The lake that, like humans, became volatile in the evenings lay motionless in the morning chill. All other creatures had set out on their day’s work. Little birds skimmed over the surface; cormorants silently shook their necks in the water; lines of migratory birds swayed across the sky like wind-ragged threads. A middle-aged man stood by a boat steadied with a long-oar, and dove for clams. He came up shaking away the plastic entangled in his fingers.

I had recently read in the newspaper that the bottom of the lake was now covered in a two-metre-thick layer of plastic instead of seed clams, rays and aquatic grass. Instead of fossilised pieces of wood and coal, it was empty bottles of alcohol that swept down the five rivers in the rain.

People would laugh that, until seventy years ago, there were crocodiles and sharks in these waters; that, before the Thanneermukkam Bund was built, Kumarakam fishermen used to catch mackerel and sardine that swam into the lake with the surging seawater. According to the figures, the lake has shrunk by one-third of its size in the last one hundred years.

Extract From “Moustache”, A Novel by S. Hareesh. Translated From The Malayalam By Jayasree Kalathil