The Longest Walk Home

THE CORONAVIRUS PANDEMIC throws into sharp relief the ever widening gap between the rich and the poor. While one set of people might be beset with boredom, another looks at the prospect of starvation. India’s affluent with their live-in domestic help, packed larders and high-speed internet might find these three weeks of mandatory lockdown an imposition, even a burden. But it will not ruin them. It will not push them out in the streets and compel them to walk for hundreds of kilometres, not for a ‘chhutti’, but for mere survival. No one knows how the economy is going to hold up in the near future, but this much is certain: the poor in India are already facing the brunt of the pandemic.

It is 2 PM on Day Five (March 30th) of the nationwide lockdown. NH-24 connecting Delhi to Meerut is desolate except for a few odd vehicles. With police checkpoints every couple of kilometres only those deemed ‘essential services’ are allowed to drive through. We pass a family of three, a mother and a father carrying a young child along with a bag strapped to his back. The husband tells us that he has a regular job in Delhi but is walking 25 km to meet his father who is unwell. We ask if he is going to reach his destination in a single day. He is confident and says he will make it by sunset. A police vehicle notices us and comes to a halt. The UP police immediately swing into action and tell the family to turn back. Their home is close by and the cops say they will escort them. The husband and wife try to make their case, but to no avail. We watch as they are herded back down the road they’ve just walked, with a cop wielding a lathi in the air behind them.

Day Three and Four of the lockdown saw hundreds of thousands of people leaving their Delhi accommodation and heading to the border. The Guardian called it India’s ‘greatest exodus since partition’. Even hardened photographers say that watching the crowds of people scramble for the few odd buses left them in tears. By Day Five the processions have been removed from the highways. All has been ‘sanitised’, garlands of plastic containers sprinkling the side of the road tell us of crowds that have come and gone. A chopper flying above hints at the presence of a head of state in the vicinity. But we still see stragglers, those who are too old or too slow, or have left late. They are looking for alternative routes, walking through harvested fields and trying to avoid khaki. They all have one destination—home. A place with family, a place without rent.

Nearly all the people we spoke to have a similar story. They’ve left their Delhi accommodation because their landlords have evicted them. Without work, and with no place to stay, they have no option but to hit the road. We ask them more than once where they are heading as their answers surprise us given the distances. A family of two women, a man and a child say they are going to Itarsi. That it is nearly 900 km away. I ask them how they are going to get there since there are no trains or buses. They say, “Rukenge aur chalenge, rukenge aur chalenge [We will stop and walk, stop and walk].” They aren’t being foolhardy. In the absence of any social net, they are forced to be self reliant. The two women used to work in houses in Noida, the husband says he is a mazdoor.

Talking to the man I am reminded of Deepa Anappara’s Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line (2020). When the young child narrator who lives in a basti visits a metro station for the first time, he says, ‘I’m very alert. I look around the station, wishing I could tell which parts Papa worked on. Maybe his fingerprints are hidden under the paint, stamped in cement.’ If each of these labourers left their fingerprints in wet cement, I wonder what biographies our metros and malls would tell us. The people who build these structures, laying brick upon brick, never get to access them, never get to lay claim to their own creations.

A woman in petite heels and a dazzling kurta tells us that she and her husband are walking to Allahabad. That is more than 600 km away. We pass by a family that is sitting in the shade offered by barricades. They say they’ve come to Lucknow by bus. The bus left them here and they’re still 30 km away from home. They have three-four odd bags and a strolley. Weighed down by luggage, an elderly grandmother and a young child walking for 30 km is out of the question. A lorry slows down and the men rush to ask them for help. We pass a family of three. The woman carries her bag on her head and tells us that their nephew has come to their rescue. The nephew wears the lanyard of a hospital around his neck. He says he has come to take his aunt and uncle to his room as they’ve been evicted from their rented accommodation and their village is too far. A car stops by and asks them if they want food and water. They say no. They say they are carrying enough to sustain them. Numerous vans, with ‘Bhojan Seva’ posted on the window, ply up and down the highway, providing the walkers with some relief. A good Samaritan who is handing out poori and halwa tells us that he has packed 1,000 lunches this Monday afternoon, from his neighbour, a sweetseller’s shop. The nephew who does housecleaning in a major private hospital says that he has come to depend on the help of strangers as the Government does nothing. He knows he might lose his job for not showing up to work but right now getting his aunt and uncle home is more important.

Most of the migrant workers we spoke to have left their Delhi accommodation because their landlords have evicted them. Without work, and with no place to stay, they have no option but to hit the road

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These are the people walking home. These are the people who policymakers and politicians, the rich and the powerful call ‘termites’ and ‘infiltrators’, ‘masses’ and ‘swarms’. This is the vocabulary that denies them of their humanity and which emboldens policemen to force them to do squats on the highway or hose them with bleach.

This is no nameless, faceless herd. These are fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters who have left families and villages and run our cities. Chinmay Tumbe writes in India Moving: A History of Migration (2018), ‘The Census of 2011 revealed that there were over 50 million internal migrants for economic reasons. The Economic Survey of India in 2017 estimated this figure to cross a 100 million when the limitations of the Census were fully taken into account. That is, the migrant workforce has been conservatively estimated to comprise a fifth of India’s total workforce… . There is also clear evidence that work-related migration rates increased since the 1990s, coinciding with increased economic growth rates and the globalization of the Indian economy.’

To look at the crowds at Anand Vihar Bus station or the state borders and deem them as ‘irresponsible’ or as ‘holiday makers’ or as ‘India’s great unwashed’ reveals the blindness and bigotry of the beholder rather than the beheld. With their bags strapped to their backs and often with children in arms they are not walking the highways or arriving at state borders seeking charity. They are merely fulfilling the most human of all wants—the desire to be home with loved ones at a time of great uncertainty.

