‘When You’re Going Through Hell, Keep Going’

— A Journey Through a Pogrom and a Pandemic

It was the night of a full moon in early March. I had spent the day in northeast Delhi, giving food rations to the victims of the anti-Muslim violence that had claimed fifty-one lives there in late February and displaced thousands more.

Riding back in a taxi with a group of relief workers, I struggled to come to terms with all that I had seen that day — a father weeping over the brutal killing of his 19-year-old son, a dazed old man with two huge bandages across his chest, covering knife wounds inflicted by masked men, groups of women sitting and sobbing quietly in small rooms.

Someone in the car pointed to the full moon and said, “So beautiful up there. So ugly down here.” Our silence signaled our agreement. This was my fourth visit to the area, and as we crossed Mahatma Gandhi’s memorial, Raj Ghat, I pulled out my phone. My hands shook a bit as I messaged a friend, ‘Can’t keep going to NE Delhi. Can’t handle it.’

The friend, an empathetic soul, asked me what the matter was. I told her I had never seen this kind of destruction before and that I was finding it difficult to sleep at night.

She sent back a response I was not expecting.

‘This feeling will pass. Go back again tomorrow. You know you should.’

I was taken aback. Obviously, she did not understand how difficult it was to walk past festering mounds of garbage every day, listen in silence to the heartbreaking stories of the survivors, stand amongst the charred remains of burnt houses and shops, and look into the vacant eyes of those still in shock. Clearly, I had not communicated my own state of mind emphatically enough.

‘You don’t understand!’ I protested. ‘This is taking a toll on me.’

My friend responded, ‘When you’re going through hell, keep going.’

I was tempted to get offended, but somehow, I knew she was right. Although relief workers do need to step back regularly while working in difficult situations, I knew in this case, the only way for me to handle this emotional maelstrom was to face it head on. The only way to get out of the hell I was in was to go through it. I needed to get back out there again.

The next morning, I returned with the team to northeast Delhi, not quite sure what to expect, but to my great surprise, I found myself handling it much better than I thought I would. My friend had been right.

The presence of machine-gun wielding paramilitary forces patrolling the area was still unnerving, the stories of the survivors still heartbreaking, and the omnipresent mounds of garbage still assaulted my senses. But inside, something had shifted. That day we ended up distributing food rations to a lot of people, and just before we left, I met a young Hindu biryani stall owner who had heroically saved 40 Muslims from certain death. His story gave me a new tranche of hope again.

That night, as our small relief team headed back from northeast Delhi, the moon had waned a bit. The fellow on our team who had made a comment about its beauty the previous night said in beautiful, poetic Urdu, “The moon may have lost some of its light, but that could be because it is shining through the hearts of some people down here.”

The next couple of weeks saw a lot of ordinary citizens come forward and quietly help the violence-affected. Concerned people from all over the country started pitching in and helping those who had lost their livelihoods. Some bought new carts for the vegetable and fruit sellers, others bought new rickshaws for the rickshaw pullers. Yet others paid the house rents of those whose shops and businesses had been destroyed. The principal of a well-known school in Gurgaon bought sets of kitchen utensils for women whose homes had been looted, and the despair and anguish I had felt during the days immediately following the pogrom dissipated.

And then came the lockdown.

On the night of March 24, the Prime Minister of India waxed eloquent on live television about India’s war on Covid-19. Comparing this to the 18-day war of the Hindu epic, the Mahabharat, he declared that the only way to win the war on the virus was to lock the country down for 21 days. I had thought the worst was over. I now realized that the worst was yet to come. (At the time of this writing, India has the fourth-highest number of Covid-19 cases in the world.)

No sooner did shops, markets and establishments around the city start shutting down than reports of hungry and helpless people started pouring in. Our small group of relief volunteers that had thus far focused on helping the people of northeast Delhi began expanding the scope of our efforts. Those who managed to get e-passes found themselves distributing food all over the city and those of us who didn’t stayed home, worked the phone, and raised funds for food for the hungry.

And then news of the migrant crisis broke.

The visuals of hundreds of thousands of workers trying to get back home stunned us. The sheer magnitude of the workers’ suffering began to make international news. So dire, desperate, and widespread was the crisis that even the self-satisfied in Delhi’s gated communities, who had hitherto focused primarily on their own fitness regimens, culinary skills, and movie lists, began to sit up and take note.

