Pomfret

Pomfret is both a fish and a recurring motif through which the novel connects Bombay’s coastal history, family life, ominous portents, and political division. First caught by the Koli fishermen who made fish-lovers of the city, it later appears in a servant’s playful prediction about an unusually large baby, in a mass die-off without explanation, and in the language used to mock military and national rivalries.## The fish and Bombay’s origins In the narrator’s account of Bombay before reclamation, the Koli fishermen sail Arab dhows beneath red sails and catch pomfret and crabs. He credits them with making the city’s inhabitants fish-lovers, but immediately qualifies that shared taste: the narrator’s Kashmiri family remains meat-eating, a contrast he associates with the reserve of Kashmiri blood and sky. Pomfret thus enters the story not simply as food, but as a marker of place and inherited difference.

The fish belongs to the older coastal landscape that precedes the city’s transformation into a peninsula. Its presence in this account ties ordinary subsistence and appetite to a history of islands, harbor, and reclamation. The narrator’s food-based aside also establishes a contrast that returns when vegetarianism and meat-eating become charged political descriptions.## A birth imagined as a catch When Amina is heavily pregnant in Bombay, Musa, the family’s former servant, tells the other servants to expect a substantial prize-winning baby. He compares the anticipated child to a ten-rupee pomfret, making the fish a comic measure of size and value. The joke draws on the Times of India birth prize and on the expectation that a large baby is especially desirable; it turns an everyday catch into an image for the family’s hopes around birth.

The comparison also brings the novel’s motifs of fish, children, and public expectation together without making the prediction a literal explanation of what follows. Amina’s pregnancy is already entangled with the countdown to Indian independence and with the contest over the newspaper’s prize. Musa’s pomfret simile gives that anticipation a familiar, local shape.## Dead fish as an omen After the State freezes Ahmed’s assets, the household’s fortunes darken. In January, dead pomfret are found belly-up along Chowpatty Beach, Juhu, and Trombay. The narrator calls the deaths ominous, while stressing that they occur without any explanation. Their unexplained appearance joins other disturbing reports from the period, including comets over Back Bay, flowers said to bleed, and the escape of snakes from the Schaapsteker Institute.

The fish therefore shifts from valued catch to public sign. The text does not establish a cause for their deaths; their force lies in the way they become part of an atmosphere in which private hardship and national uncertainty seem to produce corresponding portents. The contrast between the earlier abundance of Bombay’s fishing world and these scattered corpses sharpens the sense of disruption.## Food, rivalry, and political language Pomfret’s associations with eating recur within the novel’s broader opposition between meat-eaters and vegetarians. In Pakistan, General Zulfikar’s contemptuous description of people in East Pakistan accompanies his disregard for the region’s frontiers. Later, as the political crisis surrounding the election grows, the narrator links Ayooba Baloch’s irritation with the petulance of powerful West Pakistani leaders, whose dispute concerns Sheikh Mujib-ur-Rahman’s right to form a government after the Awami League wins 160 of 162 East Wing seats. Food preferences and food metaphors become part of the narrative’s satirical account of divisions that are political as well as personal.

During the Indo-Pakistani War of 1965, competing broadcasts and promises of victory make it difficult for the narrator to determine who attacked and who defended. In the later war narrative, Ayooba describes himself as having come to fight people he dismisses as vegetarian. The phrase exposes the contempt embedded in the soldiers’ language rather than offering a neutral description of the people they fight. Against these crude classifications, the novel’s earlier account of Bombay’s fish-loving inhabitants recalls a shared appetite that political rhetoric repeatedly tries to divide.## Meaning within a history of preservation Pomfret appears in brief but distinct settings: as the Kolis’ catch, as Musa’s comic comparison for an expected baby, and as one of the dead fish on Bombay’s beaches. These recurrences take the fish across different scales of the narrative, from local food culture to family anticipation to public unease. Its meanings accumulate through contrast rather than through a single explanation.

That pattern suits the narrator’s larger practice of preserving history through food and memory. Near the end of his account, he describes historical pickles as altered by the process of preservation yet still capable, he hopes, of conveying an authentic taste of truth. Pomfret is not itself a pickle in these episodes, but its recurring presence belongs to the same movement between material life and remembered meaning: what people eat, what they fear, and the stories through which a city and its history are made legible.