His hands wrapped tightly around the frayed rope he uses to steer his skiff, Lutf Ali is visibly on edge as he scans the horizon. He keeps looking to the left, from where the speedboats always pounce.

"The Indian boats are big and noisy, so when we hear them, we try to get away," the 50-year-old Pakistani fisherman says of the neighboring country's coast guard. "If we're lucky, we're not caught."

In the cat-and-mouse game played out every day in the Arabian Sea and in the channels carved into the mud flats of the Indus River delta, Ali is the mouse.

Hundreds of Pakistani and Indian fishermen have been arrested and imprisoned in recent years, high-seas apprehensions that human rights activists say have nothing to do with border enforcement and everything to do with the 6-decade-old hatred between Pakistan and India.