Making of a sportsSTAR

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Strap: Film actors can go to extreme lengths while preparing to step into the shoes of sportspersons

Nonika Singh

For four nights and three days, Pappu Kumar Chauhan walked along with 11 of his co-workers from Bihar. They began their descent down the hill from Sanjauli where he had been working as a painter. They trekked down the thick forest; the road and the cops were to be avoided. From Pinjore, they turned towards Yamunanagar, to Nainital, and then Saharanpur where he was told there were buses taking migrants to his village Kachnahar in Purnia, Bihar. It was not to be so though — the buses only were covering certain patches. Pappu ended up walking another 250 km in Bihar too. It is March 24, and Pappu is at Gorakhpur, on board a bus home, yet again. The rumours of a second lockdown have been strong, and exactly a year after the lockdown was announced, he has decided that he doesn’t want to be caught unawares once more. “I have been through it, I don’t want to go through it again,” he says.

Those four days were long and tiring, the nights even longer, the feeling of morbidity gaining strength as the sun went down. The night before, the 12 men had hugged each other and cried, wailed actually, he confides. They had heard that the world would soon come to an end. “I didn’t want to die in a land that’s not mine. I wanted to go home, for one last time if it was to be so,” he says. The wait had been deathly for him, his parents, two younger siblings, his wife and their newborn, whom he has, ironically, named Lockdown. “He was born on March 23, the day Lockdown was announced,” he tells.

Pappu is among the millions who walked home between March and June 2020 — Ministry of Labour and Employment puts the number at 1.06 crore, but it could be much higher; Pappu left on June 7. The first in a series of lockdowns came all of a sudden. The transport system came to a halt almost immediately. The crores of internal migrants, most of them from the unorganised sector, across the country were stranded — without employment, without food, without the choice of returning home. Some left on foot and bicycles. The images shocked the world — highways dotted with poor India, men and women, little kids, the elderly, the ailing often on shoulders or push carts; police applying force on those who dared to walk; some dying on the way, among them the 12-year-old adivasi girl Jamlo, reported to have died on April 18 after walking for three days… The cities had turned their backs on those who had laboured to build them. There were far too many to care for, too little who cared anyway.

Ramesh from Hardoi too left his home of more than four years at Jagatpura in Chandigarh in the dead of the night, on March 27. “There were five of us. We didn’t have any money and the administration’s rations never reached us. My entire family was in the village. What if something happened to them? We left at night on our bicycles, paddling through villages, avoiding the nakas on the highway,” he says, speaking on the phone from his village which he hasn’t since left. Langars on the way is where they ate food, by the roadside they slept. Sometimes villagers wouldn’t let them pass by, the good ones guided them towards detours, some good cops helped too. Sleeping when tired, cycling when up — the entire journey home took them about one week.

But Pappu stayed put. He felt it would be okay in some time. Soon, the city’s heartlessness started to pinch. “We spent the first phase of the lockdown totally indoors. The contractor who had hired us provided us food and rations. But then he too couldn’t continue. Out of boredom, we would step out sometimes, but people in Sanjauli, even those in whose homes I had worked as a gardener before going for work, would threaten us to call the police. I hadn’t expected them to help, but this behaviour hurt,” he rues.

But Pappu stayed put. He felt it would be okay in some time. Soon, the city’s heartlessness started to pinch. “We spent the first phase of the lockdown totally indoors. The contractor who had hired us provided us food and rations. But then he too couldn’t continue. Out of boredom, we would step out sometimes, but people in Sanjauli,

But Pappu stayed put. He felt it would be okay in some time. Soon, the city’s heartlessness started to pinch. “We spent the first phase of the lockdown totally indoors. The contractor who had hired us