uBio and Me

All I can think (about the uBio project) is "Oh, my gosh, WHY DIDN'T I KNOW ABOUT THIS BEFORE I LEFT FOR INDIA??!"  This chapter has just explained a major source of intercultural frustration for me.

You see, in my daily quest to find edible food for my family (yes, it took more time and energy than any other task), I was always looking for sources of protein.  After I ruled out the open-air chicken butchers, the rotten pork, and the mystery meat from the man with the freezer, I was left with: drum roll:  fish!

Yes, we lived right on the beach, on the Bay of Bengal in the Indian Ocean, so fish seemed a very viable and logical choice.  In fact, there were several fisher villages right outside our doorway.  You would think that we would be able to pay some exorbitant sum for their bounty.

Except they liked those little tiny fish, dried in the sand, so that the birds could poop on them, and my family did not appreciate this delicacy.  The especially objected to eating the heads and bones, a squeamishness that I had been forced to overcome when I lived in Japan.  My family are food wimps.

So, I cast about (pun intended) and, through the local desperate expatriate mother's network, discovered that there were two sources for purchasing fish:

1. The large, local fish market that was about an hour away.
2. A small, hole-in-the-wall fish store that was indoors, much closer to my house, and had a fan.

I tried the local market; my in-laws, who went with me, threw up at the smell.  Not so successful.  Plus, it was over an hour away, on a good traffic day.  So I found the indoor store.

Now, this store was the most westernized food store I had experienced in India.  It had a display case, with labels for the products, a cash register that took credit cards, a shopman, and, as mentioned, a fan.  Also, there were no dogs or other livestock inside of it.  The fish butcher stood behind the counter, with this incredibly large butcher's knife that he sharpened every other second, and he did things to those fish that defy imagination.  You could get your fish custom-cut in any way you wanted, including having the meat on the heads filleted.  When you purchased the fish, you paid by the pound before it was eviscerated and cut up, so it availed one to know beforehand exactly how you wanted it sliced.  Seriously, this man - this fish butcher - was an artist.  He was so fast I kept waiting to find one of his fingernails in the bag when I got home.

But best of all, there was a large poster on the wall that had pictures of the fish of India, with labels in Tamil, Hindi, and sometimes, British English.  So, I would look over the daily selection, carefully copy down my version of the Tamil label, and then run over to the poster to see if I could match the symbols up and figure out what I was buying.  Sometimes I would have to drag the shopkeeper from behind the counter and do my mime act of "Is this fish in the picture what is in the case?".  He was not much help.  Or, if I was in a hurry, I would just close my eyes and point to something in the case.

What I discovered was that the labels in English were of fish that I had never heard of, or, in many cases, there was no English label.  Even when I went home and researched on the internet, a lot of those English fish names didn't come up.  I spent months trying to figure out which fish was what, because many fish look alike to me, and I wanted to be able to identify which ones my kids would eat.

In despair, and out of patience, and way too hot, one day I took a Sharpie and wrote the American names of the few fish I had managed to identify on the poster, under the respective fish.  The shopkeeper just stared at me.  The fish butcher stopped his slicing and flipping act, and gaped.  I felt guilty for defacing their property and not being able to explain why to them.  But, I was so happy to have at least a partial knowledge of what I was purchasing!

After that, names began appearing in many languages: French, Spanish, Arabic....it seems that the expatriate community had been collectively wondering about the fish, and now that a databank had begun, was very happy to contribute to it.  When I left India, the poster looked like a word cloud of fish names in many languages.

My own baby uBio project.

If only I had known about this uBio project, maybe I could have identified more of the fish!  Maybe even all of the fish!  Dang it, the opportunity is gone.  I am going right now to those websites and finding out if any of those obscure fish names are in the database.

Teresa