Waiting for a ferry on the shores of Ganga ji in Kolkata, a small boy is fishing on the jetty. He has a rope attached to his wrist and flings his line out with expert efficiency. If I didn’t know any better I would have assumed that he was fishing for fish and that he intended to stun his catch with the magnets attached to the end of his line. In fact he was fishing for rupees downstream of a ghat where people were washing and making offerings to the Goddess River. Rupee coins are light and float a while before sinking.
“Catching much?” I asked him. He shrugs in the “What to do” perennial answer of Indians. “Give me a go,” I asked.
He hands me the rope. I fling it out a few times and garner a one rupee coin from Ganga ji.
He tells me that I can’t have the coin. I told him that I am Laxmi for him today and that this will be a very good fishing day for him before I board the ferry.
Along the way to the next jetty I see a boy swimming out towards our boat with all the power of an Olympic Athlete. He seems to be heading on a collision course with the boat, he stops from time to time to assess our speed, the current and his location. Eventually he reaches the boat and catches hold of one of the tyres attached to the side of the boat. For a while he surfs alongside the boat. After meeting the fisher boy on the jetty I know that this guy is not giving himself a cheap thrill but another of the hundreds of people whose income is derived solely from the beneficence of Mother Ganga. He rattles around inside the empty tyres to see if any coins have lodged themselves in there and swims away.
Downstream of Howrah Bridge we pass a fishing boat of men who are fishing in the same manner as the boy on the jetty. I think about the cycle of life of an Indian rupee. Perhaps some soul recently arrived in the city full of hope for a better life and one of the ceaseless flow of human traffic that crosses Howrah Bridge every day has thrown a hard earned rupee into the Mother River in thanks or prayer. It’s something I do too, no different to throwing a coin into Tripoli Fountain and making a wish. Something you do for ‘luck’ and never think of again.
Its that attention to the smallest detail that is the marker of survival in the City of Joy.