The bright side of the monsoon season in Kolkata: a hilsa dinner

Kolkatans love to eat. Apart from a (very) sweet tooth, they enjoy fish dishes, especially seasonal delicacies such as hilsa in mustard sauce.

The hilsa is a salt water fish that enters the rivers and swims upstream for hundreds of kilometers to spawn. For this long round trip, the fish gorges on the plentiful food the Hooghly river carries into the sea during the rainy season.

Kolkata, India, August 2011.