Trio walk 100km to home, but can’t enter for hours as area is a hotspot

Ghaziabad: Mohammad Naseem, 45, along with his son and son-in law, walked 17 hours on Saturday from Rohtak, hitchhiking in between, to reach his family in Khoda, Ghaziabad at 10pm. But a reunion was still far away.
They were stuck near Bhiwani in Haryana for the last two months with very little money, and on Saturday morning, they got a drop till Rohtak from where they started on foot, hitchhiking short distances and covering more than 130km in total. When they reached, the landlord of their house in Khoda refused to let them in without a health certificate, saying the locality has been sealed by the district administration.
Helpless, they spent the night on the road and reached the nearest police check-post in the morning where they were told to get themselves tested at a Covid hospital.
The nearest one, MMG Hospital, was 15km away. At the hospital, even though they didn’t have any symptoms of an infection, the heath officials initially decided to send them to a quarantine facility for a fortnight.
But on Naseem’s insistence, they were later dropped at Khoda police post on the assurance that they would remain in home quarantine.
Naseem, along with his minor son, Dilshad, and son-in-law, Saddam, had gone to work with a road contractor in Bhiwani in March and got stuck there due to the lockdown. “Our troubles increased as the lockdown progressed. The contractor used to give us food twice a day — at 1pm and 1am. We tried to come home several times but could not succeed,” he added.
“We don’t have any money left with us and know that sustaining here would be equally difficult. But I am glad to be back home with my family,” the middle-aged man said, adding that he has no plan to go back to his hometown Araria in Bihar as of now.