The migrant mother’s son’s story

Chanda’s youngest son, Hemu, had been spirited by an Indian agent to a village in the Myanmar jungles and had been bundled in a car on its way to the Thai border before all communication with his mother ceased. Illustration by C Y Gopinath using AI

My boy is somewhere in the jungle," the maid told me. "It's four days now, I haven't heard from him."

Hemu, her youngest son, was on a journey that most would consider straightforward: he wanted to get from point A, India, to point B, Bangkok, to see his mother. However, there was a reason why he could not just hop into a plane from the nearest airport: Hemu had no passport. He was a native of a ruined country called Myanmar, where people didn't matter.

"He has to sneak in through Burma and cross the border into Thailand," said Chanda. "I've paid everyone, but now he's gone silent."

The Indian agent had demanded 20 lakh Myanmar khat (roughly R81,000) for the whole trip. Chanda had negotiated it down to 15 lakh up front, balance to be paid after crossing over into Thailand. He had spirited them across several borders to a village in the Myanmar jungles. Hemu and four other refugees had been bundled into a car to be driven to the Thai border.

But now Hemu had gone dark. Chanda had not slept all night.

"He, too, may be dead," she said.

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Chanda spoke Nepali natively and Hindi fluently, but her official home was the hellish nation known as Myanmar, ruled by a greedy clutch of military thieves. She had been living and working legally as a documented migrant in Thailand for many years. I've changed her name to protect her privacy.

Imagine a skinny, hollow-cheeked woman in her mid-50s, a matchstick human being of intense nervous energy. Once unhappily married to a faithless, philandering Burmese man, when I first met her, she was the beleaguered mother of the many progeny she had produced with him. All fully functional adults in their 30s, they were, reading from left to right, one handsome but wayward son given to substance abuse; a daughter on the autistic spectrum, but passable housemaid material; a promiscuous youngest daughter who had abandoned her two children into Chanda's care while she disappeared with a brutish Thai lover who beat her regularly; a righteous youngest son who earned small change in mornings as a cook; and finally, Hemu, the boy incommunicado in Burma's jungles.

They all depended, in one way or another, on the frail woman whom I had hired as a maid.

Chanda lives on a planet where people like her are unacceptable - fleeing failed nations wracked by unrest, crime, and kleptocracy, to seek refuge in countries that will only tolerate them as an inferior species, or hunt them down as illegal aliens.

She approached me diffidently with a request, a few weeks after she started work with me.

"There is a medicine that cures alcohol addiction," said Chanda. "It is only available in India. Can you get it for me the next time you go there?"

"Who is it for?" I asked her.

"My eldest boy," she said, showing me a photo of a dashing lad in his 20s. "He looked like this once, so handsome. Now he is unemployed, hot-tempered, and drunk. He shoots drugs up his arms, and demands to be fed when he comes home at 2 and 3 in the morning."

She showed me a TikTok screenshot describing a potion that guaranteed a complete cure from any addiction. A few drops had to be slipped into the food or drink daily for a few months.

I promised to do what I could. In India, I finally tracked down a stockist in Dadar and bought five bottles for Chanda.

The medicine seemed to work, at first anyway. "He only drinks a little beer now," she told me, pleased that her stratagem seemed to be bearing fruit.

But one evening, he staggered home roaring drunk, vomited volumes of dark material, and stopped breathing. Emergency measures at the hospital failed, and he died in the ICU the following day, his mother desperately holding on to his hand as though she could restrain death itself.

And thus, Chanda lost her firstborn. She swallowed the grief and pain, just one more in a life littered with loss, but this time she changed her religion, exchanging the one whose gods had failed her for another whose pastors promised her the Lord would always watch over her.

The last time Chanda came to me, she was in high dudgeon. "This is very stressful," she said. "The Burmese military police stopped their car and took them. Now they are locked up. The soldier called me and demanded 5 lakh to let them go. I want to hear his voice first, but they refuse."

"Call the soldier back," I advised her. "Offer him 6 lakh if he'll put your son on the line."

And so, finally, Chanda heard Hemu's voice, dry and cracked. Mother and son cried for a while, and then she transferred the money to the soldier, apparently through an app designed for Burmese soldiers to receive payments from illegal migrants.

There's nothing more Chanda can do. The boy may be in Thailand. He may find his way to her. The family may be reunited. In her head, she has already marked him missing, presumed dead.

The Lord, she must assume, will be watching over them. No one else is.

You can reach C Y Gopinath at cygopi@gmail.com
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The views expressed in this column are the individual's and don't represent those of the paper.