Wordfall, by Kaleem Omar

If you’re a trout fisherman like me, one of the problems of living in Karachi is that you’re more than a thousand miles from the nearest trout stream. Sure, there is plenty of sea-fishing along the Karachi coast. The waters around Charna Island are a good place for marlin and the waters off Cape Monze teem with black pomfret on moonlit nights. There is also some reasonably good freshwater fishing within striking distance of Karachi.If you want to catch trout, however, you have to travel all the way to the upper reaches of the Kunhar River in the Kaghan Valley or the upper reaches of the Swat River. Pandhar Lake, near the headwaters of the Gilgit River, is also good place for trout.

Getting to these places from Karachi can involve several days of travel. This may be the reason why one sees so few Karachiites up there. But then, one doesn’t see very many Karachiites fishing off Charna Island either, suggesting that the vast majority of this city’s residents aren’t really into angling – which seems strange given the fact that Karachi is, after all, a city by the sea. Then again, maybe it isn’t so strange after all, considering that there are even some Karachiites who – incredible though it seems – have never seen the sea.

I have been a trout fisherman for more than fifty years. I caught my first trout in 1951, on a trip to the Kaghan Valley with a group of family members and friends. The group was led by my late uncle Major-General S. Shahid Hamid, the founder-president of the Pakistan Anglers Association. Above the door of the association’s office in Rawalpindi, he had had a sign fixed reading: “Headquarters for hunters, fishermen and all other liars”!

The reference to “liars”, of course, had to do with the fact that we anglers are well-known for spinning tall tales about the monster that got away. There are probably as many tall tales out there as there are anglers.

Over the years I’ve fished for trout in many places – for brown trout in the glacier-fed waters of Lake Saiful Muluk, for rainbow trout in the Scottish highlands, for steelhead trout on the Wisconsin shore of Lake Michigan, for speckled rainbow trout in the wonderfully named Rogue River in Oregon.

In the summer of 1989 I was fishing one afternoon in the Rogue River, near the hamlet of Shady Cove, when I noticed that another angler – an elderly gentleman who was fishing about fifty yards downstream from me – had got his line badly snagged in some driftwood in the fast-running water.

Back in the 1950s, Old Khaliq, the electricity generator operator in Naran in the Kaghan Valley, and a fishing guide in his spare time, had taught me how to unsnag fouled lines. The trick, he said, was not to tug at the snagged line against the water’s current but to go downstream of the snag and work the line free from there. The technique often involved wading thigh-deep into the icy water in order to get into precisely the right alignment with the snagged line.

During my many trips to the Kaghan Valley over the years, I had become pretty adept at the technique. So when I saw that the Shady Cove angler had got his line snagged, I wandered across to him and offered to try to free his line. Old Khaliq had taught me well, and I was soon able to work the line free.

This got the Shady Cove angler and me to talking, shooting the breeze about this and that, as us anglers tend to do whenever we encounter a fellow member of the tribe.

The angler turned out to be a resident of Shady Cove, which back in those days had a population of 204, or 205 if you included the local cat.

“Do you know whose house that is?” asked the Shady Cove angler, pointing to a house a couple of hundred yards away.

“No,” I replied. “I’m from out of town.”

“That’s Miss Rogers’ house,” he said.

“Miss Rogers?” I asked.

“Yes, Miss Ginger Rogers,” he said..

“Ginger Rogers!” I exclaimed. “You mean THE Ginger Rogers?”

“Yeah,” he drawled, laconically.

Well, you could have bowled me over with a feather – Ginger Rogers, the screen legend, dancer extraordinaire, the star of such 1930s and ‘40s classic musicals as “Gold Diggers of 1933”, “The Barkleys of Broadway” and “Shall We Dance”…Ginger Rogers, the dazzling blonde goddess, living here in Shady Cove, of all places, in the middle of the Oregonian boondocks! To a movie fan like me, the thought was enough to make the head swim.

I was sorely tempted, then, to go and knock on her door and ask her for her autograph. In the end, though, I couldn’t muster up the courage.

Ginger Rogers died a few years ago, at the age of 90. When the news of her death came to Karachi over the wire, I remember wishing I hadn’t chickened out back then by the banks of the Rogue River in the summer of ’89 and had gone up to her house and got her autograph. That would have been something. Like many things in life, however, it was not to be.

The late American author Robert Traver – who lived in Upper Michigan – made several trips to Oregon to catch trout in the Rogue River. He was a man of varied talents. A practicing lawyer, he went on to become a judge. In between all his legal work, he somehow found time to write nine books, including two classic accounts about fishing, “Trout Magic” and “Trout Madness”, as well as a novel entitled “Anatomy of a Murder” (a small-town courtroom drama which was made into a critically acclaimed film in 1959 by Hollywood director Otto Preminger, with sterling performances from a top-flight cast that included James Stewart, Ben Gazzara, George C. Scott and Lee Remick in an Oscar-winning role).

I saw “Anatomy of a Murder” at the Palace Cinema in Karachi in 1960. Although the film had been censored in America for its use of sexually explicit medical terminology in a courtroom trial scene, it was shown in Karachi uncut.

“Trout Magic” (published in 1974) is a maverick look at trout fishing and its attendant tall tales, strange happenings, and all-around fishing lore. Traver recounts the story of a mysterious “dancing fly,” and speaks pointedly about “kiss-and-tell” fishermen. He even has some new angles on women anglers, and does a fine piece of tongue-in-cheek literary sleuthing into Ernest Hemingway’s famous fishing story “Big Two-Hearted River”.

Hemingway’s story first appeared in the “little” magazine “This Quarter” and soon after in one of his earliest books, first published in 1925 and called “In Our Time”. Since then the story has been widely reprinted in a procession of anthologies as well as endlessly dissected and explicated by what an awed beholder might call a whole new piscatorial school of academic writing inspired by the story – or should I say spawned?

Says Traver: “The story’s title comes from the name of an actual Upper Peninsula of Michigan trout stream called the Two Hearted River, the maps I’ve seen omitting the author’s Big and his hyphen between Two Hearted. Yet despite these small differences the connection between the story and the stream remains as obvious as it is undeniable.”

There’s enough trout magic in Traver’s book to rub off on every reader as the author weaves his storytelling spell. One of my favourite passages is “Testament of a Fisherman”.

“I fish because I love to,” Traver writes; “because I love the environment where trout are found, which are invariably beautiful, and hate the environs where crowds of people are found, which are invariably ugly; because of all the television commercials, cocktail parties, and assorted social posturing I thus escape; because, in a world where most men seem to spend their lives doing things they hate, my fishing is at once an endless source of delight and an act of small rebellion; because trout do not lie or cheat and cannot be bought or bribed or impressed by power, but respond only to quietude and humility and endless patience; because I suspect that men are going along this way for the last time, and I for one don’t want to waste the trip; because mercifully there are no telephones on trout waters…”

That, of course, was in the days before cell phones. Nowadays even trout waters are not free of the infernal instruments and their shrill beep-beeps.