Fishing for Compliments

If you have never seen an iridescent mullet leap out of the water at night,put Oyster Opera in northern Kerala on your bucket list. You may even spot a glowing algal bloom if you are lucky. The capricious backwaters around this eco-resort,55 km south of Kasaragod,may just have inspired the magical realism of Ang Lee’s Life of Pi. But nothing,not even the gorgeous 3D graphics of the film,can prepare you for the sight of a school of fish flipping like silver pennies inches from your face. Like memories fashioned from molten glass,they glint for a moment and plunge right back into the quiet depths. The secret is not to yield to the silence. Row,row your canoe,startle the fish immersed in the poetry of the night and whoop like an impetuous child in the moonlight. One of the best-kept secrets at the seven-year-old resort on Thekkekad island in Padne,Kerala,mullet fishing is an activity traditionally undertaken at night,by the light of a gas lantern kept on the boat. Disturbed by the light,the fish jump and the bigger ones fall into the boat,to be turned into delicious kanambu curry for dinner.

After a night of canoeing,we are woken by the rhythmic thump of oars beaten against the sides of wood boats; it is a popular tactic,invented to scare entire schools of fish into waiting nets. The drumbeat also drives us out of our mosquito nets and into the palm-fringed Valiyaparamba backwaters for a vigorous swim. Then,an open-air shower in the rustic cottage — one of 10 dotting the six-and-a-half acre expanse of the resort — is all it takes to banish the thought of winter. It is a glorious 28 degrees and a breakfast of aappam made with fermented tender coconut water and other local delicacies is the perfect start to the day. We vacillate between a game of beach volleyball and a tour of the mussel farming nets. The Green Mussels Farmers Society,a self-help group founded in 1996 by GS Gul Mohammed,66,an aquaculture pioneer and the man behind Oyster Opera,today encompasses over 6,000 farmers,many of whom are women. Villages in the region,including Thekkekad,account for more than three-fourths of the country’s mussel production — four of the villages together managed a record yield of 20,000 tonnes three years ago. Production has fallen since,but Mohammed has planned to introduce farmers to open-sea culture,which he says could yield three crops a year.

Winter is mussel seeding season in Padne. Tiny mussel seeds,harvested recently,are strung along long ropes and suspended vertically from a raft tied with a matrix of strings. In a week,colonies of indigenous green mussels will set along the ropes. In three months,the molluscs will have matured,fetching as much as Rs 78 a kg in the local market. Mohammed singlehandedly introduced mussel farming on coir ropes and continues to support the community through ups and downs. When the European Union banned imports of backwater-harvested mussels from India,“the farmers carried the mussels on bicycles and on baskets trying to sell them to locals,” he says. “Now they are a popular delicacy and fetch better prices than exports did.”

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Mohammed has a healthy disregard for conventional tourism and all its concomitant fretfulness. “Take whichever boat you can handle,” he tells us,pointing to one-and two-man canoes,a country boat and a trawler. At Oyster Opera,the world is indeed your oyster. Go island-hopping on a row boat to Monkey Island,home to monkeys,beavers and dense mangroves echoing with the pitched cries of tropical birds. Ask Mohammed to take you to the man-made estuary dug by locals over 80 years ago to flush out water from their fields,only to have high tide wash the paddies away. Enjoy the sea at Sandwich Beach,13 km south of the resort. We loped along the long,sandy stretch all by ourselves,watching the waves curl their fingers around a football as we kicked it around. The sun turned the colour of a fresh wound and we headed back to our mud cottages for fresh-squeezed grape juice and a snooze on the deck chairs.

The months of December to March are also the most conducive for a visit to Bekal fort,Kerala’s largest and best-preserved fort immortalised on celluloid by Mani Ratnam. Bekal is less than an hour’s drive from Oyster Opera,the beaches there just as spectacular and awash with the culture of fisherfolk. Scorched by the sun,the citadel’s wide steps lead to a picture-perfect bastion with sprawling views of the Arabian Sea lapping at its walls. Skirt the bastion and climb down to a calm beach to watch fishermen tug their trawlers into the sea. Coastal north Kerala in winter is like a massive freehand drawing come to life; its sun,sand and azure skies will favour you with perfect recall until summer comes around.