‘The Field Notes’ is a story that is set in the coastal fishing town of Malvan in Maharashtra, and chronicles the everyday occurrences and rhythms of the place and it’s people. It is centred around four marine biologists - Kevan, Aisha, Chinmay and Avi, who are stationed at the field base in Malvan, and depicts how they go about collecting data, building relationships and navigating the smaller conflicts that occur with the fishing communities and the people involved with the local fisheries. It tries capturing the essence of Malvan, weaving a story told by disparate characters, settings and events that come together to create the flavour of a small fishing town, defining it’s character and it’s preoccupations.

“Dreadful things happen to [fishermen] constantly: they lose their nets; the fish are wild; sea-lions get into the nets and tear their way out; snags are caught; there are no fish, and the price high; there are too many fish, and the price is low; and if some means could be devised so that the fish swam up to a boat, wriggled up a trough, squirmed their way into the fish-hold, and pulled ice over themselves with their own fins, the imprecations would be terrible because they had not removed their own entrails and brought their own ice. There is no happiness for fishermen anywhere.”
~ John Steinbeck, ‘The Log from the Sea of Cortez’

In March 2020 i travelled to Malvan to meet my friend, Shaun. He is a marine biologist, and was working with a couple of other researchers at the field base in Malvan. I was in the early days of piecing together my final year project in college, and i was quite certain that i wanted to spend time observing and understanding a space where ecology, livelihoods and policies intersect. Hearing this, Shaun had invited me to come spend a week with him at the field base, to see how they work and what marine research in India is like. Within a week of me reaching Malvan, a nationwide lockdown had been implemented to curtail the spread of Covid 19, and we found ourselves stuck there indefinitely. It proved to be a beautiful spell of time, and probably my first experience of a slow integration into a setting and it’s daily patterns.

From Left to Right: Clarita, Kaustubh, Isha, Me and Shaun at the field base in Malvan.

Everybody found ways to continue their work, applying themselves in some way—any way to pass the time. But there was a significantly greater portion of time spent making tea, meeting friends from the fishing villages nearby, and finding spots of shade on sweltering afternoons to cherish the breeze blowing in from the sea. It became a period of marked growth, of a forced slowing down, a submission to the ebb and flow of time. ‘The Field Notes’ emerged form these 3 months of living in Malvan. I learnt what the quintessential small town routines look like, the local haunts, the daily phenomena, and the struggles. It opened up the complicated and arduous lives of people working in the fisheries and provided me with a vocabulary to understand the workings of this livelihood. The original intention of finding a confluence point of ecology, livelihood and policies had been met and far surpassed— my time in Malvan seemed to infuse a granularity to the realities and lives that exist at these confluence points.

To add a sprinkling of serendipity to these circumstances, i had begun reading some of John Steinbeck’s works a couple of days before leaving for Malvan. In ‘The Log from the Sea of Cortez’, Steinbeck records his journey around the Gulf of California with his friend, the marine biologist Ed Ricketts. Their experience and the gorgeous melting together of ecology, science, art, philosophy and literature, all of it brought together with the immense compassion of a writer like Steinbeck, and the resonant love and camaraderie between Ed, John and the rest of the crew, made this book a potent relic to carry around with me. It was almost as though i could see my life in Malvan play out in passages in the book, and specific accounts in the book re-enacted by the people around me. His writing has had a deep influence on my work ever since.

‘The Field Notes’ was one of my first experiments with expansive storytelling and is currently an unpublished work. I’m expecting to revisit and rework parts of it in the near future.