Triangular fins slicing the water circling ominously, a view past fangs into a monster’s stomach — say ‘great white sharks’ to anyone of a certain age and the instant reaction is ‘Jaws’, even though Stephen Spielberg has been apologising for what he did to the reputation of the Great White time and time again. For the record, one is more likely to be hit on the head by a coconut than eaten by a shark, but most people believe otherwise.
After completing his PhD on this apex predator, Raj Shekhar Aich chose to spend a season on a shark boat in New Zealand in 2015 that took out tourists who wanted to cage dive with sharks. Shark cage diving is practiced in only five places in the world and the Bluff in New Zealand is the southernmost point.
It was a narrow world where tourists came and went, eager for an encounter that they themselves were uncertain about, cold in winter with uncertain weather conditions and days spent patrolling the waters on the lookout for sharks.
‘Iridescent Skin’ arose from Aich’s experiences. Oddly enough, he himself was terrified of sharks before his first dive. It came, he wrote, from the visuals that flood the media of sharks with open mouths lunging towards their prey which were the result of bait put out by photographers. He wrote about the cage being similar to the machans on which Jim Corbett waited for his man-eaters. Though the environment was very different, what both had in common was the sense of waiting for impending danger. However, after his first encounter, Aich’s note changed — he wrote of the grace of an almost spiritual experience in a luminous environment.
The book is a mix of memoir and anthropological record. Aich describes the weather, the pacing up and down on the boat as he, Mike the boat owner, and the tourists wait for the sharks to be within diving distance and conversations with the tourists — by then he had become such an expert on sharks that he able to detect which of the tourists had a genuine passion as opposed to those who were there only for the thrill of it. People were accompanied by their partners who were terrified but came to show support. They spoke of nightmares —how walking down a dark lane at night could conjure up images of sharks floating through endless veils of water— and of the fear of shark bites, since a few knew people who had lost limbs.
Aich had a difficult time moving from place to place as he looked for affordable accommodations. He was overrun by rats on one occasion, plagued by the cold and leaking roofs, but he persisted in his goal. In between, he interweaves memories of his grandfather and the house he built from elephant grass when he moved to Bengal from Bangladesh, then East Bengal. His chapters have quirky headings like ‘Social Science of a Big Biting Fish’, ‘The Shark with the Pink Sunglasses’, and ‘How Else will you see Swedish Girls in Bluff’ which balance the serious quality of his content with the experiences covered in his memoirs and with fleeting descriptions of his old house at home which was finally rebuilt.
The book is the first of its kind multispecies ethnography, analysing people’s feelings before and after encountering sharks. While the study of sharks and encounters is immersive, equally immersive are the anecdotes that make the story more than a mere record for marine anthropologists — the sign on the shark dive cage for instance, which says ‘No Body Parts Outside the Cage’ or the fact that a woman dives into shark-filled waters to retrieve a lead from the shark cage hoist and makes Aich and the tourists feel stupid about having so many qualms. The sharks have their names and their personalities —one called Rocky is known for jumping out of the water to see what kind of fan following he has on the boat— much as they do in a tiger reserve.
Trained as an artist, Aich begins each chapter with his paintings of sharks. For those who know Bengali, he has a series of poetic names for his sections, ‘Abhishar’, ‘Opekkha’, and ‘Milan’ that mean tryst, waiting, and the final meeting with the beloved.
There have been many debates on the subject but it is true that a greater understanding of sharks and their place in the environmental scheme of things may add to enhanced shark conservation measures —sharks and tigers are fairly similar in their apex predator role— though to clarify matters, not all sharks are apex predators since they come in a wide variety.
(The book ‘Iridescent Skin: A multispecies journey of White Sharks and Caged humans’ has been written by Dr. Raj Shekhar Aich. It has been published by Niyogi Books.)
