First-person account: What it takes to make it home in the time of Covid-19

After being stranded in the US for over two months, he finally came back to India under the government's national repatriation scheme. Abhishek Waghmare gives a first-person account of the experience

The Covid-19 pandemic has given some stress to everyone under the sun. After getting stranded in the US for more than two months, I came back to India under a national repatriation scheme by the Government of India. With due respect to all agencies that toiled to make this pain bearable, here is what I experienced as I changed the time zone, and lost the summer solstice mid-air.

It was past midnight on March 9. At 35,000 feet from the ground, I was browsing through a movie catalogue on board the Air India 103. My eyes froze on a film that I had always wanted to watch but had but managed to. Kate Winslet-starrer Contagion, would be a timely watch, I thought. After all, I, like everyone else, was coming to grips with an unknown virus.
 
Never had I imagined that I would get stuck for months in a foreign land because of a pointy nanoparticle christened SARS-CoV-2.
 
After a little over two months, between thinking the real world might also have a Contagion-like ending and pondering over more tangible issues like the pandemic’s impact on the global economy, I finally got a place aboard a US-India repatriation flight that would take me home.
 
Back home, I see the economy has been hit hard, jobs are vanishing, locusts are seizing farms, and attempts are being made to redraw my country’s borders – all at a time when health workers, doctors and the police are having the toughest times of their lives. When it is a crisis, even a seemingly manageable task of running a limited number of flights to bring back stranded Indians from abroad can become a touch job.
 
The Vande Bharat Mission has brought about 150,000 Indians back home in the past two months. And, if one hundred and fifty thousand seems a glaring statistic, think of the experience of that lonely chap who usually goes unnoticed.
 
Even as all agencies did their job, there clearly was lack of planning and coordination. Limitations to institutional capacity were at work, and they seemed to disincentivise safety for a false sense of convenience. We do not need prompt action from all tiers of government in the business-as-usual world. But now that it is inevitable, the risks to, and trepidations in, the regular lives of the disabled and the old and the senile are huge.
 
The build-up
 
In the first two phases of the repatriation mission, seats on specially scheduled flights were “allocated” non-transparently to those who had applied for them. As it happened, only about 600 seats were available on the Chicago-Delhi route in the first phase, against more than 6,000 applications, an official told me. To cater to pending requests after a similar second round, the third phase allowed booking tickets directly on the Air India website.
 
It reminded me of the political tumult in India nearly a decade ago, when coal “allocation” policy was changed to “auction”, and how it gave a semblance of transparency.
 
I chose to fly domestically in the US from San Francisco to Newark, New Jersey, so that I could board a Newark-Mumbai direct flight and land closer to my home in Pune. I paid nearly $1,400 (more than Rs 1 lakh), about twice the usual fare on the route.
 
In New York
 
I had kept a buffer of more than seven hours to catch the Newark-Mumbai flight. It was only when I landed in Newark that I learnt that the flight had been delayed by about eight hours. There was no communication of this via email, and while my phone was inactive, many co-passengers with active cellphone numbers informed me that they had not receive a text about the change either.
 
Neither a food joint nor a coffee shop was open at Terminal B of the Newark airport. And the Air India counter was nowhere to be seen. Older passengers, who were looking for some communication from the other side, felt left alone without food at the airport.

The moment we reached inside the airport premises, proximity between co-passengers increased, as there was limited space | Photo: Abhishek Waghmare

 
It was only after 10 pm that day that an airport staffer emerged on the scene, just to answer queries with one line for all: “check-in will begin at 1:30 am”. An hour or so later, another staffer (she probably was from Air India) arrived with two snack boxes: each with a packet of Lays, a nutri-bar, a cup of orange juice and some dry nuts.
 
Imagine the plight of sixty-year-olds who had been waiting to go back home for two months and were kept waiting without any communication by India’s national airline at a foreign airport.
 
Finally, the airline officers arrived minutes after midnight, earlier than expected. I felt a sense of relief that luggage will now be taken care of. I thought I might be able to catch a quick nap before boarding began.
 
I was wrong.
 
They made everyone stand in a queue at about 1 am for the very important thermal screening and verification process. Those who had shelled out $3,000 for a business-class ticket, naturally, got the preference. But what irked most was that after an eight-hour wait inside the airport, everyone was now made to stand in a queue outside this time.
 
