of that breed of lizards A little cold whom I call forex fakirs. arksoos takes the edge off the heat They stay motionless, waiting for the exchange rate to turn favourable, and then move in for the kill.” Entering a pyramid is no joke My friend Omar Ehlehw, the Cairene taxi driver The crafty brothers Hasan and Shabir tried to sell me some paintings EGYPT A Stroller in Cairo “There are two kinds of lies,” said the Fish, rolling yet another cigarette. “There are those which are delivered because of some situation that threatens life and limb. You might call them unavoidable or essential lies. And there is the other kind. The kind that you tell. Lying as a conversational strategy, because you cannot think of what to say next.” “But it’s not a lie,” I protested. “Ask any Egyptian.” “There is no need,” said the Fish crisply. “If a man goes to one of the earth’s most spectacular and evolved nations for the first time in his life, spends nearly half a week there, and then cannot give a credible account of how he passed his time, then I am afraid he deserves whatever he gets.” It was the Fish’s theory that I could not have strolled around Cairo for three days.