‘Wanted to go to big city school, didn’t even get to see it’
PATNA:
Holi was always Nandini Mahto’s favourite festival but this year, she was looking forward to the week after the celebrations.
The nine-year-old was supposed to accompany her father, 34-year-old Kailash Mahto, her mother, Babita Devi, and two brothers, Mayank and Karan, from their cramped two-room hutment in Bihar’s Sitamarhi district to Ahmedabad.
Mahto worked as tailor, stitching jeans at a private firm in Ahmedabad, and hoped to give his children a better future by educating them at a school in the Gujarat capital where teaching standards were far higher than the institutions which were back home in rural Bihar.
He had returned home to celebrate Holi and the plan was to return to Ahmedabad after the holiday, this time with everyone in tow.
She was supposed to start Class 5 the Brigadier Star School in Ahmedabad, an English-medium school where the monthly fees would have eaten substantially into Mahto’s monthly salary of Rs 15,000.
“I would have enrolled my two sons also in good schools. Once educated, they would do well in life. We didn’t study and so we have to wander here and there for livelihood,” said Mahto.
Nandini, who had never stepped outside her neighbourhood before or boarded a train, was eager to travel hundreds of kilometers away, spend more time with her father and see a new city. But that was not to be.
Barely two days after she reached Ahmedabad on March 23, the government clamped a nationwide lockdown to arrest the spread of Covid-19. “I didn’t get to see anything of the city. Papa had said he would take me to a new big school, but I could not even see the building,” she said.
For almost two months, she and her family were cooped up in one room. With the factory closed, the family barely managed to eat two meals a day though the businessman Mahto worked for waived the rent for the room. However, Nandini felt suffocated as she was forbidden from stepping out of the house.
“Papa said due to the coronavirus, nobody should move out,” the nine-yearold said.
When on May 1, the government started trains for stranded migrant workers, the family felt relieved. Mahto borrowed money from his father and brother-in-law in Delhi to buy two tickets for himself and his wife at Rs 900 apiece – the travel was free for their three children.
On May 21, the family boarded the train from Ahmedabad station with Nandini having seen little of Ahmedabad except for one room and the railway platform.
She was disappointed, but relieved that she was going back home after the ordeal.
Now at a quarantine centre in Sonbarsa block of Sitamarhi, Nandini was recently told by her parents that they would not be returning to Ahmedabad.
The move may hurt her ambitions of becoming a doctor, but her father is clear that he will not leave his native village even if he doesn’t find a job there.
Nandini wants to go back to her old school, Pavirti Shishu Public School, and meet her friends.
“But I don’t know when the school will reopen. Here, we are in the quarantine centre and everything is closed,” she said.