For me, sitting relaxed in a beach-front café, watching the sun set over the Indian Ocean, the fishing boats setting out for the night present an idyllic scene: life in all its richness, there for all to enjoy.
For the stripped-down men, battling their way against the incessant, pounding waves, the reality is so, so different. Night after night the beat goes on. Every four seconds another wave builds , curves, and crashes down, hungrily sucking up the warm salt tide. On and on, a relentless cycle, heedless of the sultry weather, the oppressive thunder, the tranquil beauty.
Give us this day our daily grind.
Each morning another group of bronzed fishermen, their backs gleaming in the rising sun, paddle their long boat across the mouth of the bay, sinking their huge net in a giant arc. Then heave, heave, heave, pulling it in, the net gradually tightening; no room for escape. We stopped one morning to join the hordes, crowding around to glimpse their hoard: a few dozen palm-sized fish, frantically flapping on the brown-black sand, and just one or two larger prizes – a puffer fish, a squid. Perhaps a few hundred rupees to share out among the village. One more scant meal for their wives to prepare and their hungry children to devour. A rest. A meal. Then once more out against the pounding waves.
Give us this day our daily grind.
Dare I criticise those ‘economic migrants’ so harshly turned away from our welcoming shores? We place them so neatly in our categoric boxes: the refugees, deserving, desperately fleeing the violence and persecution of all they’ve known and loved… and the undeserving migrants, those simply after ‘a better life’, dreaming of a better future. Those who have caught a glimpse of something different, longing for their children, a brighter hope. Dare I pretend that they, too, are not fleeing violence? The brutality of inequity, of which I am both perpetrator and beneficiary, as I sip my iced-coffee and watch the sun set over the Indian Ocean, and the fishing boats set out just one more time.