Zen is a school of Mahayana Buddhism which emphasizes the idea that ultimate truth must be experienced firsthand rather than pursued through study. (Wikipedia)
Have you ever been fishing? If not you will probably miss half the fun of this piece, but go ahead anyway. The fact is, I have gone fishing lots of time with my dad when I was a kid. With him it was a hobby and a passion. For me, at the beginning at least, it was a chance to run along the grassy meadows on the bank of the lake, basking in the afternoon sun and no interruptions from adults. It wasn’t until I was nine that I actually held a fishing rod and was allowed to fish for the tiny fishes we fondly call putimach.
Now, before I write this, I would like you to give you a visual of it. Haflong, where I grew up was a hill station in N.E. India. And as hill stations go, it had winding roads with old British Bungalows, with colorful Dandelions and Chrysanthemum bushes – very storybook pretty. The life there was also slow, paced out, people seemed to be in a content daze- not in any hurry to achieve or prove anything.
For me, it meant growing up without the peer pressure and rat race of city life. It was basically eat, sleep, climb trees, smash the neighbor’s window pane with cricket ball; and go fishing with dad. It was also a somewhat about trying to get dad’s attention, I guess.
So most days we would set out around 3.30 p.m. in the afternoon when the Sun had lost its “burning” intensity. We will get a fishing pack ready, with the tackles, wires, hooks and bait - mashed bread and honey mostly, and sometimes worms (do I hear eeewwwss??). It was a pleasant 4 to 5 km walk to the Lake and then dad would cast the wire, set up his fishing rod and settle down to wait for a bite. And I would ferret around for pine cones and other knick knacks. Those were the most relaxed times I ever spent in my life.
Then, when I was around nine I shot up in height and dad presumed I was big enough to handle the responsibility of fishing. So I got a rod – a straight smooth piece of bamboo cut from the tip the bamboo tree making it very thin. To it was tied a thick string, the ones they use for stitching umbrellas. Unlike big fish, a puti barely weighs 50 gms and hardly required the Nylon fishing wire used by the adults.
Oh and we needed an indicator. See when you fish in still water you loop a piece of reed to the wire, around 3 inches long, which has a spongy filling inside making it float. It's weighed down with a small piece of lead which keeps the reed floating perpendicularly, with half of it under water. So when the fish bites, the tug on the line will make the reed bob down underwater.
Now that I have bored you with the details (having a Frederick Forsyth moment here), let me get back on the art part. Fishing, as my dad explained, was not about how many fish you catch. It’s about outsmarting that one sly fish that wouldn’t get caught. It’s all about the hunt, you could say. This of course meant sitting on the water's edge (not looming over it though as reflection scares away fishes) and watching the reed or fatna as we call it gently float on the surface.
With your concentration solely on that reed, the world almost slows down. You are so focused that you forget about the mundane problems of your life, almost like meditation. Your senses get sharper and sharper until you can hear odd bird calls here and there, fishes making small ripples on the water, the sun falling through the trees making bizarre patters on the ground. And then suddenly, it seems that it’s you who is moving and the water is actually still. It’s an optical illusion, but most people don’t sit around long enough to get that feeling.
Whether I got a fish at the end of the day or not, I rarely came away feeling angry or frustrated from these fishing trips. They taught me patience and peace at a time when the words held no meaning for me. And most of all, fishing left me with memories that still make me feel happy. Now if that isn’t Zen, you tell me.
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