Desperate Indian girl bikes 745 miles home with disabled dad
Source: AP
By SHEIKH SAALIQ and EMILY SCHMALL
NEW DELHI (AP) — From her village in eastern India, 15-year-old Jyoti Kumari reflected on her desperate 1,200-kilometer (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.
This Saturday, May 23, 2020, photo provided by sister Pinky Baby shows Jyoti Kumari 15, with her father at their home in Darbhanga district in Bihar state, India. Kumari rode a bicycle hundreds of miles with her father riding pillion to escape the constraints of a coronavirus lockdown in India that appears to have staved off an unmanageable spike in coronavirus cases but that triggered an exodus of migrant workers and crippled the economy. The 15-year-old has been invited to try out with the Cycling Federation of India, the body that sends team to the Olympics, and won accolades as far away as Washington, D.C. But she says she didn't pedal her father home to their village in pursuit of fame but rather simply to survive. (Pinky Baby via AP)
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