State border crossings

The plight of the ‘Okies’ has been all too graphically portrayed by John Steinbeck in his classic...

The plight of the ‘Okies’ has been all too graphically portrayed by John Steinbeck in his classic,The Grapes of Wrath. Consecutive years of drought had turned Oklahoma into a dust bowl. With the crops withered, the farmers had no option but to desert their fields and head west to California. Their bitter struggle, as also sublime acts of decency,leave behind enduring images.

Unlike Steinbeck, I avoid long travels. Nor am I a gifted man of letters. Nonetheless, reading newspapers has been a habit with me. My day starts with scanning the headlines, and I gathered that migrant workers seemed to be in the limelight, even if for all the wrong reasons. One is aghast to learn that during certain seasons, a whopping 15 per cent of rural India could be on the move. Since they lack even the most basic documents of identification, they make do with with rudimentary or no amenities.

Sheer logic would suggest that this flow of humanity would be towards the metros and larger towns. My sleepy backwater village surrounded by paddy fields hardly appears to be a place to meet aliens. But if you listen carefully to the language spoken outside, you can even pick up strains of Bengali. The large brick-kilns have attracted these comrades from right across the subcontinent. Imagine. They have travelled all the way in unreserved compartments, stacked like the bricks they make! Once, about eight years ago, a winsome lad with high cheekbones and pleasing manners from Nepal landed up in the local small hospital canteen. Everyone called him Robert, though God alone knows if that was his name. He is now an expert ‘parota’ maker, supplier and even doubles up as a cashier.

One late night, I was driving back from town. All of a sudden it started to drizzle, the street lights had broken down, and I almost collided into a band of people ambling along the road casually. I screamed at them and hurled a few expletives too. After a silence, they informed me that they were manual labourers from a province very far away and were going down the road so as to start repairing it very early the next day. They had trekked all the way to do a hard and humble task for people like me. My head dipped in remorse.