i fished with a variety of hooks at a variety of depths for avariety of fish, from deep-sea fishing with large hooks andmany sinkers to surface fishing with smaller hooks and onlyone or two sinkers. success was slow to come, and when itdid, it was much appreciated, but the effort seemed out ofproportion to the reward. the hours were long, the fish weresmall, and richard parker was forever hungry.
it was the gaffs that finally proved to be my most valuablefishing equipment. they came in three screw-in pieces: twotubular sections that formed the shaft – one with a mouldedplastic handle at its end and a ring for securing the gaff with arope – and a head that consisted of a hook measuring abouttwo inches across its curve and ending in a needle-sharp,barbed point. assembled, each gaff was about five feet longand felt as light and sturdy as a sword.
at first i fished in open water. i would sink the gaff to adepth of four feet or so, sometimes with a fish speared on thehook as bait, and i would wait. i would wait for hours, mybody tense till it ached. when a fish was in just the right spot,i jerked the gaff up with all the might and speed i couldmuster. it was a split-second decision. experience taught methat it was better to strike when i felt i had a good chance ofsuccess than to strike wildly, for a fish learns from experiencetoo, and rarely falls for the same trap twice.
when i was lucky, a fish was properly snagged on thehook, impaled, and i could confidently bring it aboard. but if igaffed a large fish in the stomach or tail, it would often getaway with a twist and a forward spurt of speed. injured, itwould be easy prey for another predator, a gift i had notmeant to make. so with large fish i aimed for the ventral areabeneath their gills and their lateral fins, for a fish's instinctivereaction when struck there was to swim up, away from thehook, in the very direction i was pulling. thus it wouldhappen: sometimes more pricked than actually gaffed, a fishwould burst out of the water in my face. i quickly lost myrevulsion at touching sea life. none of this prissy fish blanketbusiness any more. a fish jumping out of water wasconfronted by a famished boy with a hands-on, no-holds-barredapproach to capturing it. if i felt the gaff's hold was uncertain,i would let go of it – i had not forgotten to secure it with arope to the raft – and i would clutch at the fish with myhands. fingers, though blunt, were far more nimble than ahook. the struggle would be fast and furious. those fish wereslippery and desperate, and i was just plain desperate. if only ihad had as many arms as the goddess durga – two to holdthe gaffs, four to grasp the fish and two to wield the hatchets.
but i had to make do with two. i stuck fingers into eyes,jammed hands into gills,crushed soft stomachs with knees, bit tails with my teeth – idid whatever was necessary to hold a fish down until i couldreach for the hatchet and chop its head off.
with time and experience i became a better hunter. i grewbolder and more agile. i developed an instinct, a feel, for whatto do.
my success improved greatly when i started using part ofthe cargo net. as a fishing net it was useless – too stiff andheavy and with a weave that wasn't tight enough. but it wasperfect as a lure. trailing freely in the water, it provedirresistibly attractive to fish, and even more so when seaweedstarted growing on it. fish that were local in their ambit madethe net their neighbourhood, and the quick ones, the ones thattended to streak by, the dorados, slowed down to visit the newdevelopment. neither the residents nor the travellers eversuspected that a hook was hidden in the weave. there weresome days – too few unfortunately – when i could have allthe fish i cared to gaff. at such times i hunted far beyond theneeds of my hunger or my capacity to cure; there simplywasn't enough space on the lifeboat, or lines on the raft, todry so many strips of dorado, flying fish, jacks, groupers andmackerels, let alone space in my stomach to eat them. i keptwhat i could and gave the rest to richard parker. duringthose days of plenty, i laid hands on so many fish that mybody began to glitter from all the fish scales that became stuckto it. i wore these spots of shine and silver like tilaks, themarks of colour that we hindus wear on our foreheads assymbols of the divine. if sailors had come upon me then, i'msure they would have thought i was a fish god standing atophis kingdom and they wouldn't have stopped. those were thegood days. they were rare.
turtles were an easy catch indeed, as the survival manualsaid they were. under the "hunting and gathering" heading,,they would go under "gathering". solid in build though theywere, like tanks, they were neither, fast nor powerful swimmers;with just one hand gripped around a back flipper, it waspossible to hold on to a turtle. but the survival manual failedto mention that a turtle caught was not a turtle had. it stillneeded to be brought aboard. and hauling a struggling130-pound turtle aboard a lifeboat was anything but easy. itwas a labour that demanded feats of strength worthy ofhanuman. i did it by bringing the victim alongside the bow ofthe boat, carapace against hull, and tying a rope to its neck, afront flipper and a back flipper. then i pulled until i thoughtmy arms would come apart and my head would explode. i ranthe ropes around the tarpaulin hooks on the opposite side ofthe bow; every time a rope yielded a little, i secured my gainbefore the rope slipped back. inch by inch, a turtle was heavedout of the water. it took time. i remember one green seaturtle that hung from the side of the lifeboat for two days, thewhole whilethrashing about madly, free flippers beating in the air.
luckily, at the last stage, on the lip of the gunnel, it wouldoften happen that a turtle would help me without meaning to.
in an attempt to free its painfully twisted flippers, it would pullon them; if i pulled at the same moment, our conflicting effortssometimes came together and suddenly it would happen, easily:
in the most dramatic fashion imaginable, a turtle would surgeover the gunnel and slide onto the tarpaulin. i would fall back,exhausted but jubilant.
green sea turtles gave more meat than hawks-bills, and theirbelly shells were thinner. but they tended to be bigger thanhawksbills, often too big to lift out of the water for theweakened castaway that i became.
lord, to think that i'm a strict vegetarian. to think thatwhen i was a child i always shuddered when i snapped opena banana because it sounded to me like the breaking of ananimal's neck. i descended to a level of savagery i neverimagined possible.
