the fruit of the sea

It’s not for nothing that hilsa is called the fruit of the sea by Bengalis. The zeal with which they savour every aspect of this seasonal offering is akin to the way the rest of India obsesses about mangoes,but more. Because Bengalis are prone to literature,they celebrate hilsa by waxing eloquent about it. In his Hootum Pyenchar Naksha (Sketches by Hootum,the Owl) written in the 1860s,Kaliprasanna Singha mentions how Bengali babus would spend “two months’ salary to celebrate the arrival of hilsa in the market”. Evidently,even babus of today don’t mind shelling out a large chunk of their salary to pay their respects to the fish. A kilo of hilsa costs a mean Rs 600 this season and Bengalis have no choice but to grudgingly shell out the amount. For,a monsoon without hilsa is not a choice. Not even when one has to satisfy oneself with the inferior khoka (young) hilsa,which doesn’t have the divine fattiness of the ‘real’ hilsa and is infested with bones. For a monsoon without hilsa is like Diwali without crackers,a damp squib. “There is a certain romanticism associated with watching the rains and biting into piping hot,freshly fried hilsa. Hilsa and rains are almost synonymous with each other,” says Debolina Das,a resident of Shyambazar in north Kolkata.

However,as much as we eulogise hilsa’s love story with the monsoons,the truth is hilsa is no longer a seasonal fish. At least,not in Bengal. They are to be found,devoured and dismissed all over Kolkata all through the year. In its plush restaurants that have banners announcing hilsa festivals in January,in nondescript eateries that serve it with steaming plates of rice and in Kolkata’s old cavernous fish markets where they find pride of place amongst the freshest catches of the day. We call it a monsoon fish because it’s only in the monsoon that these sea-dwellers swim upriver to spawn. In fact,there is a theory that the concept of the hilsa season was constructed by some wise Bengalis centuries ago to avoid overfishing.

In Samanth Subramanian’s 2010 book,Following Fish,he talks about the divisive nature of the argument over the relative merits of hilsa from the Padma and the Ganga rivers. While some feel that Padma hilsa trumps its Ganga rival because it’s plumper and oilier,others prefer the intense flavours of the Ganga hilsa and like the fact that it’s leaner. He suggests a reason behind the difference in taste between the two. The Ganga hilsa is leaner because there is more silt in Ganga and the hilsa have to fight against the silt to swim upstream. The Padma hilsa has it easier and is deprived of that intense workout,hence plumper.

But all Bengalis will rise above such petty differences when they talk about their visceral love for the hilsa. They will lovingly talk about the right cuts of the fish,the kind of mustard to be used for cooking it and the merits of having it with just steamed rice instead of any flavoured main course. And of course,they will then talk about the pitter-patter of the rain on their window.