The Feast

As a child I most looked forward to Sundays because it meant a visit with my mother to our neighbourhood’s bustling fish market - boisterous fishmongers trying to catch my mother’s eye, ice machines miraculously churning away, cats feasting on surplus, and row upon row of the freshest catch - Rohu, Katla, Koi, Chingri, Parshe and the precious King of all Fish, the Hilsa. The day my mother would have enough saved to buy Hilsa, it would be cooked using her special mustard and banana leaf recipe and all family members would skip breakfast and promptly present themselves solemn with hunger and anticipation. Never did I imagine I would grow up into a world where our water bodies and the life that inhabits them would be at such grave risk from senseless exploitation and pollution. 

I was hooked the moment I heard about the fisherwomen of Pulicat lake in Tamil Nadu (a South Indian province) and their feast for the state’s top brass of politicians, as a means to protest against a massive port expansion that would virtually eradicate the lake and all it’s life. Researching further, I saw the lives of the impoverished prawn pickers - the catch they once found in an hour now took them eight hours standing in the sweltering sun. I heard stories of ‘fish kill’ near industrialised zones -  fishermen would find scores of dead fish just floating on the lake’s surface. I met communities that had been divided ruthlessly with promises of jobs and prosperity while their lake was quietly ravaged. And I ate delectable and generous meals at their humble homes, using catch they had gone to great lengths to find just to show me what the lake could do if allowed to regenerate - “the secret ingredient after all is the water itself”, they would say. I knew I had to tell the story of these people and their delicately balanced world.

Filmed in a village on the banks of Pulicat lake itself, and in the last remaining mangroves and hidden pristine waters of the wetland, The Feast was made possible only by the involvement of the local community - fisherfolk and their families, village heads, activists, cooks, priests, librarians and folk musicians. And many of them being lovers of cinema have even acted in the film, playing themselves. Their stories have inspired our writing and in the narrative, I’ve tried to depict the courageous effort of a fisherwoman for whom food becomes the last weapon of dissent. But caught between her daughter’s future and her cherished lake, there are no easy answers to be found here.