“We are facing bad days ahead,” says a fierce-eyed Indian woman, already struggling with poverty as she faces the country’s draconian lockdown from a vast Mumbai slum.
“There is a strange stillness in our neighborhood since all this started,” said Rajesh Dhaikar.
When he can, Deepak slips outside to play cricket with friends. They scatter when the police come by, then return to their match a few minutes later. So Arif bought a Hero Ranger bicycle with fading purple paint from a fellow guard for about $8, and set off the next morning with the equivalent of $12 in his pocket and a small rucksack with clothes, a loaf of bread and a water bottle.“What choice do I have?” Arif said in a phone call at the end of his first day, when he still had more than 2,000 kilometers to go. “He has no one else.”
He sleeps near gas stations, because they are well lit, or at closed roadside restaurants. Sometimes, he stops when he simply can go no further. Because they weren’t registered in the village, they were not eligible for the food rations that local officials were occasionally distributing for the poor. They are surviving on handouts from family of flour and rice, and a few dollars her husband earned working as a laborer for a couple of days.
Mina Jakhawadiya was worried. The family was hungry, though aid groups were distributing enough food every few days to keep the worst hunger at bay. “The lockdown was not the right decision,” grumbled Deepak, whose friends no longer came out to play cricket. “The rich can survive even if the lockdown stretches for a year, but what will the poor do?
Across the country, small towns and villages had started closing themselves off, trying to keep the virus away. In New Delhi alone, 23 such hot spots were ordered sealed on April 8. But in Deepak’s neighborhood, social distancing still seemed impossible.
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