The Route South
Portraits and voices from the Nepal-India corridor
I think there were ways I came into this story expecting the open border to soften some of the sharp edges inherent to leaving home. I was curious about it, drawn to what it represented, this rare thing in a world that has spent decades hardening its lines and policing its seas. And although I hadn’t consciously realized it, somewhere in that curiosity I’d convinced myself that the ability to come and go might take some of the sting out of it all.
It doesn’t.
Goodbye is still goodbye. Still painful, still forceful in how it reshapes the world with its absence. A porous border doesn’t change that. It doesn’t create the opportunities that people so desperately want at home. Dipak and the people I met along the way made that clear. Those who left needed to leave in order to build the life they wanted for themselves and their families. Those who stayed understood that, supported it. And each missed the other, deeply and simply, and wanted to be together more than they could.
What follows are some of those people. Men and women from Dipak’s village and valley, others I met in Delhi. Some left. Some stayed. All of them wish for something different, a life where migration wasn’t even part of the picture.
Please click here for the people I met along the way.
Best viewed on a laptop/desktop. If viewing on a phone rotate the screen to landscape mode.
My thanks to Basant Pratap Singh and Deepak Adhikari without whom this work would not have been possible.
Another unexpected jump to a different window into these stories, a different experience triggering different senses and other levels of feeling in me. It connects me to these people in a dynamic way. Their portraits and voices in individual posts were compelling, the stories of travel, time and distance, but something about the simple, little dots in motion connecting those at home with those away brought all those realities for them closer to home for me. Please keep opening these channels that may touch people in unexpected ways. Every person in your reporting deserves it. Every creative impulse in your work deserves to be explored.