1999/Fish

'Fishiss', pastel, crayon, ink© Amruta Patil '02

More '1999'

About Amruta

Studio

There they were, Paulie, Vishie and Romario Vaz in a salt blackened photo frame. Propped awkwardly against a carpet with a scene from the Arabian Nights woven into it. The carpet with its picture of a prince and veiled princess on a steed, and three knock-kneed boys with artificial smiles, side partings and rayon knickers leaning against it. As far as he could remember, they had worn those knicker shorts with the stamp-size pocket on the left thigh till the day their seats were reduced to a mass of worn out threads. Which was half their childhood or something. Paulie had a funny snorting expression and his chest was stuck out. When the photographer grunted "Smile", Paulie was certain he heard "Smell", and so he held his breath.
~
Children rarely betray the inevitability of future ugliness. Noses that swell out or hook over, skin that erupts in furious oil and acne, hair on the back, on the sides of the ear: not an inkling, no inkling of it at all. No indication, either, of the fistful of time each one is born with. Someone might have such a small handful, and it may fast be slipping out of the gaps in his fingers, but when you are kicking him in the stomach, or biting back: could you have imagined?
~
The studio was somewhere in Chembur. They had been on a holiday, their furthest ever. Paulie had got motion sick in the bus. He had gotten sick all over his new shoes and Romario remembered the smell had been so vile, neither Vishie nor he had wanted Paulie next to them. Eventually, Miriam had given them a sound swat on the bottom apiece and made room for the bawling Paulie and his puke stained left shoe. For the next eight hours, Romario had wished his whimpering little brother was dead.
~
Of the day Paulie died, Romario could remember nothing at all. Nor of the days after that. He woke up to the fact that Paulie was dead when he saw the jar of fish in the windowsill. Bait for a fishing trip that never happened. As the hours tumbled out what they held in their fold, the fish on the windowsill had been forgotten. Twenty-five of them in a jar, driven to dementia from overcrowding and too little air. The quietness of it was harrowing. Noiseless, a death sans gore has something almost anesthetic about it. Leaves you numb, but not jolted. The jolt comes later. The fish on the sill were the jolt that left Romario crumpled on the floor.
~
Destiny lay in the curling of a strand of hair. Had it been a millimeter away, the fish would have been dead. Expertly impaled on a sharp, sharp hook, and drowned in their own habitat for larger shadows underwater to seek out. They would have been dead, all the tormented fish in the jar, and Paulie, their executioner, would have been alive, striding back home with a plastic bag that held his catch. Round and round, frightened and frenzied in their tight little circumference. Even in their oxygen-starved nightmare, they did not bump into one another, or against the glass. Round and round, weaving through one another, through water cloudy with secretions. Romario looked at them, and slowly his vision whirled, there was but one thought in his head: resuscitate the fish.
~
Shivering and barefoot, clad only in his pajamas, he walked out into the road. Feeling the way, not knowing it, not thinking about it, just walking, reading inch after inch with his soles. It was home ground, but not that night. Was the street lamp so far from the bifurcation? The night he went out walking with the water sloshing heavily in the jar of fish, the roads had grown bumps, stretched out in ways they never had before.

The road turned off at Alexandrinha Lodge, and through a scrabble of coast-hugging bushes broke out onto the beach. Waves were lashing without pause or mercy, and Romario, biting down his fear of keeping his toes on surfaces he could not see, walked in thigh high, poured the water and the dizzy fish out. Exhausted, on the verge of tears, he collapsed on the moist sand. It was then that it struck him. Like a blood rush, like a monster wave that has crept up from behind. The fish had been caught with a thin line bobbing along Baga creek. They were freshwater fish.
~