Teen boxer back home after 73 days at SAI Kandivali
Ritu Antil was alone. When she woke up, she went for a run, as she has always done, through the vast Sports Authority of India (SAI) campus in the Mumbai suburb of Kandivali. The campus was a ghost town. Back from the run, the 18-yearold boxer did shadow work outside her hostel room. Usually, the hostel block would be buzzing with athletes. Now, there was no one else in the massive residential complex except her and the hostel’s warden.
This was Antil’s lonely life at Mumbai’s SAI center for a little over two months, till she finally boarded an Air India flight from Mumbai to New Delhi on May 26, and reached home.
The flight was supposed to take off at 11:00am, but got delayed till 9:30pm. The 10-hour wait at the airport was nothing for Antil, who boarded the flight with a smile and a selfie.
Her father was anxiously waiting for her at the IGI Airport, from where they departed for their village Murthal, in Sonepat, in a car. Antil reached home at 2:30am on Wednesday, and the first thing she did was send a text to Sushmita Jyotsi, SAI’S regional director in Mumbai, informing her that she had reached her destination.
Jyotsi, acting on behalf of SAI, had arranged for the flight ticket and Antil’s transport from the centre to the airport.
“Seeing my father’s face after landing in Delhi felt so special,” Antil said over the phone from Murthal. “The last time I was home was in November, so to finally be here with my family after such a long wait makes me very happy.”
Antil, who won bronze at the 2018 All India Inter-sai boxing competition, is now undergoing a 14-day quarantine period at home. That seems like a breeze compared to the 73 days she spent at the SAI hostel with almost no company.
With Maharashtra being among the first few states in India to restrict public activities from March 13, the SAI centre here had asked all its 50 students present then to return home. Two of them, however, remained stuck—judoka Mukesh Tar, who was giving his Class X exams in the city, and Antil, who had been hospitalised with viral fever and was too weak to travel after being discharged.
Antil tried to make the days pass by sticking to her daily routine—before the lockdown, she followed a strict training timetable, and she tried to keep that going. She doesn’t recallthe luxuryofhavingso much time to watch TV ever in her life; “the common hostel TV became my personal TV,” she said with a laugh.
Some days, she passed time by painting bottles, or even window grills.
For Antil, the real test of patience during those two months was when she would browse her social media accounts. “Whenever I would check the status of my roommates and friends, I saw them having fun with family, enjoying their time at home. I would feel really bad at those times,” she said. Through those lonely months, Antil’s biggest source of strength was also the only other person around at the hostel, the warden Lena Sengupta.
“We would sit together and speak daily after lunch, generally about things. She stayed with me throughout and took care of me like a mother,” Antil said.
In the first week of May when inter-state transport gradually began, Tar, the Judoka, was sent by SAI to his uncle’s house in Virar in a car arranged by them.
“Seeing him leave, Ritu became all the more impatient,” Jyotsi said.
When special trains resumed between various cities, Jyotsi considered sending Antil on one, but did not feel comfortable about the girl making such a long journey alone. So, when the announcement was made that domestic flights would resume from May 25, Jyotsi and her team immediately swung into action and got Antil a ticket.
At 7am on Tuesday, the teen finally checked out of her hostel.
“I was given a face mask and hand sanitizer at SAI, and the airline also provided us with a face shield and some protective gear of their own,” Antil said.