Long days' journey into flight

Book review of 1232 km: The Long Journey Home

At a time when the country is still reeling under the impact of the 2020 national lockdown, 1232 km: The Long Journey Home by national award winning director Vinod Kapri evocatively chronicles its human toll. Written like a journal and also out on Disney Hotstar as a documentary, this short book tells the story of seven migrants — Ritesh, Ashish, Ram Babu, Sonu, Krishna, Sandeep, and Mukesh — who cycled 1,232 km from Ghaziabad, Uttar Pradesh to their hometown Saharsa in Bihar a month after the lockdown was announced. The idea of cycling 1,232 km during north India’s punishing summer through a repressive lockdown seemed suicidal. Yet, for these young men, this was the only option; they were convinced that they would starve to death if they stayed on. Mr Kapri decided to follow the cyclists in a car and provide an eye-witness account of the journey. Without literary frills, the book does this, even as it describes the lack of a social and economic security net for such a feat of endurance. The back of the book refers to it as the story of “the extraordinary courage of seven men in the face of tremendous odds.” However, it seems to be more a testament to their extraordinary will to survive at a time when the government, both at the Centre and in the states they travelled through, failed them entirely.

Their journey, as expected, has its ups and downs. In Garhmukteshwar, abusive lathi-wielding policemen refuse to let the cyclists pass through; days later in Sitapur, the district police gave them beautifully packed food, along with water and biscuits for the road. At one point, scared villagers did not even let the thirsty migrants drink water from the hand pump. Hours later, a cycle mechanic disobeyed the lockdown rules to repair their cycles — and refused to take money for his efforts. They met a samosa seller who actually fired up his stove behind downed shutters to prepare a hot snack for them. In another district, the DM ensured that passing migrants were transported in trucks. In sharp contrast, the district administration in Bihar, which at the time was seeing a huge influx of returning migrants, was ill prepared, overwhelmed and inhuman in its lack of concern for the well-being of the migrants. Their experiences clearly demonstrate that a lot can be accomplished with administrative will. The reverse is, unfortunately, equally true.

Meanwhile, because real life, especially today, is no fairy tale, the group’s return to their home state was not one of those happily-ever-after endings. Struggling with loss of income, lack of employment and the floods in river Kosi in July 2020, one by one all seven were forced to make their way back to the city from which they had fled.

1232 km: The Long Journey Home

Editors: Vinod Kapri

Publisher: HarperCollins 

Pages: 232; Price: Rs 399

Mr Kapri rightly grapples with the ethics of voyeuristically following a group of people facing the biggest adversity of their lives, with his camera. He justifies his action somewhat by writing, “if the toughest journey of the lives was not documented, how would the country and the world find out about their struggle, their pain and the threats they faced?” It’s a valid question but leaves many others in its wake. Was it ethical to film Mukesh (one of the migrants) cycle in the heat when sick from the comfort of their car? Or to document the fact that the seven subjects had to go without proper food for 27 hours when Mr Kapri had the means to feed them? Or to turn their desperate journey and fight for survival into a life lesson for himself and privileged readers? There are no good answers to this. The book does, however, put a human face to these deprivations in a way that most other literature from this time has failed to do. It also raises important questions about the narrow definitions of poverty that do not account for an individual­/household’s capacity to bear unemployment, sickness and economic uncertainty.

The book is a compelling read for its unsparing glimpse into an India most of us do not know. It offers insights into the psyches of people who were a part of the 2020 migrant exodus, people without the cushions of savings, family support and insurance. Why is it, the author questions, that migrants who construct our homes, iron our clothes and do all the maintenance work that keeps our communities running smoothly, get so little by the way of social and economic security in return? His diary-like narrative style gives readers a sense of the awful uncertainty that these individuals, and indeed most of the country, faced as the lockdown took their jobs, livelihoods and lives overnight.  

One wonders where the seven men are during the ongoing second lockdown. Chances are high that after a few months of decent work till March 2021, they are, today, exactly at the crossroads they found themselves in May 2020. Indeed they, like most of the country’s unseen, unheard citizens, are victims of an economic epidemic for which we have neither vaccine, nor cure.