Casting for memories

Parag Tandel learnt to count with Bombay ducks My mother was in the business of selling dried fish at the local market here in ThaneParag Tandel at his studio in Vitawa KoliwadaShe taught me to count with bunches of Bombay duck each bunch would have a 100 says Tandel 37 He shows us a set of six Bombay ducklike sculptures cast in metal each with the menacing gargoyle mouth that the fish is known forThe Thane Creek shore where in 2011 Tandel presented sculptures made out garbage fished from the creek PicsSameer MarkandeWe are discussing fish and legacy at Tandels studio a small shuttered room in Vitawa Koliwada near the shore of the Thane Creek Tools and sculptures from when he was a student at MS University Baroda and Sir JJ School of Art are stacked in shelves A tray of bleached fish bones mdash the spine of a large kotya a croaker to be specific mdash is placed on a table These bones are materials for a future project he says drawing our attention to his current works mdash three resincast shellshaped forms in vivid translucent huesMigrantsThese and the set of Bombay ducks which Tandel calls Memory are part of his third solo show which opens on August 11 at Tarq Colaba With this exhibition titled Chronicle Tandel has given aquatic shapes to his childhood memories and become a visual cataloguer of his fishing community and a life spent in Thanersquos koliwadasExtinct Form IIIBut itrsquos not just his childhood that Tandel is drawing inspiration from I grew up on narratives of my ancestors and what they had seen in this creek and at sea These narratives are like fantasies to me and I have converted them into myths and stories I am just chronicling these anecdotes he saysWe ride to Chendani Bunder on the opposite bank from Vitawa Koliwada and a short ride from Thane station The rain plays tease from the dense mangroves the unmistakable whiff of cannabis wafts towards us The port once a premier hub for trading is now nothing but a little paved path leading to the creek In its better days it housed the Customs Department of the British Empire to monitor boats en route to Gujarat and Karachi For Tandel its more personal rather than political My parents tell me there was a time when eda masa Marathi for crazy fish used to frequent these waters he reminisces Whatrsquos an lsquoeda masarsquo Dolphins They behave like crazed children donrsquot they And passing boats used to recount stories of whale sightings in the high seas he explainsTandelrsquos ancestral homes are in Chendani Koliwada Thane which has changed over time Now there is only one practising fisherman left in the villageSwimming in these waters in his childhood Tandel has been aware of changes to his environment In the past on the banks of Vitawa Koliwada he presented Big Catch under ArtOxygenrsquos Fluid City Project in 2011 Noticing how fishermenrsquos catch included a sizeable amount of garbage he fished floating debris from the creek and turned them into sculptures Most of his works in Chronicle are titled Extinct Form and some of them such as the ones back in his studio are coloured in maroon red and bottle green They may look beautiful but these are the colours of effluents found in waterbodies around the city he says bursting our bubbleI found sculpting a better approach than just putting up bottles of coloured water sourced from these places he adds While all my works are rooted in these koliwadas and marine ecology they are freestanding pieces Memory may look like a Bombay duck but that is my interpretation I am just an image maker he explainsThe sculptures some protozoaish and others more recognisable as aquatic life forms have a feminine quality to them mdash curvaceous and bulging We quiz Tandel about this and he shyly smiles and admits There is an erotic side to these sculptures I feel the city is bulging almost pregnant Look at what happened to Thane in 2004 mdash it popped up I keep thinking that Mumbai has mated with itself and it has produced hell However Tandel offers us a silver lining mdash that he finds the pregnant forms symbolic of the creative mindWe are clearly now on what seems like a koliwada crawl as Tandel guides us to his ancestral homes in Chendani gaothan The air is spiked with the smell of fish frying in households and chicken potter around beside our feet While some of the Mangaloretiled houses remain many a plot is full of construction activity for apartment buildingsAt the end of the street through a gap between the row of houses we can see the Central Railwayrsquos trains pass by a reminder that the Chendani Koliwada is part of railway history The first passenger train in the country ran from Thane to Bombay with Chendani Koliwada sitting close to its tracks It also meant that people from this koliwada left fishing in searchof jobs in the city made accessible through the trains With industrialisation and the development of CIDCO in Navi Mumbai there were other job opportunitiesMen left for work from here in trucks to Navi Mumbai for work It seemed a better routine than with fishing where catches are unpredictable says Tandel Now with only one fisherman left in Chendani koliwada Tandel says that his community which first came to Thane from Ratnagiri nearly five centuries ago has been forever migrating As homage to this migrant status Tandel has made a fibreglass sculpture inspired by Olive Ridley turtlesWhen we head to back to Vitawa Koliwada we stand on the bank watching trains pass by on the bridge above Below the creek flows silently and lights up when the sun breaks out I think a kind of chaos has been created There are these two worlds mdash the city and marine ecology mdash and chaos in between says Parag