The day the Russian invasion in Ukraine began, Zarin (23) left Odessa, heading for the Romanian border. He was one of the thousands of Indian students fleeing the war.
I met him at the Siret customs point, during one of those freezing, late-February nights, hours after he had crossed the border into Romania with other fellow Medicine students. He had taken shelter in a tent and was literally shaking with the cold. He was wearing canvas shoes and a thin jacket. ‘I was in such a panic I only took along what I was wearing, I didn’t even have time to pack properly,’ Zarin told me at the time. Many of his colleagues were outside, waiting for the buses that would take them to Bucharest, but the cold had been too much for him. I guided him to the car of some acquaintances who were on their way to Suceava. He spent the night there, and the next day he caught a bus to Bucharest. One week later, I got a WhatsApp message from him, telling me he was safely home with his parents, in India.
I have kept in touch with Zarin; from time to time, he tells me he is nostalgic about his student life in Ukraine and frustrated that he can’t continue his studies. ‘I feel so sorry for what is happening there, I met wonderful people in Ukraine, generous, welcoming people who made me feel like home. I keep thinking of the ones who stayed back there and it breaks my heart. Of course, I’m happy to be home and be able to enjoy peace with my family, but I still have a sort of empty spot in my heart,’ Zarin wrote in another message.
Among other things, he told me about his life in India: ‘I had just gotten used to the winters in Ukraine when I had to come back to the heat here. We are having a really hard time here in India because of climate change. It keeps getting hotter every year, not to mention floods and other things.’
My conversations with Zarin made me think of something I knew in theory, but am only now beginning to understand: namely, that today’s war refugees can be tomorrow climate refugees. And the other way around. (To give one example, in India alone, in 2020, almost four million people have been forced to leave their homes because of environmental disasters.) The subject compels us to take a closer look at the relation between the idea of immediate danger and that of long-term danger. (Particularly as there is too little talk of these climate refugees, described as “the invisible”, because the danger they are facing is always seen as something vague and remote.)
Beyond all this, we are no closer to answering the two questions troubling Zarin lately: ‘what does home even mean?’ and ‘where do I go now?’
Testimony collected by Ionuț Sociu for the Musem of Abandonment, as a part of the Abandonment Baggage campaign. This project is financed by CARE through the Sera Foundation, Care France, and FONPC.
