35053668-Empire-of-the-Soul-Paul-William-Roberts

‘NO LIKE A-FEESH?’
newspaper and enmeshing them in string. His colleague
disappeared through a door to the rear.
Wondering whether they had ever cleaned the place, I heard the
man who’d disappeared out back going Psst! Psst! behind me.
‘Afisth . . . afifeeth?’ he asked me in covert tones.
‘What?’
‘Afeethsch . . . afhish?’ He beckoned me to join him, to see for
myself what it was he had.
He wants to sell me hashish, I realised, thinking these boys
certainly covered their market well. I followed him into an even
dingier back room that smelled like the Bangalore cabaret-brothel.
I wondered how they smuggled their drugs – or in what they
smuggled them.
‘Ahl,’ the man said eagerly, indicating a mound wrapped in
newspaper sitting on a wooden table so sodden with grease it was
almost liquid itself. He began to unwrap the mound. I was curious to
see what sort of hashish one could find this far south of Swat. Instead
of hashish, however, as a final sheet of virtually transparent newsprint
was peeled away, I saw a small pile of very dead fish.
‘Afhish,’ the man announced in triumph.
‘A fish! Yes, yes – they’re fish, all right. For eating?’ I pointed at my
mouth.
‘Ah! Accha!’ he said enthusiastically.
Very far from the sea, with no fishable rivers within five hundred
miles – indeed, with no monsoon, no rivers at all to speak of – fish
would have to travel some distance to arrive on the outskirts of
Bangalore. Without the benefit of refrigeration, and with the benefit
of humid 130 degree heat, these specimens smelled as if they were
some weeks into their own putrefaction. I now remembered reading
warnings in the press about illegal sales of poisonous fish, too.
‘Very nice,’ I said, ‘but no thanks. I’m a vegetarian.’
‘Vesh darian, ha?’ the man inquired, crestfallen.
I returned to collect my bottles.
‘Vesh darian,’ the man explained to his partner. ‘No like a-feesh?’
he replied, astounded.
‘Nor meat.’
‘But a-feesh goot, yes?’
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