Travel classic: Travels With The Fish

C.Y. Gopinath’s Travels With the Fish appeared at a time, back in the old millennium, when Indian travelogues were thin on the ground, and funny, quirky, spontaneous ones even more so. Gopinath made his own rules, slipping in accounts of the pigs of Bhusawal and travels in rundown Bihar along with stories of his adventures in fancier places—Jerusalem and Chicago, Australia and France. The fish that he travels with actually stays at home and proffers bookish advice a priori and post facto. This armchair traveller is old school too; he knows his stuff, in that brainier pre-Internet age, from the Condé Nast magazines he collects and has internalised. Best of all is the food. Many stories come with a recipe thrown in—for the sublime aubergine and chicken that Gopinath ate at the home of his Cairo taxi driver which he reconstructed with much trial and error over years; or the green curry for which he smuggled in galangal by the suitcase from Thailand. The wry tone gives way to ecstasy only when he is describing eating, with a description of a humble rice and dal meal he had in Rajgir taking the cake. This marvellous book could, just as well, have been Travels with the Dish.