Fisherman Abdul Aziz Dar gave up his trade in 1990 after fish stocks diminished in river Jehlum. He took up ferrying fellow villagers across the river to feed his family. The commuters from his small village of 80 households of Gadhanji Mohalla Awantipora, however, do not pay in cash.
The village is situated at the bank of river Jhelum exactly at the other side of the famous Mantaqi Shrine and the Awantishwar monument Awantipora.
The ferry is the only convenient transport to the main town of Awantipora. An alternative bridge at Padgampora is almost a mile away from the village.
“It take us about an hour to reach Awantipora via that bridge that is normally a five minute distance across the river and that is why we prefer the boat to reach the town,” Mohammad Ramzan, a resident of Gadhanji Mohalla said.
Awantipora is the nearest marketplace to Gadhanji Mohalla and villagers buy household goods and other commodities from there besides the students, employees and labourers travel by the boat daily. “We do not have a shop in our small village and we have to buy the daily use goods from the Awantipora market,” says Mohammad Ramzan.
Abdul Aziz along with his wife Jana Begum is seen busy all day ferrying people across. Sometimes Jana Begum manoeuvers the 30-feet boat alone.
Gadhanji Mohalla is not the only place in the valley where boats are the main source of short distance transport, however, it is one of the few places where ferry services are paid in kind and that too at the end of the year or during autumn.
In rural Kashmir shepherds, tailors, barbers, cobblers and even the Imams of the mosques were given paddy and other grains at the end of each harvesting season in return of their services, up to 1970’s.
“We used to give the shepherds, tailors and even the Imams some quantity of paddy or mustard after each harvest for their services and this continued almost up to 1990 in our village,” Mohammad Syed, a resident of Hafizabad Bijbehara said. Now all the services and trade are dealt in cash in both rural and urban areas and the barter system has almost vanished.
But this boatman of the small hamlet is still keeping the traditional barter system alive. Every person of the village avail his services but there is no dealing in cash for them.
“Every household gives us a bag of paddy containing 40-50 kilograms of the crop irrespective of the number of family members in each of them and the number of times they use the service,” said Jana Begum.
The non-local passengers pay two rupees per ride as the fare.
The landless villagers also pay in cash. “They pay us 300 rupees per household a year for our services. Even though we deserve more but we never bargain as the villagers themselves are not that prosperous and most of them do manual labour,” says Jana Begum.
Abdul Aziz himself is landless and his 11 member family of seven daughters and two sons is too large to be fed by the cash and grain given by the villagers for the whole year.
His two sons extract sand from the river with other youngsters of the village. “My two sons who should have been studying in colleges could not continue their studies after 5th standard, to support their sick father in running the household. Four of my daughters go to school, the eldest of them studying in class 7, but I do not know whether they can go for higher studies,” said a rather concerned Jana Begum.
Living in a small, four-room house, this family is bereft of worldly luxuries. “We are poor people and whether we are educated or not does not matter for us, what matters is that we do not remain hungry at the end of the day,” said one of Abdul Aziz’s daughters. “My parents and brothers work all day long and our companion and the only source of entertainment in this hard life is the television that I think releases the worldly tensions and worries to a great extent,” she added.
