"One Monsoon, few years back, the Gad river overflowed, flooded the banks and reached up to here" Junaid told me as we stood in his backyard.

He spoke softly, as if the river is just a family member that stumbled. Then we walked down to the waterline. On the right was a makeshift tin hut neighborhood where the out-of-state workers families lived, cooked and slept on their seasonal labor migration.

On the left, a group of them rested under coconut trees canopy gazing at the calm surf of the river.

In a distance floated sand mining boats that looked like royalty as the long bamboo poles for digging the riverbed kept swaying majestically as the workers swept the underwater surface and pulled up buckets full.

We crossed the temporary bamboo bridge, a group of workers standing midway looked down on a huge colorful fish hovering below and tried unsuccessfully to hit it with a big rock. Later we saw them collecting wood for their kitchen fire and I assume this fish could have been lunch for them.

Across from them an array of iron stems sprouted from the depths where another cement bridge column was in the works.

On the other bank women in colorful saris were unloading a truckbed full of gravel sacks.

Another Indian truck, as colorful as women sari come was piled up wit sand from a boat by porters carrying bowls of sand on their heads while balancing their steps on narrow ricketty planks bridging the rocking boats and the land.

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