If a country is a metaphorical home, then Akhilesh Rajbhar and Om Prakash Sahu are men without addresses. Abandoned by their employers, mostly hungry and completely clueless about what to do in the lockdown, the only comfort they draw is from the memory of a physical home--the address on their government identity cards.
Rajbhar is a 20-year-old who worked in a cable making unit at Narela in north Delhi. For a 12-hour work shift, he earned Rs 12,000 per month. Last August, his left leg was caught in a machine he describes as a ‘gear-box’. Think of it as a larger component of smaller bits that fuse the different parts (such as the separator, copper and insulation wires) that go into making a cable wire. The left foot and some six inches above it were lopped off in an instance.
This morning Rajbhar hobbled to the Cantonment Bus depot in Varanasi. “I registered to come back home 10 days ago. I heard nothing after that. Then the local police began to harass us to leave," he told THE WEEK.
Of the various states to where Shramik Special trains have been run, UP has had the highest share--127 of the 287. These trains are to bring back tourists, students, labourers and others stranded outside their home states.
Yet from Narela, on Thursday night, Rajbhar got onto a truck that was ferrying food grains to Kolkata. His father Anil Rajbhar hopped on to another truck. Both men paid Rs 4,000 to the truck driver and sat on closely stuffed sacks for the 861-km drive to Varanasi.
Varanasi lies some 150 kilometres away from Rajbhar’s home district Ballia. In the midst of the two lies another district called Ghazipur. It was the closest to home that Rajbhar could find transport for.
Rajbhar has not returned home since his accident. He says that he cannot bear the thought of his mother looking at him. “My father came to Delhi to take care of me. My company helped for a month. I was even promised compensation and made to fill numerous forms. Three months ago, the management told me that nothing could be done," he says. He stayed on in Delhi, supported by a cousin, in the hope of finding some work. With the lockdown, that possibility vanished.
For Om Prakash Sahu (36), a construction worker in Lucknow, home is more than 800 kilometres away in a village in the district of Bemetara in Chhattisgarh. His family of three lives with seven other families under tin sheds in an empty plot of land in Lucknow’s Jankipuram area.
Om Prakash Sahu | Pawan Kumar
He had registered to go back home about 10 days ago, but says that he has not heard anything since then. Tired of waiting, 15 others (construction workers and their families) Sahu knew left on Thursday morning.
One of these was his friend Krishna Sahu from a neighbouring village. “My last words to him were, 'Stay safe my friend. Do not try to rush',” says Om Prakash Sahu.
A while after leaving, Krishna Sahu and his wife were killed by a speeding vehicle on the Shaheed Path bypass (that diverts traffic from Ayodhya and Kanpur so that it stays out of Lucknow). Their three children survived.
Undeterred by this, Sahu would still leave if he could. “I have a cycle. But the other families do not and I cannot leave them. It would take about eight days to get to Raipur (Chhattisgarh’s capital). My village is 100 kilometres from there," he says.
The truck that Rajbhar boarded dropped him off at the Akhari bypass on the outskirts of Varanasi. Some samaritans offered him food. On Sunday evening, as the state was hit by strong winds, Rajbhar and his father waited on the steps of some closed shops in the neighbourhood. On Sunday morning, the police asked them to go to the bus stop in the Cantonment area from where buses would take them to Ballia.
Rajbhar was still waiting when THE WEEK reached out to him on Monday morning.
Sahu, meanwhile, says that he hopes to get back home someday and then return to Lucknow. “If you work too close to home, you are tempted to visit more often. I have been working here for 10 years now and go back home only once in a year and a half. Some years on Diwali. Some years on Holi. We may be poor people, but we work hard. Now all the work I have is to ride around on my cycle looking for food," he says.
Rajbhar and Sahu are confirmations of the complete breakdown of trust between the government, administration and people. Yet they say they still hope someone will take care of them.
“Sarkar humari bhi toh hai (the government is ours as well)," says Sahu.
“If someday I could get a foot back, I will be able to support my family and myself," Rajbhar says.
But for now, they only yearn for home.
