| Lavanya Arora | October 2025 | Flash Fiction |
When I first met you, fish whisperer, you were digging a spade-thick canal next to the backshore casuarina patch. Anti-dam, you called it, pointing with your deodar-leaf finger towards the swell of the backwater. I wanted to hook myself onto you like a lamprey on a basking shark right then, but… without the whole parasitic bit.
When I met you next, fish whisperer, you smiled, holding a bouquet as large as your heart, laden with the casuarina trees’ arthritic leaves. A sole embalmed olive ridley baby you’d found whittling away towards the waves at Galgibaga beach a few days ago rested on them, our future generations already thankful for its transformation into an heirloom.
“An open casket, endangered viewing,” you’d said, remembering from our first encounter that I loved wordplay and macabre things. And simple efforts.
The backwaters swell, waiting for the spade-thick fissure you create every so often, so its sweetness could rush towards the ever-consuming salt of the sea.
When I first met you, fish whisperer, harpoon for hands felt like the promise of a never-ending feast. You said you’d cook some freshly caught bangda when we meet next, at your house, just a few hundred meters into the backwater. “How can you catch and eat a dance form?” I’d asked, confused, ignorant about the local names of fishes. Funny, how the same word can mean fish and dance at the same time in not-so-distant languages. Mine, Punjabi. Yours, Konkani. You’d laughed without holding back, just like the way you danced and fed all kinds of fried fish to your friends, even if it left you with less than enough.
Years passed submerged in the spectacle of your generosity.
One day, I woke up wearing gills.
Even before I met you, fish whisperer, I’d lived underwater for three decades. A sea cow floating in my own world, far away from here. Now, I can finally breathe without the need to surface.
Look, there are the bones of the mackerel you cooked for me. There, the shell of the olive ridley turtle. A niche of whimpering fish hides between half-bleached coral and anemone. Occasionally, a fishing net twirls in the sea like the hem of a salsa skirt, disrupting the dance of the sardines. I know you feel the same warmth when I call out to you, “Darling, look, you’ve forgotten to harvest the seagrass again.”
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Lavanya Arora (they/he) is an independent researcher and writer currently based in Bengaluru, India. Their work has appeared or forthcoming in Frontier Poetry, Soft Union, Tamarind Literary, RIC Journal, Kitaab, and elsewhere.
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