'I swapped my life of privilege for helping India’s poorest'

It’s 45C, midday; with my wife Megan, in the middle of a slum, drenched in sweat and handing out food to hundreds of desperate families. Saturdays never used to be like this.

Ten weeks before, to the day, we’d been at lunch with our 12-year-old twin daughters, Cecilia and Elsa, in one of the 20 restaurants we’d opened in India. Seven years in New Delhi: a great business, a happy family, a wonderful flat on a peachy road and then, the virus.

On Sunday March 22, from dawn to dusk, the entire nation had observed “The People’s Curfew” which ended with a patriotic banging of pots and pans. The joke on our street was that the relatively low-key ruckus was due to holding a lock-in on the staff’s day off. The point being that few knew where the kitchen stuff was kept.

But the day was genuinely inspiring. I even made a TikTok video of people waving from their balconies (set to a rousing Nineties tune). The children were duly ashamed.

The next day was different. The curfew, it turned out, was the dress rehearsal for a full-blown, countrywide lockdown. No warning, no preparation and no way out. That feeling of national pride — all the smiling and esprit de corps — became quiet fear.

It did not, however, turn into panic or its first cousin in India: rioting. At least to those with a home and savings. For those employed informally (“daily-wagers”), for migrant workers, refugees, balloon-sellers, rickshaw-pullers, prostitutes, eunuchs, mendicant holy men and many more, the overnight lockdown was a disaster.

And it was quite a disaster for our business — all restaurants shut, 550 people on payroll, zero government aid and a long slog back. But somehow, we weren’t ever worried — maybe resilience from big city life; something to do with karma; certainly a big bird to the virus and a breezy belief that our dream of India isn’t done. So Megan and I decided to help others less fortunate than ourselves.

As we drove around Delhi trying to deliver food to the needy, it was strange and scary, in a city of 25 million people, to see nobody except the police who checked our Covid-19 passes, issued because of our restaurants — an “essential service”.

New Delhi was on edge, as were we. Every police roadblock set the heart thumping. The police were jumpy; everything was new, hard and unpredictable. But we relocated some sangfroid, looked ahead and drove on.

In the days after, we lived a weird but exhilarating double life. In one life, we could have been in London — parents on Zoom calls, while the girls endured virtual school by laptop. In our other life, we took to the streets.

In week one, we found our first needy families, on a local building site whose contractor had run off. Thirty adults, 12 children, no food and no money. We made a list and bought them supplies. Then we found other families to help (it wasn’t hard); then friends called us about more families and then more.

And we got organised until finally we were supporting several thousand families with food, water, milk, sanitary napkins, vitamins and masks. We paid for supplies with our own money but then found fast and generous donors. A friend from the gym sent his driver with £1,000 in cash and an instruction to call him when the money was spent. He is still giving us money today. All Hail Mr M!

Our ability — and willingness — to move around was different to most who, like their counterparts abroad, were scared and staying inside. Even those wanting to help were often subject to three-line whips from anxious aunties. Common watchwords were stay at home, eat vegetarian food and take ayurvedic medicine.

But this contrast of comfortable home life versus street reality had a remarkable and wonderful effect — it enabled us to raise, in one month, £200,000 from 1,400 donors in 25 countries. Whatever else people were thinking, they could see the brutal difference between their lockdown and those we were helping. In this way, we acted as a convenient middleman.

New Delhi is absolutely not a warzone, whatever the media might report. Cases are rising fast and hospitals are stressed, but this is expected in a country of 1.35 billion people with a population density as great as Israel or the UK. In fact, the ratio of hospital beds to emergency cases has persuaded the German Embassy in India to advise its citizens to leave the country.

One can sweat the risks, but this is an enriching time. The pollution has gone. Elsa feeds 70 hungry dogs daily, raising £2,500 and using her father as a driver-cum-spotter. Cecilia and I launched a TV cookery show — her on camera, me cooking. And our social enterprise has been supporting 30,000 people and bused 5,000 home. Truly a time of gifts.

We had close calls too. In the first week of lockdown I stopped the family car (with Elsa) to feed some families and got overrun by crowds when I opened up the boot. Later, the same thing happened in a large slum and we lost our way out.

But these incidents are a reminder that life is risk. And if one needed further reminding, during the Covid-19 period, New Dehli has had six (minor) earthquakes and a plague of locusts.

Being on the streets recalibrates one’s view of risk. The families we meet are often mystified by the Covid-19 chaos. Dengue, malaria, chikungunya, cholera, TB are part of life and, in fact, many people see coronavirus as a second-fiddle disease on the basis that wearing a mask is, apparently, the antidote. What happens now? No one is quite sure because Delhi remains restricted while simultaneously opening up. On one level, this is simple pragmatism in that we cannot afford a closed economy; on another, the challenge is to keep people calm and to build confidence in the face of discouraging data.

For now, supply exceeds demand. Malls are opening, but shoppers are few. Our restaurants now deliver food but returns are meagre. As long as the virus numbers rise — now 100,000 in Delhi; trebled in a month — people will be jittery. But the worst of the lockdown, at least for those who lost their income overnight, appears over. Unemployment is at pre-Covid levels and migrant workers are returning. Life for those reliant on consumers remains hard. Coronavirus is grim everywhere but then this is a most resilient city. Before New Delhi, were seven cities over a thousand years along with sundry plagues and pestilence.

And, mark my words, in a few years India and its capital will be booming. As China ages and the West retreats, India — two-thirds of whose people are under the age of thirty — will flourish. Young, smart, resilient, democratic, diverse, proud; too large and too dynamic for any virus or government to hold back. Jai Hind — long live India.

If you want to support the Reids’ work in India, please donate via gofundme.com/f/india-coronavirus-crisis

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