Fishermen

Ocean fishing in the Subcontinent, like fishing in most places in the world, isn’t an easy livelihood. The handmade wooden fishing boats and their beautiful black or ochre-colored sails, blown full with the ocean breezes, are a gorgeous sight to those of us watching from the shore, but life on the water is as hard as can be. In the calmer seas of winter, the fishermen go out at night, spending dusk to dawn laboring in the wet and cold while everyone else is asleep. In the monsoon season, when the sea is turbulent and dangerous, the fishermen work the waters and their enormous nets with great difficulty, often with little to show for the effort.