In the streams of our village, we often saw small fish with a brown stripe running along their sides, the same color and pattern as the skin of an unripe banana, the vazhakka. That resemblance is likely why everyone called them Vazhakkavara, banana-stripe fish. They were common, familiar, part of the background of childhood afternoons spent wading in clear water.
But every so often, among the Vazhakkavara, we would spot something different: a fish with the same general shape, but with a stripe of brilliant red instead of brown. We had no name for this one beyond calling it the queen, the special one, rarer and more striking than its everyday cousins.
It would be years before I learned what that fish actually was: a different species of barb altogether, one of the Dawkinsia, native to the cool, clear streams that run off the Western Ghats.
The recognition came back to me suddenly, decades later, in a place that had nothing to do with childhood streams. I was sitting near a waterfall, camera ready, waiting for a Malabar Trogon to come down for water. And there, in the stream below, was that same flash of red. The same fish, the same stripe, the same unmistakable presence I remembered as the queen of the water.
I asked the forest warden sitting beside me what it was called. He didn’t recognize the name from my childhood, but the fish itself needed no introduction elsewhere. This small stream fish from the Western Ghats had become something of a celebrity in the aquarium trade, sought after by hobbyists across the world. By the 2010s, it had drawn international attention, not just from aquarists but from conservationists, as people began to understand how endemic and how vulnerable these stream species really are.
Sitting there with my sketchbook, drawing the fish I’d once thought was a queen, I felt something click into place. The creature I’d taken for granted as a child, a rare flash of color among the ordinary banana-stripe fish, was part of something larger: an ecosystem worth protecting, a species that mattered far beyond the boundaries of my village. Sketching it slowly, watching the way light caught its stripe, taught me something that photography alone hadn’t: that real observation takes time, and that the things closest to us are often the ones we understand least.
In the video below, you can follow along as I sketch this small fish that carried me from childhood streams to a waterfall decades later, and from there, to a deeper appreciation of the wild world on our doorstep.