Netting Fish
He rides up on a bicycle by the ornamental pond next to which I am sitting; a coffee-skinned man whose young son follows behind on a red bicycle of his own. The child’s bike has stabilisers and so can stand on its own when the son dismounts and while his father props his own bike against the bench opposite my own. Between us is the glassy surface of the pond, reflecting the billowed clouds above. The man calls out, a name I do not quite catch, and a girl appears from behind one of the buildings which surround the nearby bandstand. She is wearing a checkered blue school-dress and does not have a bicycle. Perhaps when the man and the boy picked her up from school she rode on the luggage rack of her father’s bicycle, or on the cross-bar, else she sits on the saddle and holds her father’s waist as he leans forwards to peddle, but in the park she walks a little way behind.
When she catches up to the boys, the father’s sharp face impassive, the brother’s round and excited, the man takes from his bike a net which he had tied there either with elastic bands or string. He also produces a bag of crumbled bread and crusts which I had not noticed until that moment and, these two items in hand, he sits down at the water’s edge and folds his sandled feet in under his knees. The children crouch down either side of him and watch as he drops in a piece of bread, following it with the head of the net. For a few seconds nothing happens, only the clouds move overhead and the boy’s eager face is reflected in the water. His father warns him not to lean out so far and the boy draws back, waiting. I wonder if there is anything alive in the pond, having seen neither fish nor frogs there before, and only occassionally ducks whose scarcity suggests they are not residents of the park and instead are only passing through.
As they wait the three of them talk, switching continually between English and another language which could be Punjabi or Hindi or Urdu, or some other language I am unfamiliar with. The air is warm. Suddenly there is a small splash and the man brings up the net with an orange fish jerking and thrashing around in it. He raises it up a few centimetres above the water for the children to see, holds it there so they can get a good look at it, and then lowers the net back into the water and twists it round so the fish can swim away. The boy and his sister are delighted and with renewed enthusiasm await the next one. The father drops in some more bread and, again, a fish, this time silver. It flashes in the muted sunlight as it wriggles impotently about. I wonder if it is distressed by its unexpected capture, if the man is cruel for doing it. The children’s faces light up, the fish is returned to the water with a fuller belly.
Several minutes pass, bringing with them more fish, and a diminishing enthusiasm in the boy, if not in the man or the girl. The boy becomes restless, tired of the passive fishing game, and gets up and straddles his bike, which has stood waiting for him, balanced on its stabilisers. In search of new wonders to satiate his curiosity, he begins to cycle around the pond, coming soon to the side where I sit. As he passes me and slows down and stares at me unabashedly with the same scrutiny he gave the first orange fish. I glance up from my notepad and smile at him. Apparently satisfied he smiles back and carries on his patrol of the pond-side, his short legs pumping the white peddles at maniacal speed. A while later, the three of them leave.
