A hundred miles to go…

By Moumita De Roy

An image of some young men hauled down with school bags frog-jumping on the road in front of a lathi-wielding policeman caught my eyes when I was enjoying a feature on how people in high rises are making the most of this unwanted sabbatical. Some are resurrecting their old hobbies and some are sifting through the endless digital catalogue of activities.

Someone wrote that she has started going for a walk at the break of dawn in her garden amidst the summer flowers. And here are long winding ropes of migrant labourers who have started walking from their places of work, to reach their villages hundreds of kilometres away.

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To me, it is indeed a mystery, how these hapless people manage to have already walked a couple of hundreds with empty stomachs under a blazing sun loaded with their sparse belongings. Some of them have to be doubly careful as the fathers have mounted their toddlers on their back and mothers hiding the infants in their bosom from coronavirus, hunger and the scorching summer heat.

Here we are keeping our tiny tots engaged in fancy dress shows, singing, dancing and other theatrics and there the labourers are trying to balance the sleeping hungry toddlers perched on their shoulders. No wonder they are capable of building such high rises and ritzy houses for us.

While social platforms are bursting with ‘corona time pass challenges’ with people happily sharing their theme-specific pictures, here are the migrant labourers for whom every day of life is a challenge whether it is with or without corona. For them, the challenge starts from the very day they are born into a poor family.

From an early childhood, boys start working on daily wage and girls negotiate with murderous poverty. Isn’t poverty a timeless pandemic?

But, now, the bigger challenge for them is not to reach home, although a few have already died, but to get back the life they had before the virus ravaged life on earth. It is a challenge for them to even imagine in what different ways life will get screwed after the lockdown.

While we, on Facebook, are worried if the photo-challenge pictures are perfect, the labourers are worried if they will remain alive to click a picture with their family. No wonder, one of them said that whether they die here or there, they have to die.

The labourers are sometimes sprayed with chemicals in the name of disinfecting them. Sometimes, they are called to get transported to their villages and then asked to go back to their ghettoes with promise of food and shelter.

When we are busy trying new dishes as a part of the lockdown activities, the labourers wish for some Good Samaritan to offer them a couple of bananas, a packet of biscuit and a sachet of water. But like every dark cloud has a silver lining, this lockdown has something to make them stronger and resolute. This is their friendship with other labourers who like them started walking without even a morsel in their body and are equally blank about what will happen in the next hour.

Sad times build better relationships and comradeship than happy times. They are trying to keep each other’s hopes alive. However, coronavirus has highlighted the proverbial polarity of Indian society.

(The author is an English teacher)