Around noon on November 19, when the skies were showering Thalambur with the gentle force of a hairstyling spray, the local playground on Thalambur Main Road hosted a “fishing game”.
As they sent rainwater through a network of temporary and permanent drains into the Thalambur lake, residents received fish as return gift. Fish do swim against the flow for certain reasons, mostly to snap up oncoming prey.
Drunk on rainwater, the lake was skewed much like Antoine de Saint Expurey’s boa constrictor that had gobbled a full-grown elephant. With the grotesque sprawl, the lake brought some fish closer to civilisation, and unfortunately, the plate as well.
That post-depression day, tilapia and carp were swimming out in good numbers and residents made the most of the windfall.
Operating hand-held nets (that were more like nets made to ward off mosquitoes than to catch fish), residents had rustled up an inland, freshwater version of artisanal coastal fishing.
Every time the catch was being assessed, middle-aged Babu would exhort the younger lot to return the immature fish to the waters.
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There was a bit of noodling with a handful of residents catching the rushing tilapia and carp with their hands. Of course, for informed onlookers, this noodling can be many levels less exciting than what real noodling (taking big-sized catfish with one’s hands) is all about. For the fish catchers though, the sense of excitement was just as high. During the earlier week of rains — November 7-11 — this writer chanced upon largely tilapia-centred noodling in Selaiyur, as residents rushed in to catch fish that had flowed into a channel created for excess water from Selaiyur lake.
Fishing on-the-fly when a lake spills out its treasures during flooding is an indelible imprint of pastoral life in villages.
However, a sense of pleasant oddity cannot be helped when this pastoral scene plays out against the backdrop of sprawling and tall gated communities.
At Thalambur, diagonally opposite this scene, stood plush gated communities. The fishing assuming the flavour of a carnival, passersby slowed down their cars and motorcycles to take a fleeting look at it. Some stopped to take in the scene.
(‘Monsoon Diaries’ records how people respond to the unique situations that the North East Monsoon presents them with)