Following a Delhi government sign of a ‘Ran Basera’ we make our way to the Sarvodaya Kanya Vidyalaya, Ghazipur, near a container depot. The stacked ship containers offer us an incongruous landmark on this landlocked highway. A hospitable Delhi cop greets us and tells us that today (Monday, March 30) the Centre has been flooded by officials and press. A cop adds our names to a long list of journalists who’ve come by. He doesn’t let me write in my name, as he says he cannot share the pen. Started over the weekend this camp gives shelter to around 250 migrants. The cop guides us from classroom to classroom. Students’ tables and benches teeter high in the corridors to make place for mattresses and pillows. People lie on them in various states of wakefulness and sleep. The cop says the mattresses are placed suitably apart, but they look proximate rather than distant. He says a doctor visits in the morning and checks on the inhabitants. They are served two meals a day and we do notice packed lunches. We speak to a few people who are awake, and they reiterate the same story: they work in factories, they work in construction, they are daily wagers, and with everything shut they are trying to find a way back home.

As we head back into central Delhi, the cops become a tad friendlier. They shoot their questions less aggressively and are appeased by a glimpse of a press identity. Dusk settles with the light melting from gold to copper. For a minute, you can be forgiven for soaking this moment, the honey hues cast upon white facades, offset by the shadow of pigeons. But only too soon, one is yanked back to reality, there is nothing natural or peaceful to this emptiness. This isn’t a calm borne from the erasure of movement, this is an extraction of life itself. There is no peace here without foreboding.

Taking advantage of these sepia tones my colleague and his friend take out their cameras and shoot an emptied-out Connaught Place. On a typical day at this hour the circles of CP would be heaving with pedestrians and cars. But during the lockdown pigeons rule. The dogs wander perplexed. Swiggy delivery men in their trademark orange and black uniforms hunch over their late lunches. They say only a couple of restaurants are open in CP, but there are enough orders to keep them on the road.

I can hear only the sound of a broom sweeping up the fallen peepal leaves from the road. The municipal sweeper says that he usually works from 2 PM to 10 PM, but nowadays a new diktat has been set: finish your work and leave. He is glad that he lives close by and can walk home. His friends who live far away say they will finish their shift and then start walking back to Indirapuram.

AT A TRAFFIC light we stop behind a fuchsia pink Ambassador. A family of vagrants tap at the passenger window. We can’t be certain but from our vantage point the passenger looks like a white woman. The banging at the window rises in pitch and desperation. The window opens a gap, the car speeds off and the family scramble for a pink note.Hands grab and pull for the Rs 2000 note left on the tarmac. Is this an act of stupidity or generosity? Who is to tell? All we know for certain is that these are abnormal times.

At a 24×7 in Connaught Place, customers are allowed in only two at a time. Those without masks are refused entry. The guard at the door deems handkerchiefs tied to faces as not mask-enough. Upon entering and leaving the store, he squirts hand sanitiser upon my palm. At a State Bank of India ATM similarly, the guard offers me hand sanitiser upon entry. In their own way (and perhaps with instructions from on top) every guard, every deliveryman, every sweeper, every cashier is trying to take their own precautions and keep the city running in a time of contagion.

A family of two women, a man and a child say they are going to Itarsi, 900 km from Delhi. ‘Rukenge aur chalenge, rukenge aur chalenge’

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While health workers, of course, have the most dangerous and demanding job of these times, one must not forget the role of all these other workers. We probably don’t even know the name of our ‘kudawala’ (garbage collector), but without him today we’d be festering in our own waste. As a society, we pay such a premium to blue and white-collared jobs that we all forget those who truly keep the machine of our everyday lives oiled and running. It is the plumbers, electricians and garbage collectors, the cashiers, bank tellers and petrol pump attendants. It is the workers, those who the monied and powerful call ‘chhotu’ or ‘tsktsk’ with a click of their tongues, as if they are summoning a pre-language infant to come to
their service.

The New York Times reported how ‘Rich Europeans Flee Virus for Second Homes’ and are thereby taking the contagion with them into the countryside. A Gaurav Dwivedi posted a painting on Twitter of a father, mother and two children. The couple look like labourers given the loads on their heads and the manner of their dress. The caption reads, ‘Gunah passport ka tha/Darbadar ration card ho gaye… [The crime of the Passport/Left the Ration Card vagrant].’

Across the globe, a similar story of inequality is playing out. A single celebrity gets five Covid-19 tests whereas health workers have to wait weeks for their turn. In the US and Europe, billionaires have hunkered down in disaster bunkers and charter private jets to ferry them out of virus hotspots. On my own Facebook feed I read a post by a friend who writes of a family that has bought its own ventilator—for their home, you know, just in case, as senior citizens do dwell in the house.

There is going to be no ‘single story’ of this lockdown. It is an encumbrance on all of humankind. Each of us has our own unique struggles to deal with. Only time will tell the effect of this lockdown on our physical and mental health and on relationships. As privileged folk we will celebrate the clean air, the bursts of bird song and the spring blossoms. We know that social distancing is required and that each of us has a responsibility towards it. Social and economic inequality is a fact of life in India. But it is getting harder to reconcile with the dissonance as we all face a common enemy. Sickness is a great leveller, but the pandemic reveals how we value certain lives over so many others. It would be hubris to imagine that we can walk in the shoes of the daily wager, but we are still capable of compassion and empathy. Even if we don’t know destitution, we all know the longing for home.

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About The Author

Nandini Nair

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