A Fishy Life...
18th
September, 2012, Manipal: She wakes up at 3 am in
the morning to reach Malpe fishing Port where she has to stand out first to get
the work done of transporting fishes from boats to trucks. This hardly pays her
100 to 150 rupees a day which is dependant and fluctuates on the profits earned
by the port dealers for that day.
Shanta Damani, a daily wage worker from
Vadabandeshwar Region, Malpe, is one of the hundred women who bake themselves
in scorching sun just to run their families alone. She is the only working
member of the family of five members. Her husband is paralyzed and contributions
towards a healthy life are nil.
Shanta, although having a 21 year son who
works in a government office has left his parents to starve after marriage. The
lady’s life is completely dependent on Malpe Fishing Port where she gets her
daily wage and sometimes fishes thrown at the corners that become the happy
meal for her family for supper.
Her life is always in quest for something
or the other starting early in the morning where she looks for dealers to hire
her as a daily wage worker and in the end, hunt some fishes here and there in
the corners for her bread. Her thoughts are always seeking for a nice eligible
boy would marry her daughter and lead a good life with her- the daughter who
stays with her relatives in Belli village of Gadag district in North Karnataka.
Back at home in Belli, her nostalgia does
not seem to end of the pain and the kind of life she had to live there. Coming
down south to work was a hope like a lamp that never ceased to burn the spirit
in her. But her desperation to work coming
down to South also had to face consequences – she had to sell off her land and her
house.
When she came here destiny took a new turn
showing her the worst of worst days. She had to see the nightmares of not being
able to pay a mere fifteen hundred rupees rent and a decent one square meal a
day.
Her existence has become her ghost that she
prays for courage to die, of not being able to earn enough money for her
husband’s medicines as her daily wage keeps varying every day even though she
tirelessly does the same work. When she sees her husband suffer, her last wish
is that he dies instead of suffering, all because his medicine supply is not
there.
