A seed quite tender leaves its homely land, And drops itself in foreign sands. Displaced not by choice, but by the winds of fate, Alone to struggle in a vulnerable state. Endangered in a habitat concrete, With none for miles of its fleet, Wary eyes searching for a sight familiar, Finds only solitude and strange skins near.
Darkness at sundown awakens its fright, The stifled air brings a sleepless night. Unshaken, it remains by sheer toil, And digs a place, firm in the soil. With courage and instinct as able guides, Spreads thick roots on a network wide. Memories of home its only glove, Toughens its soul for the rise above.
The young seed at dawn cracks the soil at rest, Erupts and emerges at its mature best. Strangely familiar, the wind and the sand, Exudes the smell of a friendly land. The harsh sun not deterring its heroic feat, It steadily uplifts- upright and upbeat! Valiant, despite all odds, austerity and gloom, A lone daffodil in my balcony, humbly blooms.
It was a ‘rain lily’ bloom actually but daffodil sounded better in the poem 😊
🌼🌼🌼🌼
This poem is dedicated to Raju (if you’ve read my previous blog, you will know who he is, or click here to read) and many bravehearts like him who leave their hometowns and families to earn their living elsewhere.
Unlike Shahrukh Khan in the movie ‘Raju Ban Gaya Gentleman,’ who hails from a small town and makes it big in Bombay, my Raju became a small time painter in a big city earning a meagre income.
Like him thousands of people in India move to bigger cities in search of better work opportunities. A huge section of these people are what we call ‘migrant workers.’ Without any education, they fall in the labour category. Raju is one of them.
Last week, we got our hall and the kids’ bedroom painted and although the first two days I mostly stayed in my room(there was too much dust), the third day the rooms were relatively dust free and I got an opportunity to talk to Raju. There were two painters actually, Jaibir was the other painter’s name but he was there only for a short while on the last day.
Raju and I got talking and he shared a whole lot of things with me, things that made me sad, made me contemplate and compare.
Raju Kumar was born into a destitute family in Gorakhpur, UP. As his father and sole bread winner was struggling to make ends meet, he did not go to school. His sole purpose in life became to break out of the poverty and misery and earn a decent living. With that in mind, he left his hometown and moved to Bangalore some years ago. He equipped himself by learning a trade, to paint at Asian Paints and had just started to make a little money, when covid surfaced and the first lockdown was enforced. That’s when his life turned into a nightmare.
For daily wage earners like him, no work meant no money and no money meant no food. After struggling for more than a month with sometimes just one meal a day, he decided to go back to his village. But how? During the first lockdown everything was shut. Luckily, through some source, he came to know of a truck going from Bangalore, direct to Gorakhpur. So Raju, along with some 30 odd people boarded the truck and reached Gorakhpur in five days. He told me that those were the longest five days of his life. They had carried bread, biscuits and water with them. Sometimes, some place on the highway would be open and they got to eat proper meals but otherwise it was just the bread and biscuits for five days.
The sad part for all of them was that although they got reunited with their families, the situation back home wasn’t any better, they still had no work and no means of livelihood. Raju by the way is 29 years old, married and a father of two sons aged six and two. His second son is a coronial😉
Raju did farming for some months in Gorakhpur but he could barely make enough to feed his own family. When he couldn’t take it anymore he decided to come back to Bangalore during the second lockdown and has been here since. Ofcourse he visits his family once a year.
He told me that although his family is away, he has work here and that is the biggest motivator and biggest relief. He works in an online service platform that pays him Rs. 200/day and his supervisor(contractor or middle man) pays him Rs. 1000/day for the days he works. He doesn’t get paid for no work days and the company payment comes only once every three months or sometimes six. His supervisor Santu from Jharkhand, however, is a nice guy he told me and looks after their well being and pays them on time.
In those three days, I noticed that the two men worked diligently and sincerely without even taking a lunch break. But for all the toiling, their income is menial… so unfair!
After listening to his story, I couldn’t help comparing our lives. Here we were, during the lockdown in comfort; we didn’t face a single day of inconvenience. Everything we needed came to our doorstep, but the majority of people in the country suffered like Raju. The atrocities they encountered are something we can’t even comprehend… then, and now on a regular basis too.
Perhaps his life would have been a lot better if he knew how to read and write but he didn’t get that privilege at all. This is how millions of Rajus survive in our country, the only purpose of their lives; to eat two meals a day and provide the same to their families… or with a little better earning, educate their children.
Do they have an escape route or the only way to get out of the rut for migrant workers like him is the one that the protagonist, Balram Halwai in Aravind Adiga’s masterpiece, ‘The White Tiger’ adopts???
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