Geetanjali Krishna: They've bigger fish to fry

PEOPLE LIKE THEM

One morning on Goa's Benaulim beach, I watched idly as a little boat surfed the waves swiftly and surely. Two men perched rather precariously were netting the day's catch. When it came ashore not far from where I was, I sauntered across to see.

Out of its natural element, the boat "" if you can call two hollowed out logs of wood lashed together, one "" looked astonishingly unseaworthy. The men were dragging the net in as they waded ashore. "We've got lots of mackerel today," said one, "be sure to have it for lunch at the shacks on this beach!"

They were local fishermen, they said, who fished close to the beach for whatever they could find. "It's not much usually," said one, Jose, "usually the smaller varieties that local people eat. You get bigger fish in deeper waters where this canoe can't take us!" While they were pushing their canoe to a clump of scraggly palms a safe distance from the water's edge, their wives joined them.

"Our job is to quickly sort the catch and sell as much of it as we can in Margao, about ten kilometres away," said one of them, Maria, "the men's work is done...most likely, they'll both drink feni all day to recover from the morning's exertions!" The two men grinned sheepishly, and invited me to see where they lived.

I'd be able to find their hamlet blindfolded, I thought ruefully "" all I had to do was follow the unmistakable smell of drying fish. The road to the fishermen's settlement on Benaulim beach was lined with perfectly straight rows of silvery fish drying in the sun. There seemed more dry fish than fresh, and I said so. "That's because we don't have cold storage. So as soon as the catch comes in, we've to sell it in the market or it will go bad," said Maria. She earned about Rs 100 to 150 every day selling fish in Margao's wholesale market: "But usually, not all the fish gets sold, and the only option for us is to dry everything that remains," she said.

Dried fish, I surmised, kept these fisherfolk afloat in hard times, providing them with both food and money. "During the monsoons, all of us eat only dried fish since fresh is so hard to get," said Jose, "and whenever we need money, we can always sell an extra basket of dry fish in the market!" A basket of small dried fish, he said, could get them up to Rs 200 in Margao, while dried mackerel, a great local delicacy, could get as much as Rs 400.

The process of drying fish was pretty basic: "First, we salt the fish overnight," said Maria, "then leave it to dry on the road." The road, Maria and other fisherwomen said, was the best place to dry fish: "the tarmac of the road heats up in the sun, so the fish dries faster!"

I moved to the side as a car whizzed past: "don't they get dirty?" I asked, watching crows peck at the rows of fish. She smiled, "they'd get dirtier if we dried them on the sand!" I sat on Jose's beached canoe, thinking how difficult it was for people like him to make two ends meet. Suddenly a cellphone rang, and my perspective changed. It was Jose's phone, and he was arranging to rent his thatched boathouse by the beach for Rs 300 a night.

"Fishing is what we've always done," he grinned, "but it's tourism that brings home the bacon!"