Read Following Fish: Travels Around the Indian Coast for Free Online

attendees to him. He smiled indulgently, glanced at a colleague, and then said, as if softening the blow to a child who’d discovered that Santa Claus was fictional. ‘Well, there were also ten thousand or so vegetarians and they take their medicine in jaggery. And many attendants for the asthmatics were also present, you must remember. So the crowd was large.’
    ‘But was it four lakhs?’
    ‘No. Definitely not,’ Swamy answered.
    On my way down the stairs, I saw a poster hanging on the wall. It showed many fish, lying quite dead in a net, being pulled in from the ocean. The caption read: ‘Fish is our health.’ Suddenly, I wasn’t so sure.

    The bleeding taxpayers aside, the other prong of the opposition to the Goud treatment attacks the medicine itself, the yellow paste that the family claims is concocted on the principles of Ayurveda. A few years earlier, the Gouds had sent samples of the paste to the Central Drug Research Institute in Lucknow and to the Indian Institute of Chemical Biology in Kolkata. The latter’s report, which Harinath photocopied and handed to me, refused to offer any opinions about the paste’s curative abilities. It would only offer, grudgingly, that the paste wouldn’t actually kill you—because an assay revealed heavy metal concentrations to be within the limits prescribed by law—and that it had no steroids secretly working against the asthma.
    Harinath also had another letter, which, mystifyingly, he freely showed me. It was from the Department of Ayurveda,Yoga and naturopathy, Unani, Siddha and Homoeopathy, or AYUSH, a government body that purports to govern such alternative medicine. The AYUSH letter refused to classify the Gouds’ cure as Ayurveda, calling it ‘at best … a folklore medicine practised by a traditional healer, who is not institutionally qualified.’
    The thing with conviction, of course, is that it can operate to extreme lengths on the side of both belief and disbelief. Harinath, in his quest to persuade me of his paste’s medicinal properties, allowed himself to be swept into a current of questionable rhetoric. ‘We have test-tube babies now, so why don’t we believe the legend of Duryodhana and his brothers being born of a ball of flesh?’ he asked. ‘We have rocket ships now, so why not the
vimanas
of the Ramayana?’
    Narisetti, the advocate of rationalism, is no less vulnerable to making flatly provocative statements. ‘The government should be supporting only culture, not religion. Religion is a superstitious belief. It is not a part of culture,’ he told me. But religion, and particularly in India, informs so much of our culture, I offered—the food we eat, the clothes we wear, the festivals we celebrate, the classical music we listen to, the art and theatre we support. ‘That can all survive without religion,’ he said. And then, a step further: ‘The government’s job is to educate people about this, to show that religion is just a superstitious belief. The government should reduce the presence of religion gradually until we finally get rid of it. That’s when we will live in a really secular society.’
    The two men, in a sense, were funhouse mirror versions of each other—Harinath with his faith, and Narisetti with his faith in the sheer irrelevance of faith. But somehow, to believe as deeply as Harinath seemed to believe, even in something as unfounded as his asthma remedy, jarred me less than Narisetti’s dismissal of religion altogether. For the first time in my life, I felt moreunsettled by the views of the faithless than by the views of the faithful.

    Even if the entire event was a manufactured sham (as opposed to an unconscious sham, and in the intent to dupe lies a vast difference), nobody could tell me exactly what purpose such a sham would serve. One argument had it that the Goud community formed an important vote bank in Andhra Pradesh, and that politicians preferred to support the Bathini Goud family rather than offend the