The Fish Market

After 48 hours of gruelling train journey, I reached Chennai. I had made sudden plans to go home for Holi. It felt great to be back home but I was still swaying due to the long train journey. Our house is on the third floor and as I looked down I felt the whole building was swaying.

My dad asked me to freshen up so that we could go to the market to get some fish for lunch as it was a sunday. I took bath and put on fresh clothes and got ready for the market. Usually we get fish from nearby fish shop, but dad had different plans for the day.

After a 5 km drive, we reached the fish market. This is the first time I have ever seen a fish market. As I looked from the outside, the crowd inside simply amused me. It seemed there was no space to put my feet to get in. As usual, the whole area was stinking with fishy smell. Now my head was spinning with greater rpm. Somehow I made my way in and then landed my foot right into a puddle of dirty water. It had rained the previous day and the ground below was damp. I cursed myself and the rain. I pulled up my trousers and hopped on dry areas as I made my way in.

I could not understand where to look- at the fishes or the ground below.

The wholesalers were shouting out their varieties and prices and the retailers were shouting to get people aside as they pulled their heavy crates of fishes meant for their shops. It was so noisy that I remembered when our class in school was noisy, our teacher used to exclaim, "Is this a class or a fish market?". I would say our class was a 1000 times better than a fish market.

Till now whatever I have written about fish market is quite common and usual.

But what I was impressed about this fish market was the variety of fishes. As I went inside, I was baffled by the variety of fishes - big, small, fresh water fishes and deep sea fishes. I saw fish that were transparent -one could see their bone, then I saw golden and silver fishes. I bet I also saw sword fish. I saw varieties of fishes being sold that I had earlier seen only on NatGeo or discovery. Wish I knew their names so that I could write them down here.

My dad bought a vareity of fish and asked if I would like to have prawns too. I said why not. Till this day I had seen only one vareity of prawns but now I was looking at some 10-12 varieties. Finally we bought tiger prawns -they were bigger and had yellow and black stripes.

There were also few varieties of crabs being sold. All were alive and tied up. My mom forbid us to bring crabs as she refused to cook them. As we made our way out through the other exit, I saw two varieties of octopus being sold -one was small,white with red spots and other was large, grey and pink. I thought only Japanese and bengalis were voracious fish eaters, now I think I can add Chennaiites to their list. They do have a great taste for fishes.

At the end of the day, I would say fish cooked by mom was extremely delicious and it made me forget my fatigue of two days of train jouney