I am a hapless fisherman. What am I doing here. Who am I, even, and what could these people possibly think of me. Also, where can I learn what I need to know about fly fishing.

It’s the morning of my twelfth day on the Ramganga, and I’m posing questions so rhetorical and melodramatic that they don’t require question marks. After five days of pretty dogged, determined fishing – which itself came on the heels of seven days of ‘guiding’ other anglers on this stream, during which I could have at least gotten a sense for what ‘doesn’t work’ – I’ve hooked one (1) fish, which I promptly lost.

Day is just breaking, and I’m sitting on the porch of my cottage, glaring at the river and sipping chai furiously. Like many anglers, I don’t mind spending a day fishing and not catching anything. Per se. It’s just that at any given fishless moment on the water, chances are good that I would rather be in some stage of catching a fish. Right now, the only thing that really stings is that the guys in camp here are really pulling for me. Each time I return from the water, I am asked by at least three of the staff, their smiles optimistic, “Anything? Any fish?”

Steadily I’ve been running out of answers, by which I mean literally having trouble finding something to say. The saddest loss, which I’d been making flamboyant use of until yesterday as it had become a sort of rallying cry for me, was ‘mahseer hoga’. In my own brand of pidgin Hindi, it means ‘mahseer will happen’. Another phrase, ‘karingi mahseer’, which had fallen out of use a few days before but was also a favorite in its time, translates as something like ‘I will mahseer’.

And now that I think about it, Even my line about how the zero was invented in India has worn itself thin. (‘Zero’, in Hindi, is ‘sunya’.) If I come here, spend two weeks in camp, purport to be some sort of expert or authority on the subject of fly fishing, and don’t catch a fish – well, what’s my deal? What kind of weirdo am I?

            I need more tea, and stomp off across the camp toward the kitchen tent.

For the first week, I had fished vicariously through the Russians, trying a number of different tactics, all of which seemed promising in their own way. We’d fish pocket water, riffles and rapids, first down and across, just letting it swing, then stripping slowly, and finally, stripping frantically. We would fish another section of similar water, this time up and across, stripping as soon as the fly would land. We used an intermediate line. We used sink-tips. We tried buggers, bait fish patterns, and nymphs. We’d hook up only rarely, and – what was more troubling – never when I had a fishy feeling.           

We also focused our efforts on the clear, still pools, where we knew there were mahseer because they were plainly visible in prodigious numbers and really mind-blowing sizes. But in all the time I spent watching during the day (sometimes while a Russian frothed an adjacent stretch), the fish seemed to only be playing – never hunting, foraging, or keying in on insects. They would cruise up and down the pool, always in the top half-meter of the water column, with no apparent regularity or reason. Casting to them in the daylight, with the water clarity being what it was, proved a bad idea (though the experience of spooking two or three dozen fish at once is really novel the first few times). So we fished the pools when light was low or when it was dark, and day-by-day, night-by-night, we became more and more discrete.

Before long, we were communicating exclusively in birdcalls and sign language. To get my angler’s attention, I’d whistle softly, playfully. Then I’d pantomime directions, as this time, for example, to Egor:

Walk softly to the edge of this pool. I’ll be over there in that grass. Wait for a bit (my finger tracing the hands of an imaginary watch on my wrist), being perfectly still. Strip enough line from your reel to cast across the pool. Wait, perfectly still, for the sign from me. Then we will make a cast to that water there. We will let the line and fly sink. On a signal from me you will retrieve the fly, gently at first. Then we will make another cast, wait, and try again.