Dear Reader,

 

I love to watch my mother eat fish. 

 

After a long day of work, she first opens the fridge. She heats dal and stir-fried vegetables in the microwave, but can’t wait a minute and a half for the cold surmai steak—red from Malvani masala marinade and oily from frying—to warm up. She uses her index finger and thumb to break off a stiff, frigid piece and pops it in her mouth. 

 

Around October, she peeks into the styrofoam boxes at the fish market to see if any crabs have arrived. When they finally appear, she buys them immediately and cooks them in a broth of onion, tomatoes, and many masalas, relishing them over hours, cracking open the animal’s exoskeleton with skill and patience, and excavating every last bit of stringy, briny meat. Once the crab is devoured, her plate is overflowing with chewed up bits of shell. On the side of her mouth is a bit of the red gravy, a sign of diligent eating.

Watching her debone fish and eat it meticulously, I realise my mother is not fussed with any of the polite elegance I am concerned with while eating. Her fingers are sturdy and her hands robust—there’s no dilly-dallying with spoons and such. 

Researcher and environmental organiser Bhagath Singh A.’s memory of his mother, V. Kalavathi, buying fish with a similar determination rings familiar. In our latest Books on Food excerpt—published from Seasoned by the Sea, an anthology of stories from the Coromandel coast—Bhagath describes his mother’s no-nonsense approach as she prepares to buy her preferred cut of trevally or kingfish:

It is evident that buying fish and eating it is serious business.

I imagine it is the same reliable sturdiness—that precise strength of zeroing down on the fish head and ensuring she takes it home to make a joyfully fatty kulambu—that Kalavathi brought to her life as an activist organising around feminist and environmental issues. 

 

Not shying away from the sharp bits of fish skull that holds the viscous, oily brain fat requires an appetite for wading through messiness to get to something good. Just like in her political life, Bhagath’s Amma demonstrated this hardiness. 

 

For anthropologist and poet Soibam Haripriya’s mother, this hardiness meant developing a thick skin. In our latest personal essay, Kheer and Curfew, Haripriya recounts her childhood experiences of eating food foraged from Loktak Lake in Manipur, and coming to terms with the hardship her mother—or Ema, as she addressed her—associated with these ingredients.

Haripriya’s Ema grew a thick skin against her in-laws’ visits and their subsequent criticisms, which, like the thorns of the thangjjang or fox nut they brought along, were prickly. Suffering from asthma, she would have to labour harder to tend to their home garden, and even prepare foods foraged from the garden's pond. She would nurture the pond by feeding it with fish seedlings she brought back from her work in the fisheries department. 

 

In a poem, Haripriya writes about finding her mother in the garden unexpectedly, with, I imagine, her hands wrist-deep in soil, harvesting greens and vegetables with a quiet confidence:

Sometimes, sturdiness, especially during trying times, looks like the act of harvesting greens, growing flowers even if they wither away the next day, the foresight to store fermented fish (ngari) to flavour brothy kangsoi during lean curfew months.

Other times, strength might look like the stamina it requires to encourage people to make better seafood consumption choices, even as the climate crisis threatens the fish we eat and the livelihoods of the people that bring them to us. In The Marine Conservationist Reviving Lost Connections, The Locavore’s editor Yamini Vijayan speaks to Divya Karnad, conservationist and co-founder of InSeason Fish, about leading walks through fish markets and the importance of seasonality. 

 

As she nudges chefs and fish-lovers to make more informed choices, works with small-scale fishermen and sellers, and advises government bodies, Divya approaches the complex and interconnected world of seafood sustainability with a tough practicality. It’s clear that her tenacity mirrors the hard work of the people that are essential to this ecosystem. She says:

Divya’s realistic approach to the world of fish is not without a matter-of-fact optimism. When asked how she keeps working despite the seemingly irreparable climate crisis, she tells us that she suspects conservationists are motivated by negative realities: “Something horrible (is) happening, and you feel the need to step in and fix it.” It is a grounded, sensible choice to look at difficulty and think, let us be rigid against it.

 

We recently published a recipe from InSeason Fish—the Patla Macher Jhol—that reminds me why I don’t associate women and their fish with the now-tired warmth we use to describe women in relation to food. As a child, my defiance against eating the very same preparation of rui maach (a type of carp fish) was met with unshaking barter from my mother: to gain access to the foods I loved, I would have to toil through the meaty stomach of the carp fish. Or, when a small bone of papda or freshwater catfish would get stuck in my throat, the swift mouthful of rice I was made to swallow to escape thorny danger. Or, when I first tried to debone my own piece of ilish (hilsa), my grandmother’s unimpressed expression at my slow speed and too-quick surrender.

 

I love when the women I know are stern, uncompromising, unyielding in the matters of fish. Fish is, after all, serious business.

April Reads

 

Dried Fish At Amma’s Memorial
In a three-year-long cookbook project spanning the Coromandel coast, Bhagath Singh A. writes a tribute to his late mother.