‘No trust, but money will eventually bring me back to city’

NEW DELHI: “The need for money is so primal. Now that I think of it, I don’t think I ever want to return to the city but I know that at some point the need for money will trump my lack of trust in big cities and bring me back here,” Khushi Ram said as his children tried to curl up on 36 sqft mat under the Ghazipur flyover.

Khushi Ram had tried to cross over to Uttar Pradesh on Sunday morning with his three children and wife along with the 5,000 migrant workers who had gathered at the Ghazipur border on May 17.

“That is precisely why we reached here on May 17. We thought the lockdown would finally be lifted that day and we will be allowed to go home,” he said, adding that they were brought to live under the flyover after being turned away.

This is not the first time Khushi Ram had tried to reach his home in Budaun, Uttar Pradesh. Every time the lockdown was supposed to end, he attempted to cross the border. “The first time we tried crossing from the Bypass, then near Mukherjee Nagar on the road towards Azadpur and now here,” he said, adding that none in his family owned a smartphone to book their place on a Shramik Special Train home.

After leaving his village behind, Khushi Ram had arrived in Delhi five years ago and had started working at a small eatery in Mukherjee Nagar (Outer Delhi).

“I had tried farming back home but the soil was not right and animals would often damage crops,” he said, adding that his employer took care him for the first few weeks of the lockdown but could not continue as business was shut and no money was coming in.

In the last two months, all Khushi Ram and his family have got in the name of ration is rice for two meals every day. “No dal or anything else was provided to us. We did not even get salt to eat with the rice. But my employer used to give us whatever he could from his shop,” he said.

“I don’t even know what to say anymore. Our house in Budaun has no other family members. We can just go into home quarantine without bothering anyone and yet there seems to be nothing that authorities can do to help us go home,” Khushi Ram said.