The queue did not move an inch for a long time. After repeated questions to strangers who were distributing some or other forms all the time, we came to know that the consulate was responsible for thermal screening and passport verification, and the officials concerned had not arrived yet. They finally arrived sometime between 2 am and 3 am, and our queue moved its first inch forward at 3 am.
 
When I reached the screening area, it was already 4:30 am. While everyone was following social distancing outside the airport — when they were left to themselves — we had to walk close to each other inside, even when under supervision.

Indian Consul officials were verifying passports of each and every passenger before the check-in process | Photo: Abhishek Waghmare

The person with the thermal gun was handling more than just that job, as the situation demanded multi-tasking. He did not seem to be a medical officer. At the verification desk were three officials from the consulate who were checking passports and sticking saffron-coloured stickers on the verified ones.
 
After these stressful few hours, almost everyone made it to the boarding gate two hours prior to departure. If people had been invited in batches according to seat numbers or any other random formula, the night would have been bearable for most of us. It just needed a bit of dynamic planning and coordination.
 
In the flight
 
The take-off was swift, within 10 minutes of the scheduled time. The only trouble faced was by the well-meaning flight attendants, who found it hard to manage the stowage of carry-on and cabin luggage into overhead compartments. Many students were coming back to India for good, and many of us were square families. Most were carrying more luggage than usual.
 
Two meals, a mask and alcohol swabs, a face covering, and two water bottles were placed next to every seat so that the crew did not need to engage with each passenger individually. Though this was a bit unwieldy, it was definitely safe.
 
The biggest concern I had when in my seat was looking at neighbours chatting with their masks pulled down. Lowering the mask from mouth to chin seems to have become a custom while speaking face to face with others. I had to remind those sitting close to me to abide by mask hygiene and discipline every time I noticed this transgression.
 
Somehow, the flight was apparently feeling more crowded than usual. It could most probably be due to the fact that everyone was wearing a full-face film covering, most of them had a backpack near their feet, and all of them had to carry two meal boxes in the vacant space in between them and the seat ahead.
 
Flight attendants were on their tenterhooks: They seemed worried all the time, clearly showing the stress they were in as they flew 300 worried people at a time and back. The announcements from the cockpit were fewer than usual.
 
The attendant gave us a form to fill which was intended to help the authorities do better contact tracing. The tryst with forms kept happening at all pit-stops – the port-of-departure airport, in the flight, at the arrival airport, and even at the hotel where I ended up being. I remember filling nearly the same information everywhere.
 
Arrival in Mumbai
 
While the weather in New York was expressionless and stoic, Mumbai welcomed Air India AI-144 with monsoon rains, and clouds as low as a few thousand feet from the ground.
 
In what deserved respect, airline workers and the security personnel were exclusively taking care of arriving passengers while themselves being at risk all the time. They guided the arriving passengers to the right place at every turn. There were two counters for sale of SIM cards. Moreover, one person was stationed exclusively for checking if everyone’s smartphone screen flashed the Aarogya Setu app, the official contact-tracing smartphone application of the Government of India.
 
However, weird though it might sound, anyone who does not use a smartphone is ineligible to get assistance from the government. Technology was not merely supportive, I thought, but also mandatory for humankind to survive from here on.
 
Immigration and customs were a cakewalk, and no one talked too much unnecessarily. The shot in the head came while exiting the airport. To segregate arriving passengers according to their destination town, respective district authorities had set up makeshift desks before the exit and were handing out signed-and-stamped passes that would allow travel by road. No distancing protocol was being followed at this specific point, and I was sure that the air here was not as filtered as in the aircraft. This seemed to me a potential risk zone, and as the desk servicing the Pune district had just one person in the queue, I nudged the officer on the desk to hurry up, and left with my pass.
 
It was only after I reached the exit door that I realised I had been handed someone else’s licence to roam. I went back, and what did the officer do? He just re-scribbled my name over the existing name, scribbled my phone number. I had to sternly tell him to issue me a new pass.
 
Until this point, I had no idea where I was going to stay quarantined after reaching my hometown. Was it going to be allocated? Was I to be given a choice? Everything was still under the wraps. The desk person was prompt to remind me that it was more important to ensure that I reached Pune first!
 
