When Sneha, now a postgraduate student at Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi, found herself en route to Tikamgarh, Madhya Pradesh, in March 2020, just days before the junta curfew was announced, she didn’t anticipate staying very long. “Mentally, I was very settled . I had enrolled myself in coaching classes; I was barely in touch with my family,” says Sneha. Soon, life in Tikamgarh became the new normal.
After the lull of the initial few weeks, Sneha recalls how there came a point when the ennui of being in Tikamgarh turned unbearable. “Ye kahan aa gaye hum? (Where have we come to?),” she would ask of herself. Reconnecting with the family over the daily ritual of watching Mahabharata and Ramayana soon became the running theme of the lockdown. As for Tikamgarh itself, the town she had lived in for 17-odd years before moving to Delhi, the changes were minimal.
Then, when the town opened up after the lockdown eased, Sneha travelled to sites that had remained out of her reach as a child, and found herself gushing about her beautiful discoveries. The town’s polity was now more discernible to her, and she noticed a lot of things she hadn’t before this visit. Soon Sneha found herself organising a street play in Tikamgarh to spread awareness about vaccinations, joining up with a group called Hifazat (protection). “I tried to understand the city better. The political awareness I had gathered in Delhi helped me see in my town what had remained invisible to me as a child,” she says.
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The pandemic permeated our lives entirely, upending, uprooting the ways in which we lived. And for those who were in the midst of building a home away from home, studying, working, evolving, the pandemic turned out to be too long a pause. It halted their lives and threw them back to where they had come from, thwarting the hopes and ambitions they had so dearly nurtured.
The setback was both personal and cultural for people who had successfully made their way out of the towns they had found too small to fulfil their aspirations. The towns they returned to were still the same, even as they themselves had grown in leaps and bounds during their time away. The result was a new, forced relationship, mixed with irritation and despair, repulsion and helplessness. But for many, the equation was also altered in that the migration allowed them to unravel their roots through new eyes.
Observe and reflect
Saket, a final-year student at IIT Delhi, was the first student to enrol in an IIT from Naugachia in Bihar. He recalls how he rediscovered the town he had dismissed and disliked since he was a teenager. “I was irked by the fights people picked in my neighbourhood. Some of them smuggled liquor, others followed any corrupt means they could to make money. But during these one and half years spent here during the pandemic, I realised that the root cause was the lack of education. I want to help them now, maybe create jobs here when I’m in a position to do so.”
This empathy, Saket says, is a direct consequence of the time he got to sit back, observe and reflect, for his earlier visits had always been too short for him to immerse himself fully into the town and its ways. Saket would run into an old friend on some days, but otherwise preferred keeping to himself, looking around, tending to the farm.
For someone who had always been nudged by his parents to get away from Naugachia, Saket had an awakening by the end of his stint there. “My hometown,” he says, “pehle visible nahi tha, par ab dikhne laga (my hometown was invisible to me before, now I can see it).
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The upside of a semi-urban city or a small town is, quite ironically, its meagre development, which doesn’t hinder the delicate balance with nature. The air quality, albeit poor, is not yet worryingly bad. The roads, with their potholes and cracks, are still not crowded with traffic. Parts of these towns bear signs of their rich history. Saumitra, a final year student at BITS Pilani, probed the layout of Jhansi, his hometown and home in the year gone by, as part of a course project. “I realised the architectural patterns of the town continue to be along colonial lines. The elite areas are at one end, the underdeveloped at another.”
Saumitra’s tryst with Jhansi, though, barring this one project, was an underwhelming affair. In contrast to Saket or Sneha’s epiphanies, his interest in the ecosystem of Jhansi faded over time until he found himself isolated. “I wouldn’t hang out or meet people. I didn’t feel any connection whatsoever with life in Jhansi,” he says. “Throughout, the sense of being away from Pilani was more prominent than being back in Jhansi.”
Different views
The environment of a small town, where festivals are celebrated in large groups, and fairs and functions routinely organised, is romanticised by the urban Indian. But for its denizens, who return after time spent away, the interaction with the community can be fraught with coldness and disinterest. Amit, a product manager, moved from Mumbai to Kalpi, a little town in Uttar Pradesh, just before lockdown. He found the people of Kalpi, from whom he had drifted farther and farther away, stuck in the same conception of the world as before. He spent one and half years gradually accepting the rediscovered community in Kalpi and coming to terms with the differences in viewpoints.
“I couldn’t really connect with the people of Kalpi, but after my time away, I’ve turned more tolerant of our differences. I’ve realised that running away from the people around you is of no use but also that the sense of entitlement one has towards our hometown and its people is misplaced,” says Amit.
Three waves later, the virus does show some hints of relenting. Sneha and Saket have moved back to Delhi, Saumitra to Pilani. Offices, colleges, and schools are opening up. A lot of people who were thrust back to their hometowns have returned to their hostels and pads in the hope of picking up from where they had left off, reclaiming the train of life that was so unexpectedly derailed.
The hometown, in the middle of this migration, once again risks being buried in the past. The pandemic, though, has ensured that those who return are surer of the inextricable connection with their roots, more aware of the ties that hold them. Or don’t.
The writer is a final year undergraduate at IIT Delhi.