'Hunger doesn't care about tigers'

Gabura island, Bangladesh - The sun is fierce and the air hot and sticky when Mahfuza Begum steps onto the riverbank one late morning in March.

Her bare feet sink into the cracked mud as she reaches for her narrow, black boat. Her fingers quickly check her net for tangles. Then two women and a man help her push the boat into the water. With no upstream current to fill the riverbank, they strain under the weight of the task. After several minutes, the boat finally drifts free. Without a word, Mahfuza slides into it, grips her oar with calloused hands and begins to row.

Each stroke carries Mahfuza forward, carving a path through the river’s gleaming surface.

She glides past dense green Sundri mangrove canopies. A humid river breeze tugs at her headscarf. The 52-year-old pulls it back into place with a practised hand and keeps rowing. Beads of sweat trace a slow line from her temple to her jaw.

After about five minutes, she stops in the centre of the river, stands, and with a graceful motion, casts her net wide over the water. The heavy mesh unfurls, then sinks.

Fifteen minutes pass. Then she pulls the net, and as the mesh rises, a wide, triumphant grin blooms across Mahfuza’s face.

The net is filled with shrimp.

The air has the earthy smell of mud, and the only sounds are of the river’s gentle movement and the rustling of leaves. Dense mangrove roots twist out of the water at the river’s edges. In the places where thick tree canopies block out the sun, it casts deep shadows, while beyond the riverbank, the forest hides what moves within.

Mahfuza has lived her entire life on the edge of survival. For years, she has rowed her boat alone in the rivers that snake through the Sundarbans, one of the world’s largest mangrove forests, in Bangladesh's southwestern Khulna region.

The river system Mahfuza navigates is a complex network of wide, slow-moving waterways that split into smaller, narrower channels winding through the forest. The water darkens as the canopies grow closer, and the sunlight that penetrates casts dappled patterns.

As a fisherwoman travelling through these quiet waterways, she is familiar with the ever-present dangers that lurk in the forest and the murky waters. Crocodiles glide just beneath the surface while tigers roam near the riverbanks.

Mahfuza knows how to read the signs for their presence – the way the water moves, the quiet. "The water can look calm, but it hides a lot," she says.

Over the years, animal sightings have increased. They are being pushed into the fishers’ paths as the forest shrinks and human activity expands.

"The animals are getting bolder," Mahfuza explains. "We’ve taken over their land, so they’re taking back ours."

Crocodiles have slid alongside her boat. They move fast when they strike, and she knows to always avoid the edges of her boat. She sees crocodiles often, especially in the dry season when the water level is low.

She has seen more tigers than she can count, though most encounters are fleeting - a rustle in the forest, a pair of glowing eyes.

One morning in 2019, as she hauled in her net, she noticed that the birds had fallen silent. Animals, she says, feel the presence of a tiger. She turned and saw a tiger watching her from the edge of the river several metres away. Slowly, she grabbed a metal pot and banged it against the boat. But the animal didn’t budge. For a moment, they stared at each other, and then it turned and disappeared into the forest. She has learned that making noise - talking, singing or banging on the boat - can scare tigers away, but not always. And if a tiger attacks, there is nothing one can do.

She learned that brutal lesson 17 years ago.

It was late one afternoon when Mahfuz, her oldest son Alamgir, her older brother Shahadat and his wife set out on two boats.

The sun had begun to set when Mahfuza and Alamgir, who was on his mother’s boat, turned to go home to fetch a new fishing net as theirs was broken. While rowing towards the shore near her home, she heard a roar.

By the time they turned back to her brother’s boat, it was too late. Shahadat had been close to the shore near the forest, fixing a net on his boat. A tiger had lunged at him, sinking its teeth into his neck before he could make a sound. His wife screamed as the animal dragged her husband away, leaving blood on the boat. Mahfuza was in shock as she tried to console her devastated sister-in-law and bring her home. “Before I could even react, he was gone – dragged into the depths of the forest,” Mahfuza recounts sadly.

That night, about 150 villagers ventured into the forest carrying torches. Tigers don’t usually hunt at night and fear fire. They were able to recover Shahadat’s remains and bring them back to Mahfuza’s house.

The next morning, she stood on the riverbank, her heart pounding with fear.

But fear is not a luxury she can afford. "If I get hungry, there is no one to feed me. My hunger doesn't care about tigers. It doesn't care about a tiger's hunger. It takes me to the river to fish,” Mahfuza explains.

"If it is my fate, then a tiger will take me too," she says firmly.

Before setting out on her boat that day in March, Mahfuza had squatted by the water’s edge, the cotton fabric of her red sari sticking to her damp skin, to catch small fish.

In her village, there are about eight fisherwomen. Aged between 40 and 60, they usually fish with their family members. That morning, they were on the shore, but the heat kept them from venturing onto the water where they would be more exposed to the sun. Instead, three watched while others polished boats and fixed nets under the shade of a tree.

With a deliberate movement, Mahfuza cast her net into the river. There was no pause, no wasted effort. Mahfuza was used to the heat, used to the work.

One of the younger women standing under the tree called out to Mahfuza. "Don’t you feel the heat? It's unbearable out here."

