Boat People
Unable to afford homes on land, the poorest of Kashmir’s poor live on open fishing boats, where life is always unsteady.
By Kevin Sites, Tue Jun 6, 2:07 AM ET
SRINAGAR, India-controlled Kashmir - The children are hard to control, says Mahooda, when you live on a boat.
When home is only 20 feet long and three and a half feet wide, it's understandable that her three girls — Rosie, nine, Daisy, 8, and four-year-old Fancy, — get a little hyperactive when the boats are docked and they can actually play on dry land.
Her son Maqbool isn't a problem yet, since he's only two and spends most of the time in her arms.
"Of course we'd like to live on land," says Mahooda, "but we're poor people. We can't afford to."
Mahooda, along with her husband, children and in-laws, have lived on four small boats, called shikaras, for the last ten years.
Living on the water» View
Her husband and father-in-law take two of them out to fish each day while she, her mother-in-law Fazi, and the children spend the day in the other two, close to shore.
Fazi says she might as well be in a boat. She's already lost much of the mobility in her arms and legs for reasons she can't understand, and the cost makes seeing a doctor out of the question.
At Dal Lake, where many tourists spend their holidays living on board one of the hundreds of large houseboats along the lake, it is ironic that Mahooda and her family have to live on boats that are really no more than large canoes. There are no official estimates of how many people have been forced by poverty to live on their shikaras, but Fazi estimates that there are at least a few thousand scattered around Dal Lake.
The family earns only about five dollars a day, selling the fish the men catch. Money is so tight that almost everything they catch has to be sold. In the stern of boat, a few tiny fish that look like lake bass, long dead, are piled in a plastic bowl. They begin attracting flies when the breeze drops.
The family eats its catch only a few times a week, instead subsisting on rice and vegetables that Mahooda cooks in aluminum pots over a wood fire on shore.
The children have sweet and mischievous faces and are well versed in their responsibilities. They are soft-spoken but relentless in asking for money, forgetting about it only when we begin a project of making airplanes from paper ripped from my notepad.
"I constantly worry about them," Mahooda says. "Can you imagine four small children in this environment? You have to watch them constantly."
The residents of Dal Lake» View
She says they've fallen into the water by accident many times. She fears they could drown. Mahooda points at Fancy's foot, which is bandaged.
"She cut it when she fell against the side of the boat a few days ago."
The children are not in school, because Mahooda says that is another cost the family just can't bear. And without an education, she worries that they could be condemned to this lifestyle into adulthood.
It's a beautiful evening, with a soft breeze and temperatures dropping to a more comfortable level after a hot day. With the magic light of dusk painting everything golden, the setting seems ideal — and it would be if the family had a place to go after this "afternoon outing" was over. But for Mahooda and her family, it's never over, especially when the warmth of summer days turns into chilly fall and then to unforgiving winter, when the lake sometimes ices over.
They pack all of their meager possessions on the boats — pots and pans, extra clothes, a few bedrolls. While the boats have wood frames that can be covered and turned into roofs, they don't do much to keep out the rain and cold when the weather turns bad.
Even basic hygiene is a complicated maneuver on the shikaras. To wash themselves, Mahooda says, they paddle the boats early in the morning to the center of the lake, where there is less emerald green hyacinth algae covering the water.
And nighttime on the boats can become a nightmare for the family.
"It's almost impossible to sleep," Fazi says, "because we're all on top of each other."
Despite all of their difficulties, Mahooda seems to be able to smile and laugh at her childrens' shenanigans. But it's obvious the constant exposure to elements has stripped the smoothness of her youth.
It's a harsh life, she concedes, especially during the rain and snow of the winter months. She looks at her children and then off into the distance, still holding Maqbool while she stands steady in the hull of her home.
"I want to hope for something better," she says, "but what can you change when you make only 250 rupees [$5] a day? Every day we live like this is the worst day."
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