‘Here, even children carry mobiles’

“They stabbed me, snatched all my money and screamed in my ear: yayi kepra (You are a guest here),” says Mohammad Salim, sitting in his twostorey tenement in a refugee camp for Rohingya Muslims in Delhi’s Kalindi Kunj. “I knew right then that I had to leave Rakhine state,” he says, holding back tears. “I was convinced Burma is not my country.”

Salim arrived in India a little over a year ago, taking the same route that thousands from his community have taken since 2010 — a midnight boatride to Bangladesh, dodging security personnel, a one-week stay at a refugee camp in Bangladesh, and finally another boat journey to the West Bengal border.

“I had to pay off people at every stage. I had left my village, Tanmyahati, with Rs 2 lakh. By the time I got to Kolkata, I was broke,” he says.

Now the 30-year-old stays with 45 other families in Kalindi Kunj, one of the only official Rohingya refugee camps in the Capital. Multi-storey homes made of wood planks, cardboard, plastic sheets and just about any scrap material line the narrow pathways of the settlement, that was built on land donated by the NGO Zakat Foundation.

It was Salim’s grandmother, Zora Hatum, 70, who first came to India in 2012. “I told the 10 others in the family that you come when I tell you it is safe. I am old, I didn’t care if I died on the way,” says Hatum, adding that she hasn’t bothered about getting a refugee card made. “I will die soon, what is the point?”

Salim, who speaks in broken Hindi, works at a chicken farm in Panipat for Rs 3,500 a month. “I feed the chicken and clean the place. We have rooms to stay there. I come here on weekends,” says Salim. He wants to eventually go to Saudi Arabia when he saves up enough. “I have heard a lot of money can be made there.”

In the past four years, says the camp’s 38-year-old zimmedar Abdul Karim, the 215 people in Kalindi Kunj have largely settled down. “Most of the children go to the government school in Jasola Vihar. The rest go to a madrasa in the camp. A few educated men from back home take turns to teach there. We also have our own masjid and shops,” says Karim, who runs a small grocery store.

Unlike the Rohingyas in other parts of the country, most of them in the Capital have long-term visas which entitle them to admission in government schools and to government hospital facilities. “We don’t get anything else. Earlier, NGOS would give us blankets and rice,” adds Karim. The visa has to be renewed every year.

Mohammad Johar, 23, says the visa has done little to improve their lives. He teaches at the madrasa for Rs 5,000 a month. “I have been in India for five years, but couldn’t find a job,” says Johar, who was married at the camp and now has a one-year-old child.

Johar also regrets that there is very little coverage on Myanmar in the Indian media.

A kilometre away from Kalindi Kunj, 65 Rohingya families live in a slum in Shaheen Bagh. It is not an official camp, and the over 300 Rohingyas here share space with migrant labourers from Bihar and Assam. Manohara Begum, 18, lives with her husband, who works at a construction site, and two-year-old son. “My family — parents, two sisters and three brothers — arrived in India with a dalaal and got dropped off at a chicken farm in Panipat. He charged us Rs 30,000. I don’t even remember the route we took, it all seems so hazy now,” says Manohara, asking her mother how many years it has been in India. Her mother, Dilma, 48, tending to her own newborn, looks confused. “Maybe four,” she says.

Manohara says she likes Delhi. “People are nice, they even helped me learn Hindi.”

Looking at her son, who is sitting near a garbage mound, she adds, “Chotechote bacchon ke haath me mobile hai yahan (here, even children carry mobile phones). In Myanmar, our phones were snatched and police asked for fines as high as Rs 3 lakh... We are here for now, in the future we will go where the government sends us.”