‘So much land. Can’t govt give us some?’

“AE BURMA, this man wants to talk to your people,” an autorickshaw driver hails Mujib, in a lane outside Welcome Colony, home to a majority of the Rohingya families in Jaipur.

‘Burma’ is the generic term used by locals for people of this colony. For them, it is a pool of cheap labour. Mention Rohingyas, or even refugees, and the locals shrug ignorance.

Mujib, 27, left Buthidaung in Rakhine about a year ago. He crossed over to Bangladesh and into the heart of “Hindustan” — as the Rohingyas call India — through Kolkata.

Welcome Colony houses around 300 Rohingyas in the heart of the city, next to a choked drain. Squatting on government land, it draws its name from Welcome Hotel nearby. The other two camps are in Hathwara and in the outskirts of the city.

Headed to the home of “the more vocal” Kadir Hussain, Mujib, who has picked up Hindi, stops to drop off a sack full of trash he has collected through the day at what looks like a garbage collecting point.

“This is what what most of us do here,” Mujib says. “There are a few who pull rickshaws, but most are garbage collectors.”

Children share space with roosters amid heaps of garbage. The women swiftly move into houses at the sight of strangers.

“Why did we leave? When the government does not want you around, there is little else you can do,” says Kadir (50).

He adds that they didn’t have a destination in mind. “We did not plan for Jaipur or Jammu, nobody promised us anything, there was no leader. Everyone just wanted to save themselves.”

Kadir’s small house, for which he pays Rs 2,500 as rent, has a makeshift partition; on the other side are his newly married son and daughter-in-law.

His face lights up as he talks about his 10-acre paddy farm in a village in Maungdaw city. “We had a large house there, with five rooms for the family and JAIPUR space left over for guests,” he smiles. “But the government just took it away. Officials come with measuring tapes, and that’s it.”

On why he came to India, Noorun Amin, at the Hathwara camp, says, “Hindustan has never asked us for our identity. It has allowed us to earn a living and live without the fear of violence. It is like a mother’s lap.”

The refugees say they don’t face many problems in Jaipur, since most of them have identity cards issued by the UNHCR. They are, however, required to register themselves with the Sodala police station nearby, “once or twice a year”.

Most of the children study at a nearby madrasa. Around 50 go to a primary government school.

What’s weighing most on their minds here is that the drain by which most of them live may be demolished soon. “Once that happens, they will evict us. We don’t know where we will go. People don’t rent out their houses to ragpickers,” Amin says.

“We don’t demand anything from the government here, no citizenship or any other rights. The government has so much land. Can’t they give us some?” he says.