one fish

I wanted to catch a fish. One fish. A real one, big enough to put on the table, so that for once dinner would have a thing on it that I had brought home myself, with my own hands, off my own line.

There is a river at the back of the kampung, brown and slow on top, and an old wooden jetty going out over it, and at first light the uncles sit on that jetty with their lines and say nothing for hours and go home with fish. I had watched them do it my whole life. It looked like the easiest thing in the world. You sit. You wait. A fish arrives. You take the fish home. How hard could a thing be when all it asks is that you sit down.

Atok came with me. Atok is my grandfather, and he does not really come anywhere, he stays in his chair with his radio, but the river is the one place he will move himself for, so he came and sat on the bank with the little transistor going next to him, the football turned down low, half listening, the way he half listens to everything that is not the radio. He was not going to fish. He was going to sit. Atok at the river is the same as Atok at home, only wetter underneath, and he brought the radio so the river would know he had somewhere more important to be.

I did not sit. I am not a sitter. I built an operation.

A fish, I had decided, is a problem, and a problem is a thing you solve with a system. I set a target weight, which I made up, because I do not actually know what a fish weighs, but a mission needs a target and a number sounds official. I lined the gang down the jetty so we covered the whole width of the river, all the angles, so that no fish could possibly get past us without meeting a hook. I had a plan for every part of it.

Aiman set up first, because Aiman sets up first wherever there is anyone to charge. He had a tin of worms and he was renting them out, one sen a worm, two sen for a lucky one. The lucky worms were exactly the same as the other worms. I said so, loudly. Aiman said luck cannot be seen, that is the whole nature of luck, and he rented three lucky worms to Kavi before I could stop him, and Kavi paid, because Kavi will pay for anything that sounds exciting.

Ah Wei was on the bait bucket, which I knew was a mistake even as I did it. Ah Wei's family runs a stall and Ah Wei always has food. He cannot bear to watch food go to waste. The bucket was full of keropok, for throwing in the river to call the fish. You see the trouble. The keropok went down slowly. Not into the river. Into Ah Wei. He looked sorrier and emptier the lower the bucket got, and he said throwing good keropok into a river was worse than eating it, and he may well be right, but the fish got none of it, and the bucket got light, and the river stayed uncalled.

I cast my line. I cast it the way I do everything, hard, with my whole body, like I was trying to throw the river itself onto the opposite bank. The hook went out a long way and came back with weed. I cast again. Weed. I cast a third time and caught a slipper, an old one, from the bottom of the river, somebody's lost selipar from years ago, and for one bright moment I was excited, because at least it was something, and then I remembered I was fishing and not collecting other people's footwear, and I dropped it back in, and it sank like it was glad to go.

The uncles further down the jetty caught fish. They did it without a system. They did it without a target weight. They sat, and they were quiet, and now and then a line went tight and a fish came up, calm, like the river owed them and was paying it back in small instalments. They did not even look pleased. They looked like men collecting a thing that was always going to be theirs.

We did not look like that. I had covered the whole river and out-planned every fish in it, and between the entire gang we had caught one slipper and emptied one keropok bucket into Ah Wei.

Then I caught a fish.

It was the size of my thumb. It may have been smaller than my thumb. It was a fish the way a full stop is a sentence. But it was a fish, on my hook, on my line, and I held it up and the whole jetty looked at it, and I had a decision to make, because you do not keep a fish that small. You put it back so it can grow up into a fish worth keeping. Everybody knows that.

So I made a speech about it. I could not help it. I told the little fish that I was letting it go. I told it that it had its whole life ahead of it, that this was mercy, that one day it would be a great big fish and it would remember this moment and this merciful girl. I lowered it gently into the water and let it swim off, free, into its long and grateful future, and the very second it was gone I wanted it back so badly I nearly went in after it. It was the only fish I had caught in my whole life, and I had given it a speech and released it. Mercy, I have learned, is a thing you regret the instant it has swum away.

After that I went quiet.

Not because I gave up. I want that clear, because it matters. I went quiet on purpose. I had finally run all the way out of clever things to try. The only thing left was the thing the uncles actually do, which turns out to be the hardest thing of all. Sit still. Be quiet. Put one line in and leave it there. Stop throwing the river around. Stop covering all the angles at once. One line, one worm, and the patience not to pull it up every ten seconds to check whether the patience is working yet.

It is much harder than it looks. It took everything I had. I sat on the end of the jetty and I held one line and I did not move and I did not talk, which the gang found so completely unlikely that they all wandered off down the bank to do something with more shouting in it.

And the line went tight.

Not a weed tight. A live tight, a pull, a thing on the other end that did not want to be on the other end. I brought it in slow, the way you have to, my heart going like a small fast drum, and it was a fish. A real one. Not big. But a hand longer than the thumb one, with proper scales on it, flicking and silver and mine, caught on a quiet line by a girl who had finally, for once in her life, sat completely still.

Atok put the radio down in the grass.

He got up from the bank, which Atok does about twice a year. He came out onto the jetty and looked at my fish for a long time, the way he looks at his durian trees, like it was a thing worth looking at properly. Then he said, "Cukup besar." Big enough. And from Atok, big enough is a whole parade with a band in it.

We took it home. And here is the part I did not plan and could not have planned. Atok cooked it with me. Not for me. With me. He showed me how to clean it, his big slow hands and my small fast ones working at the one small fish over the sink, and then we fried it in the pan with a bit of garlic, the two of us standing at the stove, and the whole time he talked. Atok, who answers a long question with three flat words and then turns the radio up to end the conversation, stood at the stove and talked. About the river. About which fish bite at first light and which ones wait until evening and why. About a big one he caught when he was about my size, holding his hands so far apart that no fish that size has ever lived. He had left the radio out by the river. Nobody went back for it.

The fish, when we ate it, was about two bites. Two bites, shared round the table, gone in a minute. I did not mind. I had wanted to put a fish on the table myself, and I had, and the fish turned out to be the smallest part of the whole thing.

Atok asked me when we were going again. I said tomorrow, first light. He said the evening is better, for the big ones. I said first light. He said evening. We stood at the empty pan and argued about it, gently, the two of us, about a fishing trip we were both going to go on anyway.