Nadia walked briskly up to me, her hands full of food containers. You wanted short-eats, no? she asked as she led me to the group of women who were waiting close by. Earlier in the day while interviewing her, I had asked her about recipes for Maldivian short-eats, fried tuna-filled snacks that often accompany their morning or evening coffee. The women had just returned from a meeting at the school with plenty of leftovers, so we made our way to one of their homes. Inside, Nadia arranged a plate of gulha, samosa, and boakiba in front of me, and poured me a glass of juice. Three other womenall part of the Women’s Development Committee on this island of Rinbudhoostood around the table, giggling at my obvious pleasure. These were all snacks Nadia had prepared at home, which she often shipped to Malé or sold to tourists. Her boakiba (fish cake) was fantastic, spicy and dense, but not heavy.
A few minutes later, we heard that the boat that had gone out that afternoon was just pulling into the lagoon. The previous day, my collaborator Fisam and I had been told that we should try to make it out to see the catch of frigate tuna when it was landed the next evening. You have to go fast! Nadia said, motioning for me to finish eating quickly. Fisam and I made our way to the beach on the island’s north-eastern edge, the sand a muted pink and orange in the late light of the setting sun.
Rinbudhoo is one of the six inhabited islands in Dhaalu atoll in central Maldives. The 26 atolls of the Maldives are made up of individual islands, uncut emeralds in a sea of sapphire as T W Hockley, a visiting British official, wrote in 1935. Its waters are vast, home to 3% of the world’s coral reefs. Fishing and fisheries are central to the culture and economy here. I was there for my doctoral research, trying to understand how the ecology of these coral reef systems is changing in response to major climatic disturbances like coral-bleaching events. But in the past few years, I have been drawn to the dynamics playing out on land, and to exploring the ties between people and their reefs. Fisam and I were here to conduct a pilot study on the valuesboth monetary and culturalthat people had for different species of fish, and whether those were changing. Some studies in ecology happen far from humans, but on islands like these, things are necessarily more intertwined. I was coming to appreciate that.
What would change if community-wide fishing days were no longer practised, though? If a bigger harbour brought more boats, more tourists, more revenue, were fishing days a small price to pay? To whom did it matter, anyway, and what purpose did it serve? I couldn’t help but think of a colleague’s research in the Nicobar Islands, where hasty government aid and rehabilitation programmes after the tsunami of 2004 had radically altered previously isolated Nicobarese societies, affecting the structure of their households, fisheries management, and resource use. In particular, post-tsunami policies had overlooked Nicobarese traditions of sharing and collective ownership, and eroded customary practices by not being cognisant of the role they played in those communities.
Often, the value of a certain practice is difficult to quantify and understand until it is no longer performed, and every other practice or process it’s linked to suddenly becomes more vulnerable. In our surveys across these islands, Fisam and I noticed just how much things had changed, both on land and in the water, as islands were reclaimed and expanded. Would Nadia still make and sell her boakiba if she had to buy her tuna? Would people simply switch to fishing for another species, if frigate tuna no longer entered these waters? Perhaps, some of these changes were inevitable. But tonight, at least, the air was thick with the smell of rihakuru, and we would all eat well tomorrow.
Economic and Political Weekly