Ratan Sarkar, then 44, had dreams of a good life as a chef when he boarded a flight from Calcutta to Kabul in 2012 amid the assurance of a “stabilising Afghanistan”.
Nine years later, a “strategic decision” by the US to withdraw troops from Afghanistan rendered Sarkar, a chef at one of five US Air Force dining facilities at the Bagram base, and many like him jobless.
Sarkar and around 200 of his peers — most from South Asian countries — were sent home in May, well in advance of the final fall of Afghanistan.
“I’ve been sitting idle and am drawing from my savings for three months. I don’t know what I will do once this money runs out,” Sarkar told this paper from his home in Nadia’s Bagula village where he returned on May 16.
“The agency which sent us to Afghanistan hasn’t found me a replacement job. I do not have any farmland. How will I feed my family?” asked Sarkar, father of three.
He says he earned about a lakh a month in Bagram. “I've earned well and saved too. But how long can I survive like this?” he asked, adding he was even considering if he should apply for a job under the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, a move “unimaginable” a few months ago.
Like Sarkar, another chef at a US military base now back home in Begopara, Ranaghat, 31-year-old Silvestor Supriyo Maitra is also jobless. “The sudden change (in Afghanistan) created a threat to the lives of about 60 Indian migrant workers like us who worked at army bases as chefs. Our sole aim was to return home. I returned on July 31 with three others. Some others returned by August 5,” said Maitra, who used to earn Rs 60,000 a month.
His US-based employment agency has ruled out any possibility of a job now. “It is difficult in India because of the pandemic. Most companies associated with food and catering have stopped hiring,” he added, adding that his father, a chef at a star hotel in Bihar, also lost his job during the lockdown.
Maitra said he would look for work for some months and then set up a food joint by the NH12 in Ranaghat. He is grateful to be back home, but his tone belied disappointment at having to take a “step back” in his career.
The geo-political developments of the past week, which Sarkar and Maitra watched keenly on television, evoked what Sarkar called “a mix of nostalgia and pathos”. He said differences in culture, language and rank never came in the way of cordial relationships the chefs shared with soldiers at the military base. “The military base was our world... I feel bad for Afghanistan and also for people like us.”