Mahfuza didn’t look up. She pulled the net in with a smooth, practised motion, her muscles flexing. "It's hot. Sure," she called back, her voice even. "But fish don’t care. And neither do I."

The women exchanged looks. Some of them laughed, others looked at Mahfuza with respect.

Mahfuza emptied the small fish into a bucket of water, which she handed to the women to look after while she fished on the river.

She paused and stood, wiping her brow with the back of her hand. "You coming?" she asked, glancing over her shoulder. "Or are you waiting for the sun to stop shining?"

One of the women chuckled. "You really don't mind the heat, do you?"

Mahfuza flashed her a brief grin. "Heat’s just a part of it," she said, tossing the net back into the river. "Fish don’t wait around for perfect conditions."

Mahfuza grew up in Ward No. 9, a fishing village on Gabura island - one of about 200 islands in the Sundarbans - surrounded by the Kholpetua River.

It is the same village where she lives today. Home to about 34,000 people, it is one of several villages on Gabura.

Families in Ward No. 9 fish and collect honey and wood to sell, but can’t farm due to salinity from the river water affecting the soil.

Mahfuza was born into one of the poorest households in her village.

Her father worked as a daily labourer and fished when he had enough money to rent a small boat. "My father was the poorest of the poorest. That's why I started begging when I was very little, maybe six or seven - I don't even remember the age,” she recalls. “I used to be a maid at people's houses around the same age, washing the dishes and clothes of other people."

The fourth of six children, Mahfuza never went to school, and begged from people who themselves came from families barely able to make ends meet. She remembers hunger being a constant presence, there only being rice, water and salt to eat and wearing the torn clothing that people gave her.

But Mahfuza was always curious when she saw her father returning from the river and would play with his net and the fish he occasionally caught.

“He never showed me how [to fish],” she says matter-of-factly. "It wasn’t because he didn’t want to - he just didn’t know that women could fish like men."

When she was eight, she encountered a stranger, a man from a different part of the village who looked to be in his mid-40s, catching shrimp by the river. "He looked like my father, so I thought to reach out to him and ask him to teach me how to fish,” she explains.

She remembers he was surprised by her request. Women, let alone girls, didn’t fish in her village. But she told him she wanted to fish to feed her family and he agreed to show her how.

"It's dangerous. If you really want to learn, you need to be dedicated,” he told her. Over a few months, he showed her how to row a boat and how to look for signs that fish are close, like bubbles or ripples on the water’s surface. "The fish follow the current," he explained. "When the water’s calm, the fish are hiding deep. When it moves, they come up to feed."

"He never treated me like I was different," says Mahfuza.

She would then practise fishing on the riverbank. "It was difficult at first,” she says.

Men from her village would come up to her, she recalls, and say, "You are very small. Girl, why do you want to fish? You belong to the stove and firewood. Go and cook now.”

But Mahfuza stood her ground. "Give me food if you don't want me to go fishing," she told them. “The men in my village fear me now,” she adds with a laugh.

Mahfuza’s parents supported her pursuit, as their daughter now brought fish home for the family to eat. She spent time learning how to handle the creatures she caught and trying to understand them. By 12, Mahfuza could row a boat, cast a net, and catch fish to bring home and sell in the market.

“After that, I was able to eat with a belly full," she says, a hand dangling over a bent knee as she sits on the floor of her home.

"I no longer had to beg from other people. I could eat well and feed my parents. My mother could finally eat sardines; it was her favourite fish. It made me so proud."

Today, Mahfuza shares a small tin-roof hut constructed from salvaged wooden planks painted red, blue, and green with her grandson, Lavlu.

Since there are no paved roads on Gabura, a five-minute ride by engine-powered boat from the mainland, the only way to reach Mahfuza’s house on the other side of the island is by motorcycle or bike along an uneven track with the river on one side and houses on the other.

Mahfuza’s hut sits just metres from the water, surrounded by palm trees. Boats lie nearby on elevated ground, some tethered to trees.

Like most women in her village, she was married before the age of 16. Then, 22 years ago, her husband, a day labourer, left her and their three young children for another woman.

"I brought my children into this world. I raised them, I fed them, I married them off. I did everything I could for them. Nothing could stop me," explains Mahfuza, tucking the fabric of her headscarf behind her ear.

When there is no man in a family, she believes a woman has to be both mother and father to their children. But her voice quivers as she says this.

Today, her two sons, both daily wage labourers, and her daughter, who divorced and remarried, live elsewhere, unwilling or too stretched financially to house or support Mahfuza.

"They forgot all these years of care right after they got married,” she says with frustration, her eyebrows furrowed. “It eats me up from inside."

Mahfuza helped Lavlu, the son of her daughter from her first marriage, study until class five. But her fishing alone could not support the two of them. So she was forced to make the difficult decision to send Lavlu to work when he was 10 years old. The now 15-year-old carries clay to turn into bricks at a factory. Mahfuza worries about his future.

“My grandson is my only family here, my everything,” she says.

