A Home For Jhaji

I belong easily.

Any new place I move to sinks into me within minutes. But the ones that draw me closest are the ones where, each time I step out on the streets, a familiar language with all its dialects floats into my ears through the ambient cacophony.

The language is Maithili, my mother tongue from North Bihar, and in most cities in India, I hear it everywhere: in the parking lots, on the pavements, in the mandis, at the mall entrances, in the government kachaharis or among the office buzz.

I can tell my people from a distance, even when they cloak their Maithil roots in a veneer of an acquired otherness; it’s their lilting Hindi intonations, the tunes they hum, their sometimes-discrete-sometimes-not knotted hair tikkis bobbing about, or the gentleness with which they argue the mundane, the spiritual and matters of critical urgency.

These drivers, parking attendants, security guards, rickshawallas, vegetable vendors, maalis, the Bata saleperson, the Sulabh Shauchalay attendant, the icecream vendor and more, they and I are bound together by language in a way that only the shared expressions of a land proffers.

I can rarely resist my compulsive urge to initiate conversations with them. The chats are predictable enough - about where they are from, how long they have been away, who all they have left behind. This ‘ghaur baair’ (home and hearth) answer always has a poignant wistfulness to it, talk as they do about their aging parents (it’s always the parents first – a trait that marks Maithil men, I suppose), wife, children, siblings’ families, a cow, a couple of goats perhaps, a house.

I can picture it all in my head even as they speak. I know those beaten tracks, the ponds, those courtyarded houses. But I also know how the entire belt, village after village, is devoid of the able-bodied menfolk between the ages of 17 and 55, give or take a few years on either side.

And so, it is in the cities that have lured them away with peddled opportunities, or with promises of anonymity and hope, that I have been meeting them, my kindred souls, everywhere I go. They, along with the millions of other workers from other regions – moveable parts, sort of, have been growing the foods I eat and building the concrete monstrosities for me to live in. They have been guarding my homes and offices, and helping me move between them when I must. They work hard, these invisible people, with self-pride, dignity, fortitude and almost always with a weather-beaten joviality. And as the country has been witnessing the abominable tragedy play out in the past couple of months, they are the most dispensable indispensables in our comfortable lives.

Interestingly, enmeshed in this sea of people in the urban landscape is another variant of the North Bihari migrant – people like me. We left our home towns after school with big dreams to come to the big cities to study in big universities and land big jobs and live in big houses so that our children can have all of these even bigger.

Like our less privileged compatriots, we are everywhere. Cast your eyes wide and chances are, you’ll find us in hordes in your circle of friends, colleagues, work acquaintances, seniors, mentors and well-wishers. We left because of reasons similar to theirs – a land that has been failing its people for a long time, we continue to move away in droves at the slightest hint of greener pastures elsewhere.

About thirty years ago when I first left home, my parents knew I was leaving for good. I remember my father accompanying me on that journey and my mother fighting back tears saying this-is-it as the train pulled out of the platform. I didn’t know it then, but from that very day, I was surrendering myself to a migrant’s way of life, hopping from one city to another, sometimes on my own terms, sometime not.

My mother was right. I never did return home ever for more than a few rushed days at best. The summer vacations thereafter and my subsequent visits ended up being a whirr of distracted activities and as life kept getting busier, the notion of that home got fainter and more and more distant.

What is home, then? Or the lack of it, therefore?

As I now see the incondonable afterthoughts and reprehensible political dramas around the shramik trains and buses, I think of the collective sense of anger, frustration, desperation, fatigue, hurt rolling along the rails and roads across the country, all finally homeward-bound.

I am moved easily by images – as our most of us; the last several weeks have been an assault on the conscience from all sides, therefore. I suspect it has had a role to play in my growing insomnia too. My nightmares show me flashes of someone’s slippers giving away on the burning asphalt, someone dropping that last saved drop of water; I see the swollen feet of a child and trickling blood of a woman who starts menstruating on the way. And I wake up soaked in sweat, acutely aware of my privileges, knowing that these are not merely nightmares. Worse ordeals continue to befall the stranded in the real world.

It is in this cover of darkness that I feel my guilt consuming me, more than ever before, for not doing enough. For not giving enough, for not helping out enough in whatever ways I could have, for not calling out the authorities’ apathy enough. But the most damning guilt of all is the thought of unwittingly forsaking my own when they needed their own the most.

But that is not the only thing I have forsaken. In my inveterate rush to experience the many thrills the world has tempted me with, I have willingly let go of my rootedness. The hundreds of masked faceless humans whose images we are bombarded with on our screens are all going back to that place they call home. The urban gypsy that I have become, there is no place that will ever truly be that for me. Not the one where I now live; not the one where I grew up; not the ones where my origins are.

And that is where I, this other Bihari migrant, am poorer for the choices I have made over the years.

For there is no longer a place where I truly belong.

---Richa Jha