Tin Fish by Sudeep Chakravarti

Author:Sudeep Chakravarti
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2012-07-16T00:00:00+00:00

It was an epic Sunday. We saw three movies, ate goat-brain curry for lunch, drank beer, and sometime between movies two and three my life changed.

Fish had stayed behind to write a letter to his sister and father, with whom, he used to say with a smirk, he had a love-hate relationship. ‘I love my sister and hate my father.’ He would dutifully write to them on alternate Sundays, one Sunday for his sister and the next for his father. His routine never varied. We used to rib him about it, and he would always take it good-naturedly, even Porridge's jibe: ‘Just cyclostyle it, bugger, and fill in the dates on top.’

This Sunday, we knew, would be a special letter. Fish's dad had written another of those ‘My dearest son, Sanjay’ letters to Fish. This is how one went, ‘How much I wish for you to uphold the family tradition and become a doctor like me, and my father before me. I know you are swimming captain, and I am sure you will—you must—become school captain, but you must pay particular attention in your science classes if you are to have a future we can all be proud of.’ This was typically heavy Bwana bullshit. Fish would fume whenever something like this happened, and take off for a swim, do a mile or so, and come back; as the king of the pool, he could go whenever he wanted, even beyond games timings, and nobody ever told him anything.

He could be many things, but we were convinced Fish would never become a doctor, a rich and famous heart surgeon like Bwana, at least not until he could stop throwing up in bio class every time we had to dissect a frog. He recently made it as far as slitting the soft skin of the tiny frog's underbelly with the scalpel, but puked when the bio teacher, Girish Gupta, whom we called Grundy, came, pulled the flap of the skin open with tweezers, and said, ‘Ah Sanjay, having trouble again with your fellow swimmer?’ and neatly plucked the tiny heart and placed it on the plastic board. Grundy was a sick piece of shit, but he had style.

What Fish really wanted to do was be in India's Olympic swimming team, especially, as he told us, as no Indian swimmer had been good enough to make it to the last eight in the Olympics. ‘I don't want gold, man, just to be in the team would be cool-breeze,’ he would say dreamily. And if that didn't work, he would lead treks after he graduated from college, and marry Masuma, his Muslim penfriend-turned-real sweetheart, to whom he would write every week, and whom he would visit on his way to Sing and back from Mayo, because Bwana always booked Fish on flights to Sing via Hong Kong and those flights left from Bombay. ‘I will settle in the Himalaya and Masuma and I will have some babies, and you guys will all be,

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