Articles by Aakanksha/PARI

At 9:00 in the morning, when commuters jostle to reach Borivali station in suburban north Mumbai and shops start lifting their shutters, it’s time for 24-year-old Lakshman Katappa to begin his work day too. Carrying a black cotton bag on his shoulder, walking barefoot along with his wife Rekha and his younger brother, 13-year-old Elappa, he stops in front of a closed shop. He opens the bag, and out comes a long green ghagra , a head band, a small box containing bandar (yellow oxide powder) and red kumkum , beaded neck ornaments, a small mirror, a chabuk (whip), and…

Gopal Gupta had decided to leave Mumbai for a second time in a year when it seemed certain that lockdown-like restrictions would be introduced again in Maharashtra by mid-April. Instead, at the end of March, his family boarded a train carrying a small red earthen pot with his ashes, to take it back to Kusoura Taluk Sahatwar, their village in Uttar Pradesh. “I don’t think I can only blame corona for my father’s death…Even if he had lived, he would have been without one leg,” says Jyoti, Gopal’s 21-year-old daughter. When Gopal, a 56-year-old vegetable vendor in Kalyan, developed a…

“I survived on bananas which I had stocked up in my bag,” Surendra Ram told me on the phone, about how he got through the ‘Janata Curfew’ of March 22. That day, when most of the shops and businesses in Mumbai shut down and those who could stay indoors locked themselves in, Surendra sat on the footpath near the Tata Memorial Hospital in Parel. Surendra is 37 years old and has oral cancer. That footpath had been his ‘home’ for a week by the day of the curfew – no ‘locking in’ for him and many other patients living on…

“I survived on bananas which I had stocked up in my bag,” Surendra Ram told me on the phone, about how he got through the ‘Janata Curfew’ of March 22. That day, when most of the shops and businesses in Mumbai shut down and those who could stay indoors locked themselves in, Surendra sat on the footpath near the Tata Memorial Hospital in Parel. Surendra is 37 years old and has oral cancer. That footpath had been his ‘home’ for a week by the day of the curfew – no ‘locking in’ for him and many other patients living on…