‘1,232 km’: Stories of heart & heartlessness

Sarika Sharma

“India witnessed two kinds of exodus after the lockdown was announced on 24 March 2020. The first wave was triggered by uncertainty, and the second by a lack of trust,” writes Vinod Kapri. His book traces the second through the unimaginable 1,232-km cycle journey seven young men undertook out of sheer desperation a month after the country was pushed into a pandemic-induced lockdown at a barely four-hour notice last year.

The book, however, isn’t just a tragic daily diary of the seven days that they cycled from Ghaziabad in Uttar Pradesh to Saharsa in Bihar. It is a critique of the social system that seems to build new walls of prejudice for the poor, not to be broken, not to be negotiated, but just there to be seen and felt; the education system that often brings them nowhere; the non-existent health system; and an ever-absent government. It is a telling of the tales of drudgery and helplessness and poverty that pull them down, no matter which part of the country they come to. And for most, life back home refuses to change.

As millions of migrants (mostly from UP and Bihar) walked home between March and June, Kapri, an award-winning documentary filmmaker, set out to make a film on these men who were forced out of the glittering cities by deprivation, “the virus of mistrust” and the oppression by state authorities. While there has been enough coverage of several journeys, Kapri felt the need to make people understand just how hard these journeys had been. And he realised: “They were difficult, life-threatening and almost impossible — as much as for these men as for the millions others who undertook.”

The film was subsequently made and released on Disney+Hotstar in March to coincide with the anniversary of the lockdown. A moving portrayal, it touched many. Kapri decided to turn the film into a book when he felt there was so much about that journey that still remained untold, undocumented. Crying over the long phone calls home, the fear of not making it home, desperate measures like foraging for food amid leftovers too… All this had to be told to bring home the message that all the lofty talk on TV should have been followed up with better planning and action on ground.

Kapri thus became a diarist, his iPhone taking the notes on what the camera was not to record. For those who have seen the film, the book plays out like an extension of the same. You can relate to the characters because they aren’t just characters. These are people whose lives you have seen across seven days packed into 1 hour 26 minutes. You have seen up-close their toughest challenges, their tiniest of joys, their despair, anguish, tears, smiles.

What the book also does is show a mirror to society — in all its beauty and ugliness. If there were policemen belittling the migrants going hungry for two days, there was a cycle mechanic who opened his shop at midnight to repair their vehicles. For every dhaba owner who refused to feed them for fear of cops, there was one that went an extra mile by waking up his staff at midnight to feed them.

Kapri seems to have done a fine job by maintaining his distance as a storyteller, a documentary filmmaker, but rising to the occasion when things began to seem slipping out of hand. You understand his anguish when he is told one morning about the encounter they had with armed goons (who apparently turned out to be faking it with a toy gun, pushed to the hilt because of pandemic-induced joblessness).

Once home, the men’s joy knows no bounds. The journey eventually ends, but how long can this joy last? With families having nothing to eat, with the earnings having dried up and no job in sight, a future full of struggle lay ahead. As Ritesh, the youngest and brightest group member, says: “…labourers have a single destiny. Suffer hardships throughout life and then just die.”

More books will be written, better ones too, but Kapri’s account will remain an honest tribute to the many who died along the way and all those who made it home, only to return the very cities that deserted them when they needed them the most.