BENGALURU: Leaving behind boxes of herbal oils and other medicinal products they had taken from Davangere to Sudan for their hotel business, Shivananda Jayanth and his wife Roja dashed out of their room a week ago, with bags holding some clothes and documents.
They walked with over a hundred members of the Hikki Pikki tribal community, to escape the constant bombing in Sudan. It turned out to be a happy ending when their Indigo flight carrying 229 Indians, including 125 from Karnataka, touched base at Bengaluru airport at 11 am Sunday, the second such evacuation flight to Bengaluru.
Jayanth (31), who went to Khartoum for two months last December to sell herbal products, decided to stay back and build his business. However, after a bank in front of their hotel was reduced to nothing in the bombing, and living through two days without food and power, made the couple decide to take a shot at life, rather than die in the raging civil war.
Jayanth said, “I was staying in Hotel Khawaquif in Suklarabi Siniagandul area. With reasonable rentals of Rs 800 and Rs 1,000, the adjoining two hotels too were occupied for months by Hikki Pikki families who came here to do business. My mother and aunt are still there, awaiting evacuation.”
After he decided to leave, it took him a week to touch down in Bengaluru. “We waited for a few days to see if the situation would ease, and decided to leave. The hotel manager and staff had already left the rooms to us. We met an Army man who promised to provide cover for 158 of us in the hotels. We walked 300 metres with our baggage to a bridge. Bullets were being fired as we walked, but the Army men saved us. We paid for buses to Minabari, where there was no fighting, and my aunt and others were staying.
There, we took up apartments for two days before travelling 850km by bus to Port of Sudan. The bus was constantly stopped by warring factions. The Indian embassy helped us and the Indian Navy took us by ship to Jeddah, where we boarded a flight to Bengaluru.”
Navin Kumar and wife Shwetha, also from the same community in Davangere, expressed their gratitude to the Indian and Karnataka governments for timely help. “I came here in January 2023, ran a massage parlour and sold my herbal products, before war started on April 15,” he said.