Outside the Mumbai airport, the Maharashtra State Road Transport Corporation had arranged buses for outstation travel. In normal times, the agency’s buses would ply from one city to another at regular intervals, every day, 365 days of the year, irrespective of the number of travellers in the bus. The readiness of the system to transport even one needy person at a time, even if that made the trip a loss-making proposition, made public transport in states like Maharashtra and Karnataka stand out.
 
But when it came to transporting international arrivals during the pandemic, the state transport buses were determined not to move unless they got at least 20 passengers. Why? So that they did not incur a loss. They devised a novel plan that was not on their table for donkey’s years: Set a target income for a trip, divide it by the number of passengers in the bus, and charge that as the ticket price. I paid Rs 1,340 for a 180-km journey, which would normally cost me less than Rs 500.
 
It took these multiple agencies a foot-trembling, gut-wrenching, stress-inducing six hours to let 17 hungry people get on to the bus. Again, the system ensured that financial pinch was not the only trouble we faced. See how the protocol was designed: The municipal body of Pune, in consultation with the district administration, would decide on the hotel where the bus should be headed. The communication would come from a nodal officer from the municipal body to the driver of the bus. This particular driver, from a village located 200 miles deep from any big city, was on his first journey after the lockdown was lifted. Neither had he a clue about the protocol nor did he have a smartphone.
 
When I realised this was not working, I had to call up the municipal officials myself, to send the message across, that this specific MSRTC bus was leaving Mumbai with 17 passengers, all waiting for the suspense over the allocated hotel to end. It was only when the bus entered the jurisdiction of the Pune Municipal Corporation that the nodal officers shared the list of hotels where one could book a room. It was a random choice, and everyone chose the one closest from her residence.
 
But the humble bus driver, who knew only the bus stations in cities around Pune, did not know the routes to these hotels. The high-risk people that we were, we had to turn on Google Maps, and give directions to him so that we could get to the hotel. The city officials were quick to put the blame on the driver for the delay and inconvenience.
 
The entire mechanism was established in the first place to minimise the potential spread of foreign viral strains via hosts that we were – international travellers. But they were the ones who had to deal with multiple agents who neither had PPE nor any clue about who’s going where, who had to resolve logjams on the go, wait in the poorly ventilated dungeon-like parking lot outside the airport, before they would even know where they were going to lie down after 40 hours of fatigue, risking every agent in the process.
 
Once the bus left Mumbai, there was no check on whether the risky international travellers were paying attention to care. The bus stopped at a closed food joint for a break, and smokers in the lot were careless enough to lubricate their lungs near the bus. I realised that the policy response left space for casual behaviour in times that warranted critical care. This happens when a policy response is left to itself.
 
I realised that there was no incentive for collective efficiency, synergy, or coordination: every agent worked relentlessly to speed up the movement of paper from his table to another, ensuring that he could answer a “yes” to his boss, grossly neglecting the thin wires that connected them. I wondered if the bureaucracy worked like this in normal times too.
 
Home is closer than it appears
 
In the first month of the pandemic, some impatient ones among those quarantined disobeyed the rules. Some others exposed how the government-maintained facilities lacked basic cleanliness. It was then that the rule mandating paid quarantine at relatively clean private hotels was put in place.
 
In fact, when I reached The Pride hotel in central Pune, I was pleasantly surprised to see a person at the entrance of the hotel with a thermal gun in his hand. I readily offered my forehead to him, he shot a beep at me, point blank, and noted down my temperature: 33.5 degrees Celcius. For the uninitiated, anything below 35 C is possibly hypothermia. But no need to worry, I am fit enough to write this.
 
It was about time that I shelled out Rs 21,000 ($275) for the seven-day quarantine at this hotel. A mandatory 14-day quarantine would have meant twice this expense. To put this amount in perspective, it is enough to take care of monthly spending of two people staying in a rented studio in any small town of India.
 
The reduction of institutional quarantine to seven days — though it makes me worry a bit, as SARS-CoV-2 can potentially make anybody its home even after the 10th day of exposure — is expected to loosen the burden on hotels as the number of incoming passengers rises.
 
But as I pack my bags for home after all this, I ask myself, do I really feel relieved from a burden? Yes, or No? My mind says, “Can’t say”.