Thane-based Karen Fernandes has some of the fondest memories of consuming dried fish while growing up in Mumbai during the monsoon. Since it is difficult to get fresh fish during the monsoon, her family would spend all summer drying fish for the rainy season. She shares, “When I was staying with my grandmother and would feel picky about eating simple foods like dal and rice, she would roast dried fish such as mackerel, bombil, prawns, dinas.” Experimenting with dried fish, she would roast the fish on one day and make a salad out of it on another day a salad, or make ‘paara’, a popular delicacy eaten in most Goan homes during the monsoon. “It would instantly be the most exciting meal of our lives. I remember all of us kids going from uninterested in eating to being excited about lunch, the moment the scent of dried fish being roasted fills the air,” Karen adds. 

Mumbaikars are lucky as the city boasts of a very long coastline that gives us a variety of different fish in abundance, one of the most popular being the famed Bombay duck. It also happens to be one of the many fish that are dried during the summer to be consumed during the monsoon season in many different ways. While the Kolis, Mumbai’s fishing community make use of dried fish in abundance, there are other different communities including the Goans, Mangaloreans, East Indians and even Keralites living in Mumbai, who make a variety of dishes with dried fish during this time of the year.