Fish, friendship, and a fudge

The Hindu

28-06-2025

I once read an old English book on fishing, one of those charmingly archaic volumes filled with both practical advice and poetic digressions, which mentioned a guest house on the banks of the Giri river, about 10 kilometres below Solan towards Rajgarh. The memory of that book stayed with me, tucked away like a forgotten map. Years later, it resurfaced at just the right moment. It was near midnight, and we were descending from Himachal Pradesh, weary from the road and in search of a place to rest. I remembered the book and its quiet recommendation, and so, guided by instinct and half-remembered lines, we found our way to that very guest house on the river, a favourite quarry of British anglers of Mahaseers, an angling challenge.
It was just as the author had described: a simple, lovely place nestled beside the Giri, where the river widened into a calm pool. The surroundings were clean and undisturbed, with low hills gently enclosing the valley, as if sheltering it from the rest of the world. A place utterly still, yet brimming with quiet life. Literature, after all, has long borne witness to rivers not just as locations but as moral and symbolic thresholds, from the meditative solitude of Izaak Walton's The Complete Angler to the spiritual journeys across the Ganga in Indian mythology. Rivers are indeed not merely backdrops but undying protagonists.
Modest in form, the Giri carries the soul of a river, ancient and awake. It flows down through Himachal's foothills, like a whispered hymn, to join the Yamuna at Ponta Sahib, that old, sacred town of pilgrimage and memory, a site where literature, history, and faith intertwine. And from there, its waters merge with the great Yamuna, which eventually pours into the Ganga, India's most timeless river steeped in reverence and legends. To sit beside the Giri, then, was to be part of that immense journey, a thin stream flowing into the heart of the subcontinent.
Blissful days
We spent three blissful days upriver from that sacred site, a fleeting spell of unbroken serenity full of sunlight and quiet rapture. We basked by the water, swam in its cold blueish-green clarity, cast our lines for the elusive Mahaseer, and relished long, simple meals under the sky. Every afternoon and evening featured fish, either those we had (miraculously) managed to catch, or, more often, the result of a more pragmatic solution.
One morning, as we descended from the guest house to the water's edge, we came upon a local fisherman who had already laid claim to the day's abundance. While we enacted our slow-motion drama of enlightened angling, he skipped straight to success without props or pretence. He had stretched a wide net across a narrow bend in the river, and when the early morning fish swam unsuspectingly into it, he hauled in nearly two dozen hefty, slippery Mahaseers without the ancient meditations of bait and stillness. Beautiful tough creatures, golden monsters in their own right, the 'tigers of the river'.
We hadn't caught a thing ourselves. But drawn by the sight, and driven by appetite, we asked if he would part with four of his catch. He agreed readily, seemed pleased in fact, and took half a rupee for the lot. It felt like a small betrayal of the sport, of the quiet ethic to catch a fish, not trap and slaughter it in cold blood. There was something crude, almost violent, in that indiscriminate haul, a kind of rupture in the intimacy between angler and fish. I thought of my days in Cambridge, fishing in the River Cam and how, as the fishing principles dictate, we would unhook the fish and let it go back into the river. Understandably, the ethics of fishing, of sportsmanship, restraint, respect for the life one draws from the water, haunted us gently, never enough to stop us from eating, but always enough to make us think. Hunger won over principle that morning. Unlike hunters returning from a thoroughly undeserved triumph, we shuffled back to the guesthouse, fish flapping, egos inflated, and mischief bubbling under the veneer of modesty. We told the others that we had caught them ourselves, a harmless fiction, and the breakfast that followed was among the finest I remember. Simply boiled potatoes, fresh grilled fish, and that shared sense of satisfaction that only a river morning can give.
And so the days passed. Morning swims, afternoon naps, evenings of firelight and laughter. Our modest attempts at fishing continued, more for the pleasure of the ritual than the hope of success. And the fisherman continued his efficient work upstream, which we disapproved of in principle but quietly relied on in practice. The Mahasheer, grilled and spiced, always made its way to our plates. Fishing for Mahaseer is, indeed, less about the catch and more about the journey. Immersed in tranquil landscapes and flowing mountain rivers, the experience offers a deep connection with nature. The excitement of encountering such a powerful fish adds to the thrill, but even without a catch, the adventure, the serenity, and the sheer beauty of the surroundings make it unforgettable.
In the end, it was not just the fishing or the setting that made those three days special. It was the feeling of being out of time, of living by the pace of water, sun, and hunger. Of watching a small, unassuming river move with quiet purpose toward the sacred confluence with the Yamuna at Ponta Sahib, and then onward, toward the Ganga, carrying with it the dust of mountains, the breath of forests, and the fragments of stories like ours. Standing on the banks, a thought came to my mind that rivers are not only geographical features, but carriers of civilisation, memory, and language.
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