Miles to go, during a pandemic

A very topical novel indeed, written from the perspective of itinerant migrant labourers in India who journeyed home on foot when the national Covid lockdown gave them no other option. This is the (fictional) story of 15-year old Meher’s family, who leave their residence in the slums of Dharavi, Mumbai, and along with another family, try to walk home to Rajasthan, to their village, Balhaar. The structure of the novel is a series of letters written by Meher to one Ms Farah, a journalist, which is what Meher herself aspires to be. Meher imagines she is giving Ms Farah an exclusive. 

The letters recounts the risks and dangers and hardships of the journey back to Rajasthan, where police wait at checkpoints and tolls to beat and turn back escaping migrants, to enforce the lockdown. It tells of how many people smugglers spring up to ‘help’ these travellers evade the officials and police, and extort money to convey them by truck, boat, or any other means. It tells of the dangers of walking on train tracks and roads and through forests, and of some hostility and ostracization in some places when the migrant travellers actually make it home, due to fear of the virus. On the journey there are occasionally food handouts – though never enough – journalists, NGOs and social workers to try to organise and help, camps to hold migrants for testing. The migrants connect with each other using mobile phones (though where they can recharge batteries is unclear). 

Meher’s narrative voice comes across as unbelievably matured and assured for a 15-year old, even one who has had the benefit of ‘real’ schools in Mumbai. However, it also rings out with some authenticity with the histrionics and absurdities of the discourses which infuse her life, with a humour which is an acquired taste.

Although Baba appears foolish for having led us on this expedition of perils through a locked-down state, you must know he’s a first-class father. A man with the usual human burdens but the tensile strength of tungsten, who lost his hinges only recently. Let me tell you about that manic moment, ma’am, the one which stole my father’s bearings and went on to introduce us to the smoky fairy.

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Sometimes though, the language is just a little too far fetched – Happy, Meher’s little brother and just a few years old, supposedly says,

Your nocturnal chitter-chatter is of some use now.

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– is a child expected to use a word like ‘nocturnal’, let alone construct a sentence thus? Actually, much of the dialogue of the migrants seems extremely erudite and sophisticated for people supposedly with limited education and literacy levels. 

However, the travails endured by the migrant labourers walking home seem authentic enough – hunger, thirst, pain, beatings, robbery, fear, crammed into vehicles, illness and death, mistreatment at the hands of various authorities, and no real way to resist. The arbitrariness of their suffering also rings out quite authentically, as does the cycle of exploitation that threads through all levels of society seemingly, until those at the very bottom pay the price because they have no one else to exploit and no way to refuse. The novel is filled with casual violence, seemingly inflicted with impunity and without any accountability, and also full of abject bodies, broken, ravaged, stripped of dignity:

their feet spoke more than their eyes – naked feet, muddy feet, plastered feet, blistered feet, bruised feet and bleeding feet […] some migrants had fashioned plastic bottles and bags into footwear, some had strips of towels and torn cement sacks fastened around their feet, some had used leaves to fill the holes in their tattered slippers, while one had ‘mended’ his torn shoes with safety pins, the pins giving away, tearing into his skin. A few shoeless children stood on their toes to keep off the searing earth…

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Although Meher’s Baba and her father’s childhood friend, Jairaj, want to reach their village in Rajasthan, Meher does not remember it quite so fondly. She recounts the suffocating patriarchal stigmatisation of women in the village, and continues to regard Mumbai as a site of hopes and dreams, where modernisation and freedom are possible – where, for example, her mother was able to move from ghagra-choli with a veil, to saris, and then to salwar-kamiz, and even to jeans and thigh-length tops and no dupatta.

You should have seen her when she wore those tops, ma’am. There was a mini rebellion in those cotton blouses, and each time she put them on, she was a revolutionary – her against the disorder of social order, warring and waring on behalf of her mother, sisters, every woman in Balhaar and all of India. Of course, she would not dare to wear those clothes in our village. Her mutiny had limited geography, the Mumbai Metropolitan Region.

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Some of the better written passages are well observed, witty, edgy and bright. But some of the histrionics are rather off-putting, unnecessarily emotive and sensationalised, but perhaps not surprisingly so, as these are classic weapons of the weak. The repetitions and melodrama does get a tad tedious, all the same. Ultimately, it is a story of bare survival, and a system which continues to generate acute poverty and destitution. Meher recounts all manner of brutality and exploitation inflicted on the poor, by employers, authorities, their own families, underlining their lack of choice. The story also flags up the farmer suicides, which further prompted the rural-urban migrations in the first place.  

At the end of the book, there is an explanation from the author, that as an independent journalist, she did not have a press card and could not travel to villages to meet her story’s characters, and that she “had to write the book soon” (p231). She says the lockdown turned her to fiction but tried to stay true to the narratives,

No imagined atrocities, no made-up brutalities, no fictional victories, just what happened, just what really happened.

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That may be, but the laments and pontifications and gnashing of teeth were fictional additions. Perhaps the author meant to equate excess with outrage in equal proportions to ensure the dim-witted reader would really grasp it all. Overall, worth a read and thankfully a relatively short novel, but a little more authorial restraint and balance would have improved the quality of the writing considerably without detracting from the thrust of the message.