Niyantha Shekar

Fishing in the Arabian Sea.

Marine Drive, Mumbai.

Ranwar Village, Mumbai.

This photo essay originally appeared in 101 India.

Photographs by Anirudh Ganapathy.

I can smell the fish even before I enter Mumbai’s 142-year-old Sassoon Dock. As I walk in to the city’s largest wholesale fish market, stepping over rivulets of blood and innards, I see Koli fisherwomen in their bright saris, sitting in front of walls that have become canvases for local and international artists, slicing and dicing away. It’s impossible to miss the hundreds of trawlers, some wobbling with their fluttering flags in the wet dock, others silhouettes in the distance in search of catch in the Arabian Sea. Walking deeper into the dock, past the workers taking quick naps on the very handcarts and fishing nets that they ply, I see a section of ten to fifteen parked yellow lorries. Run by a group of immigrants from the village of Unnao in Uttar Pradesh, these lorries transport a crucial component present in almost every step of the fishing supply-chain: ice.

In between his turns at a game of cards, a worker on his break informs me that fishermen spend a long time out at sea. It can take 3 days to travel to their fishing spot, and as long as 4 weeks to meet their target. So, it is the tonnes of ice they carry beneath the boat’s footboards that preserves their highly perishable product. When the catch finally enters the dock, it’s quickly placed in carts of ice to enable local sales as well as transport for the export trade.

As I stand by the back doors of a lorry and observe the work, I feel a familiar sensation; it’s as if I’ve entered an air-conditioned room. I see a worker manoeuvre massive blocks of smoky ice with kainchis – heavy, rusted pairs of iron tongs. It’s a serious test of forearm strength as he slides the ice out of the lorry and turns it over on a platform. He repeatedly stabs the block of ice with a tocha – a screwdriver of sorts – to break it in half. Then a strong kick sends the block into a crushing machine that is reminiscent of the bloody woodchipper from the film Fargo, except for the tika mark adorning the crusher from that morning’s pooja.

As crushed ice spits out, two teams of two – one team to service the boats heading out to sea, and the other to service the lorries driving out with the day’s catch – scoop it up with a shovel and deposit it behind their backs into tonne gaadis, long wooden carts reinforced by steel. Seven blocks of ice equal a tonne. A tonne of ice is shovelled in 5 minutes. The men work efficiently.

One of them then connects a rope to the tonne gaadi, wraps the other end around his shoulder, takes a deep breath and pulls. His partner pushes the cart from the back. It is like a painful game of see-saw as the two jump, tilt and level the cart before starting the arduous journey to the fishing vessel, which could be as far away as two kilometres. Once they reach the boat, they slide the crushed ice from the tonne gaadi to the several empty compartments on the boat floor. Each vessel carries 15-20 tonnes of ice; so it takes multiple trips to satiate a boat before it heads out to sea.

On an average day – which starts at 4 in the morning and goes on till the late evening – each team of two transports 50-60 tonne gaadis. Depending on the amount of work they get, they could earn anywhere between Rs. 15,000 – 30,000 a month. I notice that the younger men, in their late teens and early 20s, move rapidly with the vigour of youth. But the aches of this toil do catch up. Several workers from Unnao have spent three to four decades on this job, and the older ones complain to me of deep blisters on their palms and severe shoulder and lower-back aches. They turn to alcohol to get through the day, they say. Just enough to numb the pain yet stay productive.

Sassoon Dock is built on the backs of various micro-ecosystems and communities that come together. Like the city of Mumbai, the Dock too is filled with immigrant stories. And I realise that as in many of these stories, the protagonists here view their burdens with a matter-of-fact lens.

“Yeh mehnat ka kaam hai na?” (It’s hard labour, isn’t it?) says the man operating a pair of kainchis as he kicks another block into the crusher. Ice spits out, and the shovelling continues.

The boats await.