Pisces 1 (2021)
My saving grace in times of hunger. Salty, oily and hearty with the unexpected blue zebra skin. You can go with tuna or sardines, but mackerel holds court as the deluxe option in the canned aisle. It’s something bought in a good mood, when the world feels abundant and an extra twenty pence stacks on like nothing.
At a political moment where the British working class is gaping split, this fish humbles me, reminds me of basic allegiances- things a foreign education, a university degree and white-collar jobs can blow-torch asunder. “Why not get it fresh? It’s much better,” say those who clearly don’t understand. It’s a fish that flags up strangers and enemies alike.
Noshing it, I’ve had something like the clichéd your-food-smells-like-shit diaspora moment. Well, almost. White Britain loves canned fish as part of itself, it’s not a racialised food by any stretch. The otherness comes along the lines of class, and that’s a conversation wracked with so much guilt and so little understanding.
Pisces 2 (2021)
Fillets? No dice. Though rohu is less bony than ilisha and khoi, it’s also best enjoyed with a clear diary so you can snap vertebrae and suck salty jelly at leisure. Eating these fish is a slow dance at knifepoint; bites glide across flesh to catch pins, spines slip through lips, molar tips grind against tiny bean rumps, incisors sashay through zesty lime. Misstep and risk a shivved throat.
Though I can’t read or write in Sylheti and am an awful swimmer among my aquapeople, I consider myself literate in its tastes. You can count the establishments on this island that do a good rohu mas salan on your hands. By that slipshod statistic, it’s a commercially unavailable taste; altogether prestige, home comfort, elixir of life.
How has it resisted commercialisation so well? Is it the labour of love in lightly roasting the moshla right, shaking the pan to not shred the fish to flakes? Or the time it takes to simmer the skin into a limey-gold shimmering broth of electrolytes and fats? My guess is it’s as Bong Joon Ho says of global cinema “once you overcome the 1-inch-tall barrier of subtitles, you will be introduced to so many more amazing films,” except here that inch is a fishbone.