Early one morning around 3 a.m., I noticed that Zartab bhai, one of the most active members of our relief network, had just posted an anguished message on Facebook about the plight of 16 labourers who had been crushed under a train while sleeping on the tracks at night. The exhausted workers and their families had been following the train tracks in an attempt to find their way home to their village. I sensed in his post the same anger and helplessness I was feeling. We had a long chat in the wee hours of the morning and decided it was time to do something — anything — to help migrant labourers get home. We had little idea of how to actually go about it and no funds in hand, but that night, project ‘Destination Home’ was born.

The next morning, we let people know on social media that we wanted to help stranded workers in Delhi get home safely, free of cost, and with their dignity intact. The response was overwhelming and within 48 hours, we had received enough contributions from friends, and friends of friends, to hire three buses.

Zartab, who is originally from Sitapur town in UP, told me that an NGO in his hometown had already sent him lists of migrant workers stuck in Delhi who desperately needed to go home. We had money to hire buses to send these people home, but getting permissions for these buses to cross state borders was proving to a challenge of a different magnitude. The UP government had just sent back the 1,000 empty buses that Priyanka Gandhi had sent to pick up migrant workers.

A senior functionary in the Delhi government, who had been a big help in our relief distribution in the immediate aftermath of the lockdown that month, promised he would do everything in his power to help us with the complicated paperwork needed for ‘Destination Home.’ Over the coming days and weeks, he kept his word.

Over the next few weeks, we also continued to receive help from the most unexpected sources, including from a high school student who, using social media to the hilt, managed to raise enough money for six buses! Ordinary citizens with extraordinarily generous hearts gave us the wherewithal to hire 14 buses, book space on two trains and send 1,200 migrant workers home, not just to Sitapur in UP but also to faraway Darbhanga and Purnia in Bihar, and Malda in West Bengal.

Perhaps the most moving incident during ‘Destination Home’ happened just before our sixth bus left for Sitapur. We got a call the previous night from a man called Kundan, who asked if we might have five seats available on the bus. We said we did and told him to please not be late, as the bus had to leave Delhi by a certain time. Kundan then stunned us by saying that he and his family were going to cycle all the way to Delhi from Sonepat in Haryana because there was no other transport available to them!

They cycled for 10 hours straight on what had turned out to be one of the hottest days of the year, and by the time they arrived, their hands were blistered and their muscles frozen with pain. It was then that we also learnt that Kundan had actually carried his aging mother on the back of his bicycle all the way.

They told us of the problems they had faced along the way. Their bicycles broke down, and Kundan’s sister injured her foot. There were moments when they thought they wouldn’t make it, but they knew they had to keep going because they had a bus to catch.

That day, Kundan and his family became the living embodiment of the advice my friend had given me way back in March — ‘When you’re going through hell, keep going.’

It’s easy to feel completely overwhelmed in the face of the multiple crises India is facing. A galloping pandemic, a melting economy, an unprecedented rise in unemployment, the unremitting assault on our basic democratic rights and freedoms, and last but not least, a very disturbing situation on the Indo-Chinese border.

Our ability to emotionally survive a time like this perhaps lies in our capacity to somehow be able to stand in what educator and author, Parker Palmer, calls ‘the tragic gap’. The tragic gap, according to Palmer, is the gap between the way we know things can be and the way they actually are.

It is not easy to stand in the tragic gap. Palmer says that in the face of overwhelming problems, we tend to flip either into the realm of corrosive cynicism and stop believing that anything will change and end up living only for ourselves, or we flip into the world of irrelevant idealism and empty optimism, and ‘float above it all.’ The result is the same, as both the cynics and so-called idealists end up doing little good in the world.

Palmer tells us that very few choose to stand in the tragic gap because they know that doing so will break their hearts. But the key, he says, is to let the pain and tragedy break our hearts open and let empathy flow, instead of letting them shatter like exploding grenades, spewing shards of hatred and anger out into the world.

Those who choose to stand in the tragic gap understand full well that they will not be able to solve the great problems of the world, but they also understand they have a responsibility to be a part of the solutions, however small.

And in these, the most trying times in recent modern history, that is enough.

(Rohit Kumar can be reached at writerohit@gmail.com )