Desperate Indian girl bikes 745 miles home with disabled dad

NEW DELHI (AP) — From her village in eastern India, 15-year-old Jyoti Kumari reflected on her desperate 745-mile bicycle journey home with her disabled father that has drawn international praise.

“I had no other option,” she said Sunday.

“We wouldn’t have survived if I hadn’t cycled to my village.”

Kumari said that she and her father risked starvation had they stayed in Gurugram, a suburb of New Delhi, with no income amid India’s coronavirus lockdown.

Her father, whose injury in an accident left him unable to walk, had earned a living by driving an auto rickshaw.

But with all nonessential travel banned, he found himself among millions of newly unemployed.

Their landlord demanded rent they couldn’t pay and threatened to evict them, Kumari said.

So she decided to buy a bicycle and, like thousands of other Indian migrant workers have done since March, make her way home.

As the temperature climbed, Kumari pedalled for 10 days, with her father riding on the back of the hot-pink bike.

They survived on food and water given by strangers, and only once did Kumari give her legs a break with a short lift on a truck.

The daughter and father arrived in Darbhanga, their village in Bihar state, more than a week ago, reuniting with Kumari’s mother and brother-in-law, who’d left the capital region after the lockdown was imposed on March 25.

Kumari, an eighth-grade student who moved from the village to Gurugram in January to take care of her dad, stayed on.

She said Sunday that she was still exhausted from the trip.

“It was a difficult journey,” she said.

“The weather was too hot, but we had no choice. I had only one aim in my mind, and that was to reach home.”

Upon their arrival, village officials placed Kumari’s father in a quarantine centre, a policy many state and local governments in India have implemented to try to keep returning migrants from spreading the coronavirus.

They are now all quarantining at home.

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