My friend Gee, a longtime resident of C R Park, recently found herself in a quandary. When she first heard from her lieutenant Onima that a few goons had been heard thundering threats in the fish market, she narrowed her eyes. “I have been saying for years this will happen,” she said. “Have you seen the prices the maachhwalas charge? Why, just the other day, I had to pull out my chequebook to pay for some bhetki fillets, a spot of topshe and a whole rohu. They didn’t even pack the fish oil for me. So, no, I am not surprised. Especially as a retired government servant who lives on her pension and has not promoted her house.”
Before Gee could launch into her other pet peeve (C R Park residents who have “promoted” their old single- or double-storey houses to snazzy, marbled “flats”, and thus pushed up prices in the neighbourhood with their nouveau money), our other friend Em, who had dropped in for a cup of tea, interrupted her. As far as she knew, Em said, it was not a socialist uprising. It was, or so they said, an attack by the vegetarians. Since there was a temple in the market, apparently the fish shops needed to be shut down.
“What does that mean?” asked Gee, genuinely mystified. “Everyone knows fish is auspicious. Before every exam or interview, my father would urge me to eat some fish for good luck. It went right alongside a dahi teeka on the forehead and a glimpse of a cow before boarding the school bus. I can’t tell you how irritating I found the fish business. But then who doesn’t want some extra luck before exams and interviews?”
Em nodded sagely. “Don’t they know that Swamiji himself cooked fish in so many different ways? From kalia to French-style to chowder to Norwegian fish balls?”
Em is the kind of Bengali for whom invoking Swami Vivekananda in dharmic (or a wide range of other) matters is, in and of itself, a closing argument.
Meanwhile, Onima had fished out her phone. She showed us a number of videos that were doing the rounds on social media, as a result of which Gee had to, for the first time in her life, count herself on the side of her bete noire: the fish-sellers. “Is that our Haru?” asked Gee, peering at the screen. “No,” said Onima, “It’s Naru. The one who refused to give us the Padma ilish last year.”
Naru told off the interloper, who was yelling that he was a Sanatani and couldn’t allow fish shops cheek by jowl with a temple, with the pithy comeback: “But we are Sanatanis too. We built the temple. We pray to the Goddess before opening our shops.”
“All very good points,” Gee conceded.
“And are you saying the Goddess lives only in the temple? Isn’t Ma Kali everywhere?” said Onima belligerently.
“But what is the genesis of all this?” Gee was still mystified. “Well,” said Em, “Meat shops were shut in UP during Navratra. I’d better buy some mutton on the way home today before something drastic happens. My daughter and son-in-law are coming from Bangalore.”
Em herself is a vegetarian, though not a Vaishnava (There are Vaishnava Bengalis who don’t even eat onion and garlic. One of my aunts married into one such family and we all raved about their cuisine in a thank-god-we-don’t-have-to-meet-them-every-other-day sort of way).
Later in the day, Gee calls me to ask, “Is there a protest happening somewhere?”
Personally, I don’t think there is any real threat to the fish market: At the Opposition’s attacks, one of the leading lights of the government not only invoked the legality of the shops and the devotion of the fish-sellers but even praised the high standards of hygiene maintained. I’d allowed myself only the mildest of chuckles at that last bit.
“Let me find out,” I placate Gee, knowing that some fights are more personal than others. Gee and her husband had brought their two children up on a standard Bengali non-vegetarian diet, bolstered by appropriate amounts of mathematics and music. They turned out to be wonderful on all fronts save one. One became vegetarian out of volition; the other embraced veganism.
And now there was this.
My friendship with Gee had first flourished in a phase of our life when, right out of university, my husband and I had found our first house in a Jain quarter of Green Park. The tiny apartment was lovely, with natural light and terrazzo floors. But no non-vegetarian food could be cooked. Law-abiding citizens that we were and respectful of other people’s faiths, we had not abused the trust of our landlords.
In that year, we were often invited to Gee’s for dinner. Gee and I would return from work together. On the way back, she would park her red Indica by the market, say her hellos to the deities in the temple, exchange a few words with the priest who was always angling to perform a Satya Narayan pooja at her house, before going to Haru, Naru and ilk, to hotly debate the freshness of the prawns and the fish. When we entered her house, her cook would inspect the bounty and pronounce the name of the item that was to be produced out of it all. Sometimes it was a gentle jhol, simmered with potatoes and cauliflower florets; sometimes, if coconut milk was handy, a malai curry was whipped up. Never had we enjoyed the taste of C R park fish more than in our year of living with the vegetarians.
Roy is a Delhi-based author
Visuals from CR Park in New Delhi (Photo - Wiki Commons) 
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