By Astha Savyasachi
"When the claws of hunger spread all across the country, fighters like Roshni, Arti, and Urmila, despite their own countless struggles, continue striving for humanity."
It is a scorching day and 22-year-old Roshni is sitting outside a grocery shop in the Jhilmil Industrial Area of East Delhi. With the sun right above her head, she is busy making Atta and Rice packets for distribution in the next hour. She lifts her left hand to wipe off the rolling beads of sweat from her cheeks. The Atta patch on her dusky skin is a sight full of hope.
Roshni with her parents, three sisters, a brother, and a niece lives in a room less than 25 sq yards. In her neighborhood, her family is the lucky one to own the space they live in. Her two elder sisters are married and stay in a village in Bihar. It has been over five years since the family lost its livelihood. Her father used to work in a cotton factory. His supervisor asked him to leave. According to the factory owner, he was of no use because of his severe joint pain problem. Her mother worked as a domestic help in the bungalows nearby but she also could not continue because of the sudden deterioration of her health. The younger sister suffers from malnutrition and had to drop out of school. She worked in a parlor to manage around 1500 a month and then joined a factory which agreed to pay her 6000 for working 10-hour shifts 7-days a week. Despite all the financial hurdles and the family’s relentless pressure to get married, Roshni did not let her spark grow faint. She struggled to continue her studies. She became the only one in her family who has entered a college. After completing her graduation, she could not imagine, even in her wildest dreams, to pursue higher education. But her tenacious attitude guided her and currently, she is pursuing a Masters in Hindi from Delhi University. For her pocket expenses, she gives tuition to school kids from the neighborhood and manages to earn around 2000 a month.
With her own situation in ruins and her family somehow scraping a living, imagining Roshni as a volunteer and a social activist seems impossible. But here she is, standing up after arranging all the ration packets in the cartons. She is waiting for her best friend to come. It was a week after the announcement of lockdown when the activist in her was kindled. She had got to know that her neighbor Aslam Chacha’s(name changed) family didn't have a single grain to eat and even his children had to sleep on an empty stomach for two days. It, however, did not come as a shock to Roshni. She had always known the taste of hunger, that feeling when the stomach twitches and cries out for food but we are too weak to even utter a word. She had herself bore the brunt of starvation. She couldn't sleep that whole night. She took her copy and sneaked out of her home to make a list of the people she could ask to donate. And that is how this relief work started. Since then, she and her friends collect funds, buy ration, and distribute the packets to needy households. They also provide basic financial help to those who are sick during this lockdown.
A young girl comes running with paper and a pencil in her hand. She is Arti. She calls out the names of all the households where the kits have to be distributed. After a quick check, both the friends lift the cartons and load them in the rickshaw which was ready to go. There is space for only one person left on the rickshaw. Roshni sits and Arti follows on foot.
Arti is a brave fighter on the battlefield of her life. She is a 20-year-old cheerful girl who is pursuing her Bachelors in Political Science from Zakir Hussain College. Her family has warned her that she can study only for one more year. But Arti hopes to complete her graduation and opt for the English medium from next year. Arti is also facing the family’s pressure to marry and quit her studies because she has a younger brother and the family can only afford the education of one child. Her father was a daily wage worker until last year when he met with an accident which left his right leg crippled. Her mother works as a domestic worker. During the lockdown, the family itself did not have enough ration, and Arti had to work in the bungalows along with her mother to manage two meals a day. When she came to know about Roshni’s initiative, she was the first one to volunteer. Arti, with an ever-grinning face, doesn’t seem like someone who had to step into all those difficulties. But she is forced deep into millions of such hells and yet emerges out victorious every single day. Her determination to continue her struggle against all the odds makes her a fighter.
The rickshaw must have reached the colony. The girls would soon distribute those packets. The families must have been waiting for them since morning. These girls are doing what the government aiming of a 5 trillion economy failed to do- to feed the hungry. Today, when our world stands at a juncture of witnessing one of the deadliest epochs in the history of humanity, we find all the economies crippling over the havoc caused by COVID-19 and the claws of hunger spread all across the globe. When the world is living in these grim shadows, the young girls like Roshni and Arti prove that even amid the darkest of storms, light finds its way out. They prove that some of us still qualify to be called humans. These girls with smiles on their sweaty faces are little packets of hope. Their eyes are bowls of fire that were born to change the world and redefine every meaning of existence. But, Roshni and Arti are not the only flames of fire. There are many others just like them who are burning steadily against all storms of society. They are standing firm on the chest of every system which treats them inferior.
While shifting the 20 kg Atta sacks from her shoulders to the cart, Urmila is calling out for the shopkeeper to keep another sack ready. She is an activist with the All India Central Council of Trade Unions. She is someone who is considered dependable. Her affirmative and steady body language shows the same. Within three days of the announcement of lockdown, she along with her friends made the list of all the families in her slum who were in need of ration. Urmila was a baby when she came to Delhi clung to her mother’s chest. She clearly remembers her mother telling her that it was the year when Indira Gandhi was assassinated. Her parents came here with literally no resources at hand and took refuge in a slum near Katwaria Saria. At 20, they married her to an alcoholic. By the time, Urmila was solving many riddles about herself. She was unfolding what she had unknowingly stuffed deep inside her consciousness. She was beginning to realize that she does not relate to the sex they assigned her at birth. With no source of income in the family, forced sexual relationship with her husband, and the horrific domestic violence, she called off the marriage. After her parents died, she shifted with her friends from the LGBTQI+ community. She made new friends in the JNU campus and often went there for a stroll. On one fine evening, a friend told her about the problems the contractual workers in JNU face. Over the following week, she and her friend talked to almost all the sanitation workers to get a clear picture of the problem. Urmila soon realized that the problem was structural. She decided to join the workers union, AICCTU. A few years later she became the President of the JNU Worker Union and under her leadership, the workers won the case for “Equal Pay for Equal Work” in the labor court. But on the same night, things changed miserably for her. The supervisor called her and fired from her job for “provoking” the workers to ask for equal pay. Since then, Urmila has been barred from entering the JNU premises. But these boundaries could not stop her from striving for an egalitarian society. She continued to provide outside support to the union and the workers. These days she does the relief work and distributes ration kits to casual, daily wage and migrant workers who have lost their livelihoods. Every kind of abuse is hurled at her, for her identity, her sexuality, and whatnot. But by holding the fingers of her own struggle in one hand and her social responsibilities in the other, she continues to walk gracefully.
Roshni, Arti, and Urmila are like the gleaming rays of hope amid the dark storm which is scraping away every bit of humanity from us. Our daily news is flooded with the photographs of those lifeless eyes which are forced to walk miles and miles in search of food and are destined to die somewhere in between. We are haunted by every another video we come across - A baby playing with the dead mother on a railway station in Bihar, two little migrant girls who are sobbing hard when they fail to even drag their swollen feet on the ground because of the unbearable pain, a woman migrant who delivers a baby on the road and then had to walk another 150 km drenched in blood, a migrant father who breaks down in tears when asked about his plight of having to walk with family from Ambala to Madhya Pradesh. And amidst all the havoc, our governments choose a comfortable limbo. All of this is somehow pushing every sign of life to grow faint. But the strong-willed fighters of humanity like Roshni, Arti, and Urmila help us believe that green saplings can grow out even from the most stubborn rocks.
