Evicted over rent, school is now home for teacher

Ghaziabad: Around 15 years back, Monaranjan Nayak, along with his newly-wedded wife, moved from Odisha to a small town called Chipyana Buzurg, and started tutoring school children to earn a living.
Over the years, their family grew as did his reputation as a teacher, and every evening, their modest living space would be bustling with children hanging on his every word and filling their notebooks, as he guided them through their school curriculum. With around Rs 12,000 a month, the family of four had little to complain about.
But just ten days of the lockdown washed out the life they had built in this town. The classroom, the largest part of their rented house, was filled with silence as he lost every one of his students because of the lockdown.
By the second week of April, unable to pay the rent of Rs 3,500, the family found themselves on the road after their landlord threw out all their belongings and evicted them. A friend he had made along the way, a teacher at a private school in the adjacent village, Dundahera, came to their rescue. He arranged for a room in the school for the family to live till they find an alternative.
“I was not able to pay rent as all my students stopped coming for tuition and all the savings dried up during the lockdown. Now, we are not in a condition to purchase dry ration but somehow we have borrowed some food from people around us ,” Nayak said.
Since then, the tuition teacher, along with his wife and two boys who are 14 and 10, has reached out to every acquaintance they had made in the town to survive the days of unprecedented misery. Nayak recalled that the family even had to go to bed hungry a couple of nights.
Although he doesn’t want to disclose the name of the school fearing he will lose the roof over his head again, he has shared that apart from his friends, some school staff members have also come forward to give them food or money to survive.
Nayak told TOI that he had applied several times for the Shramik Express train to Odisha and has also registered his family on the migrant workers portal of the Odisha government but is yet to get a response. Between May 5 and May 17, a relative booked them train tickets to Odisha twice but the trains were cancelled.
A week back, when they came to know that the Indian actor Sonu Sood is helping people stranded across the country to get back home, Nayak approached him on Twitter but failed to elicit a response.
The family hopes the Ghaziabad administration or chief minister Yogi Adityanath, will help them reach home. "I don't want to live here anymore. If I manage to reach my hometown, I am sure we will not die without food," the teacher said.