Mahfuza’s day begins at 5am. She wakes for dawn prayer and quickly gets ready to head out. There’s no time for a proper breakfast, just a cup of tea or maybe some leftover fish if she’s lucky. Usually, by the time the sun starts to rise, she’s already out on her boat, gliding over the river.

At the end of the day, her hair flecked with sand from the river and dust from the road, she comes home and bathes in the pond close to her house. Sometimes she swims for fun.

Mahfuza catches about five kilos of fish a month. She keeps 1kg for herself and Lavlu and sells the rest, earning about 10,000 taka ($10), which the two must survive on.

Some fish, like sardines and mola carplet, are found all year round. But her work otherwise changes with the seasons. In warmer months, she catches shrimp and hilsa, and in the cooler months, she goes after bigger fish and crabs.

“The seasons dictate everything,” she says. "You have to keep up with the water, or you’ll fall behind."

On a good day, she makes a few hundred taka, enough to cover her expenses, which include the constant burden of renting her boat. The work is always unpredictable. "Some days are good, some are empty," she shrugs.

The seasons pose other challenges. Annual government bans lasting a total of five months during fish breeding seasons to prevent over-extraction make things harder. In those months, Mahfuza and Lavlu are often forced to borrow rice or money or sometimes go hungry. "If the government wants to protect the species, then they should protect us too," she says.

From May to October, the monsoon season, Mahfuza risks being caught in a cyclone. She is adept at reading the weather, relying on the wind, the colour of the sky and the patterns of the waves to gauge whether a storm is coming. "The sky darkens, the wind shifts - then I know I need to get back to shore," she says. Sometimes the weather turns quickly. "You can feel it in the air before you see it," she explains, "but there are times when the wind changes and you know it’s already too late."

When she’s been caught in a storm, she has had no choice but to hunker down in her boat and wait for it to pass, bobbing helplessly in the churning waters.

Mahfuza has been caught on the water in some of the worst storms, including Cyclone Aila in 2009, which killed more than 100 people and caused tidal surges and flooding, displacing half a million people.

Sometimes she has had no choice but to fish, even when the weather doesn’t look promising. "The sea doesn't wait for you to feel ready," she says. "I have to fish to survive - cyclone or no cyclone.”

Pirates also prey on small fishing boats in the remote waterways, especially those with lone fishers like Mahfuza. They often demand money and fish, and though raids aren’t daily, they’re enough to keep villagers on edge. Sometimes, they hold fishers for ransom. “They usually are here for money. They think that we have money. How foolish they are!” says Mahfuza.

Seven years ago, Mahfuza and her older brother Alamgir were fishing when they were surrounded by five unmasked men in boats armed with guns. They demanded 12,000 taka ($98). Mahfuza and Alamgir said they didn’t have it, so the pirates forced them onto another boat close to the shore. “They are very dangerous. They kidnap and sometimes even kill people if they refuse to pay money. I was very scared,” she says. They were held for hours until a coastguard vessel appeared in the distance, and the panicked raiders pushed Mahfuza and her brother into the shallow shore waters.

To this day, sudden noises in the water from another fisher make her jumpy.

But as the sole provider for her children since the age of 30, she has had no choice but to fish. "When my children cried for food, I did not care about the pirates," she says.

She now jokes about that experience, but her laughter is brief. Even now, she hides her earnings in different places and rows faster when the sun starts to go down and raiders tend to strike.

For the last 44 years, she has braved tigers, crocodiles, cyclones and pirates and stood up to her own community to provide for her family.

"I need no man. I row the boat on my own. I go to the forest alone. I can fish and bring wood from the forest. I need no man," she says, laughing, her voice tinged with pride.

When Mahfuza returned from fishing around noon, her close friend and neighbour, Nur Nahar, visited her on the shore with a few other women. Nur, in her 60s, often fishes with her nephews.

Amidst their everyday struggles and dangers, Mahfuza has found strength in the friendships she has built with the other fisherwomen from her village.

"We look out for each other," Mahfuza says with a grin. "If I get a big catch, she gets a share. If she catches more, I get mine."

“Mahfuza is my friend,” says Nur, her grey hair tied under a scarf. “She shares fish with me when I don’t catch any, even though she’s poor too.”

And when there is no fish, “I tell her, ‘Don’t worry, we’ll fish again tomorrow,’” Nur adds.

The fisherwomen have only themselves to rely on. They warn each other of approaching storms if they’ve encountered bad weather on the water on the way home. They whisper about the latest pirate sightings, speaking quietly because in a village where people struggle to earn a living, the pirates could be known to them. When one woman's boat breaks, the others help repair it. During the government seasonal bans, they share what little they have to try to make sure no one goes to sleep hungry.

These women have built a support system that’s all their own. They’ve learned that they can’t rely on anyone else, so they’ve created their own kind of family.

Five years ago, Nur’s husband died of a heart attack. The same year, her sister was killed by a tiger.

“When I lost my husband, I didn’t want to go on,” Nur confesses, speaking softly. “But these women ... they carried me when I couldn’t stand.”

"No one else understands the weight of the water on your back,” says Mahfuza, her voice low but steady, referring to their hardship. “But we do. We carry it together.

"We fight, we laugh, and we fish," she says with a big smile. "That's just how it is."