Following Fish: Travels Around the Indian Coast by Samanth Subramanian Page A

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    This cave (once the dwelling of a Saivite sanyasi) has been sanctified by the prayers and penances of St. Francis Xavier.
    As grottoes by the sea go, this one seemed remarkably unnatural, having been augmented at some point by wooden ceiling beams, square pillars hewn out of rock, blue paint on the walls, and a wooden lintel under the arched doorway. At the cave’s deepest point, against its back wall, there was a small statue of Xavier and a Mirinda bottle half-full of oil for the two lamps. To the right, just inside the entrance, was a shallow well, fed allegedly by the ocean just outside. ‘It’s true—you put a lemon into the well, and it will wash out into the sea a few minutes later,’ I was told by many people. (Oddly, in every version of the test that I heard, it was always a lemon, as if the use of a banana or a tin can would be like using something other than litmus to settle the acid–alkali confusion.) The ‘miracle’ of the well is that, despite its connection to the sea, the water is supposed to taste sweet and fresh. I drank half a cup, out of a pail standing near the well, and while the water tasted faintly brackish, it certainly wasn’t half a cup of seawater.
    The Church of the Holy Cross was here when Francis Xavier moved into his cave. In the 1530s, a Portuguese trading ship called the
Santiago
foundered near Manapadu, and its mast washed up on the beach. ‘But somebody accidentally stepped on it, and a terrible thing happened,’ Valentin Ilango, a high school Tamil teacher and a passionate historian of Manapadu, told me with dramatically rolling eyes. We were sitting in his staffroom, the school cloaked in the anxious hush of examinations. ‘This man became gravely ill, and his body swelled up. Then the captain of the ship had a dream that the mast was to be erected as a cross, and that it was to be washed and oiled. When the captain did that, in 1540, the poor man recovered.’ By 1582, a church had grown up around that original mast, which remains now as thespine of a bigger, newer cross. It is still washed and oiled on feast days.
    Xavier arrived here a couple of years after the mast became a cross. ‘He lived in that cave, and he prayed all night. If he ate at all, it was only one meal a day, and he would eat the food that the local fisher folk brought him—rice gruel, dried fish, things like that,’ Ilango said. ‘From the cave, he wrote, I think, twelve letters to St. Ignatius of Loyola, which are said to be in the Vatican’s library in Rome.’ When Xavier finally emerged, he set off for Tuticorin, on the project that had brought him to these parts: Cementing the conversion to Catholicism of the fishing community in the area.

    In a chapter in Jules Verne’s
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea,
the narrator, M. Aronnax, is watching Captain Nemo fondle a gigantic, perfect pearl when he sees a shadow in the water. He fears it is a shark but, as he writes, it is only a man:
    …
a living man, an Indian, a fisherman, a poor devil who, I suppose, had come to glean before the harvest. I could see the bottom of his canoe anchored some feet above his head. He dived and went up successively. A stone held between his feet, cut in the shape of a sugar loaf, while a rope fastened him to his boat, helped him to descend more rapidly. This was all his apparatus. Reaching the bottom about five yards deep, he went on his knees and filled his bag with oysters picked up at random. Then he went up, emptied it, pulled up his stone, and began the operation once more, which lasted thirty seconds.
    The
Nautilus,
at the time, was lurking off the final sandy curve of India’s east coast, which makes Aronnax’s Indian, in allprobability, a member of the pearl-fishing community living between Rameshwaram and Kanyakumari, concentrated in particular in Tuticorin and its neighbouring villages. The fishermen may date themselves back to antiquity, but there is still debate, academic as well as popular, about