Vicarious Nomads: Fish fall from the sky: Fort Kochin, India

I wake up to a man shaking my leg. “Kochi?” he asks. “Here.” We gather our belongings and scramble off the bus, from sleep to street in a matter of minutes, hoping we didn't forget anything. It is ten minutes to six in the morning. Super Bowl Sunday, I think. It is still dark.

An autorickshaw takes us over bridges, past the watermelon tree. No, watermelons do no miraculously grow on this tree. Thousands of watermelons sit beneath it. It is a watermelon central market of sorts. Hard to imagine how the watermelons on the bottom don't get smooshed or go bad. We pass communist signs and crowded churches. Ironically, these are the first signs of both communism and Catholicism that we have seen in India. Crowds gather outside the churches for lack of seats inside. Ganesha, Krishna, Vishnu, Hanuman have been replaced by images of Jesus and his mom.

Man made churches to honor God. God made trees to honor man. Anyone who has sat in the shade of a great old tree knows this. Buddha knew this. Now man makes great shrines to honor him. And another cycle is complete. Fort Kochin's trees are as great as any I've seen. Entire cricket matches occur under their canopies. They remind me of the live oaks in New Orleans, the way their trunk-sized branches stretch wide like yawning arms. And then there are the banyans—Bodhi trees—Buddha's eponymous tree of enlightenment, roots hanging like dreadlocks on a Sadhu.

Hours later, after sleeping off the overnight bus ride from Bangalore, we sip fresh pineapple juice in the shadows of Chinese fishing nets. These twenty-square-meter nets take six men to operate. The men pull on thirty meters of rope, every meter marked by a ten kilogram boulder—all of it attached to a huge log frame—a complicated counterweight to the nets. Like a laid back oil derrick, the nets slowly dip in and out of the water, producing three or four kilos of fish every few minutes. The crows watch carefully from the perimeter for an opportunity that never seems to come.

We choose a red snapper and some prawns for lunch. They are placed in a plastic bag and handed to a man whom we follow down the block and around the corner. He seats us under an umbrella at a plastic outdoor table and proceeds to clean and grill them in a delicious lemon ginger sauce.

After lunch, we wander pat children playing cricket under one of Fort Kochin's great trees. We hear a loud thud on the ground three feet to our right. We expect a cricket ball, but it's a fish, maybe six inches long. A tiger fish, to be precise. It's dead. Annette and I look at each other in wonderment with a chuckle. A fish just fell from the sky. Did the children throw it, we wonder. Their looks are innocent and the angle from which the fish dropped was wrong. We wander on, content to accept that in India, fish fall from the sky.

That evening we watch elephants adorned in gold parade around a temple, three dancing men and a processional rainbow of ornate brightly-colored umbrellas atop each. We watch a troupe of drumming braided girls in pink and men with metal rods through their skin and tongue. All are dancing. Surely, a fish falling from the sky isn't out of the ordinary.

As we sit on the balcony of our guest house, we watch a fish eagle a sparrow and a few crows alight in the great trees of Fort Kochin. And I remember the crows by the Chinese fishing nets. Perhaps an opportunity presented itself, its bounty only to be lost on a branch high up in a great tree overlooking a children's cricket match. If that is the case, why didn't the crow come for it's fish?