None of the
stories are related to one another. None of them have any underlying meaning. All
of them are very much bland.
I love my Family.
I come home
after six months, four of which I spent alone in my hostel because of the Covid-19 lockdown. The day
I land, we are inundated with calls - from most of the family of course. However,
a particular close-family member calls us up at 12 in the night, a couple
minutes before I reach home. He had apparently forgotten to give us a call. Understandable.
But why 12 in the night? Unless you knew it would take us a lot of time to
go through the screening and allocation processes in the airport and the swab
tests at the local centre. And it did, it took us 5 hours to complete these
formalities and reach home. Seems like you knew about that, did not you? Well,
that was awkward.
A couple
days later. Our family is in home-quarantine. But we have not been that strict
with prohibiting any outside contact since my mother has been called for work. The mentioned
person comes in for a couple signatures from my mother in some papers. He has no problem
coming into what is potentially a covid infected home, sitting in what is
potentially a covid infected couch, and touching the same papers which my
potentially covid infected parents have touched. I come in with a cup of tea and
a few biscuits. He does not touch the biscuits. He takes the cup of tea but keeps
it away after two sips. He has never done that earlier. It is not normal.
My mother
is offended. She rants to me about the person at dinner. I realize I have not
paid attention to it earlier. I laugh at the hypocrisy.
Flood
My mother is an essential worker. She’s a part of the district medical team during this Covid-19 crisis. Adding to the rapidly rising number of cases, the recent rains and
the rise of the Brahmaputra has inundated thousands of villages in my state. She
is immediately assigned to the Flood-Medical team. She comes home, all drenched
in water, stinking of that very specific smell of flood and immediately rushes
to the bathroom. During dinner, she talks about the tents along the roads the
people have built – the people whose houses are half-immersed in water. Nothing
gets spared – their food, cattle, even the furniture. By the time the waters
will recede, the houses will be covered in silt, which will take months to get
rid of. However, these people are used to it by now. They aren’t surprised when
the waters rise; they only compare the level of water with the previous years,
in the marks of the walls of the mud houses.
2004
floods. It was one of the most destructive ones in the last couple of decades. I
was 5. But I remember the water entering the house and how we had to shift half
our furniture and other stuff onto the beds. My uncle lifted me onto the
bicycle, which he could not ride because of the knee-deep water, and we all went to our parents’, which was comparatively higher ground.
I remember fishing in our own front-yard. Riding the bhurs in our own neighborhood.
It was new. It was exhilarating. This year, the water has reached our gate. The
roads beside our house have been inundated. I do not go out. But I see kids,
around 5 years old, sloshing around in the water, having the time of their
lives. They do not understand the tents. They are excited at the prospect of a new home on the road. My mother
complains of the screams of the kids outside, and how they will get cholera or
rashes because of the dirty water. I watch from my window.
Gratitude
While locked up inside my room in Delhi, I started working with a team to send stranded migrant
workers back home. After two months of arranging buses and pleading for trains, we expanded our field into helping them settle down
with jobs. Almost all of them were out of jobs, and their sustenance depended
on their wages. For that, we had to call up people we sent home to ask if they needed help.
Most of them said yes, some did not pick up the phone, a few calls could not
be placed because the numbers were not recharged.
One fine
afternoon, I sit down with my cup of tea, mentally preparing myself to place
the calls. I am not a person who can talk over the phone – I prefer texting. How
I wish I could have hit them up on their Whatsapp! I dial his number; he does
not pick it up. So, I dial the next one. He does not pick up as well. But the first
person calls me back. I start talking to him, starting with the basic, “We sent
you home from Delhi in the buses, remember?”. He then bursts into cries of
gratitude. He talks, and talks, about how relieved he was to come back home to
his wife and children. What did you do earlier? I ask. He says he was a tailor,
working contracts with one shop or the other. Can you give me the name of the
last shop you worked in? He does not remember. He says it did not have a name. It
might have one of the places around the corner where you see two people with
machines sewing clothes, but you don’t pay attention. I can not proceed with my
questions; every space left blank in the conversation, he fills it up with
words of gratitude. I am glad, I say. He tells me how he survived on one meal
per day for two months, and how black tea was the only thing they could drink
if they were hungry during the day. He says he was willing to work for as low
as two hundred rupees, but there was no work. My heart sinks. I cannott cry in
the middle of this semi-professional call. I hold it back in, and try to deflect
the conversation to another question in the list. He answers it, but goes back
to his story, about how he felt like walking back from Delhi to his village in
Bihar, but did not even have enough cash to afford some food on the way. I
listen. His story is interspersed with heartfelt thankfulness. I try stifling my
tears and keep listening.
“Thank you,
bhaiyya. I will call you if we find any job that works for you”, I say, and
hang up. I do not know how to feel.
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