Chitra Ramaswamy: Hook,line and thinker

IT’S HARD to keep doing new things as the years march past. We get older, we do stuff we’ve done before, and our lives become a greatest hits of experience on repeat.

Toast and Marmite for breakfast, the same route to work, the same clothes, repeats of Morecambe and Wise at Christmas. The options are as limitless as they ever were (a boiled egg for breakfast? Or what about that bodycon dress in the wardrobe that you never dare to wear?), yet the safety is in the sameness. From cradle to grave, our comforters don’t change that much.

But once in a while we are bitten by the shock of the new. This is what I find myself thinking as I bob around in a boat on a lochan in the Highlands. I’m fly fishing, and the novelty of it all is intoxicating. The words are familiar – fly, hook, rod, cast – but strange now that I’m applying them to actual things.

And so I cast off. The line arcs out and pierces the skin of the water. I reel it in with little jaggy tugs, hoping to lure a fish. No joy. Apparently the trout are low today because it’s cold out (which it is, even in thermals and three pairs of socks) so we’re using a wet fly, which will sink down and seek out their little gulping mouths. It’s very pretty, this fly, and looks like a flouncy earring. I stare at it for ages. Perhaps it’s hypnotising me instead of the fish.

I cast off again, again, and again. Now and then the fish nibble and then swim away, too quick for my inexperienced hand. I begin to enjoy myself. This is what fishing is about, or at least it is for those of us who don’t catch any. It’s all about the spaces in between the fish. The deep bits. What happens while you’re waiting.

My instructor is a mellow, softly spoken man, exactly as you would want a fisherman to be. He doesn’t reprimand or praise, he just untangles my line now and then, rows me around the lochan and says things like, “I caught the same trout in here six times last week. Could tell by the markings.” Occasionally he points 
to an unruffled surface of water and says, “See that?”, somehow seeing the hubbub of activity beneath. “Yes,” I say, even when I don’t.

Prior to this moment my entire knowledge of fly fishing amounted to a) seeing people, invariably men, dotted along river banks, or out on a boat, or wading in water and b) the JR Hartley book that only exists in the minds of children of the 1980s. I eat my fish from a chippy on a polystyrene tray like most people, try to go for line-caught over farmed (until farmed became OK as long as it was the right kind of farmed) and worry about the emptying of the oceans during a bad bout of insomnia.

Now I see it from a different, rather contradictory perspective. Fishing as a kind of hunting meditation. Peace, with rod in hand. I can’t believe this secret has been kept from me for so long. I picture long, lazy Sundays on the banks of the Spey. My very own box of flies. I forget entirely that the purpose is to catch something, that there are only so many fish in the seas. And then ... of course ... a tug ... I pull the rod up and reel it in. A brown trout, small and panting, on the end of the line. My fisherman unhooks it, gives its sides a soothing pat-pat, then releases it. The fish disappears instantly. We go back to waiting.