They, the people -Stories of the ubiquitous but the invisible, stories of folks that nobody much cares about

Migrant workers returning from their native places board a bus in Thane travelling towards Mumbai -PTI

Manjira Saha | TT | 06.0920 : Samtali Chaudhuri takes a few seconds to recall the name of her elder son. “Sambhu,” prompts someone, as Samtali looks this way and that absentmindedly. It is not easy to have a conversation with her, not because she is uncooperative, but because of her general air of resignation. Her standard response to any question seems to be: “How would I know?”

We are in Malda’s Shukurullapur. Three hundred years ago, one Shukurulla Sheikh had arrived in this part of Bengal from Motihari in Bihar, purportedly in search of new fishing opportunities. More people from the Bind community followed Sheikh to Malda and there they remained and their successive generations too. Samtali speaks in Bengali, but her accent betrays the olden tether.

Sambhu, her eldest son, was a migrant labourer. The mother cannot say for sure where exactly her son took up a job. “Perhaps Delhi. Or was it Haryana? Some place that side,” she says. It turns out Sambhu had tagged along with some relations. Those same relations later informed Samtali about his death. “They told me he was returning home from work. He had gone to the marketplace with a little boy and then they said he was no more,” Samtali continues.

Was Sambhu’s body sent home? Samtali shakes her head. “No.” Did the family receive any compensation from the employers? “No,” she says, this time forcefully. “Who would have brought the body home from that distant land? Who would have paid? We didn’t even get to know if he fell off a building or someone did away with him. The thikadar (middleman) here said, ‘Your son is no more’.”

Samtali and I are sitting in the open and talking, just behind us is a bamboo contraption, some teenage boys are sitting on it, hanging around it, chatting. I am told they are home from their different job stations in other states. Sambhu had gone away when he was that age. News of his death came five years ago. Soon after that Samtali’s younger son also left, in search of a living.

***

In North Dinajpur’s Mandipara neighbourhood, they thrust before me a rain-drenched photocopy of a voter ID card. It belongs to a Gandu Soren. In 2005, he was 45 years old. Soren had left home in search of work. He has been missing for the past three-and-a-half years.

His wife believes he is alive. She has been told so. Where did your husband go, I ask. She replies, “The thikadar from Pratappur told me, ‘Your husband has gone away in search of work’. Where to, he didn’t tell me.”

Soren’s three children crowd around me. What I gather from their loud lamentations and constant questions is that their father went missing before he could reach wherever it was that he was headed for. There was no point pinning blame on the local thikadar as he was responsible for the daily wagers only up to Malda; thereafter, they had been handed over to another thikadar.

Soren had disappeared into thin air and what was left with his family was a voter ID card wrapped carefully in plastic and a worn-out photocopy.