As the government readied trains to transport migrant workers to their homes in distant corners, Dharamveer and Tabarat Mansoor gave up on the battle of life, one collapsing while cycling from Delhi to Bihar and the other as he headed from Maharashtra to Uttar Pradesh.
Sheer fatigue felled them both, as it did so many other stranded migrants who set off for home, hundreds, sometimes thousands, of kilometres away, desperate to be with their families in the prolonged lockdown that left them with no money, no jobs and no roof over their heads.
Home beckoned. But they never did get there.
Some bought cycles with their little savings and others just set off on the long walk, in shoes with paper thin soles or flip flops, their few belongings packed into backpacks or unwieldy bundles.
On Friday night, the first special train ferrying over 1,200 stranded migrants from Telangana reached Hatia in Jharkhand from where the state government took them to their respective districts in sanitised buses in accordance with COVID-19 protocols.
Sometime around then, 32-year-old Dharamveer was declared brought dead at a hospital in Shahjahanpur in Uttar Pradesh. He began cycling, along with other labourers like him, from Delhi to Khagaria in Bihar, about 1,200 km away, on April 28, police said.
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"On Friday night, they halted at the Delhi-Lucknow highway in Shahjahanpur. When Dharamveer's condition deteriorated, the labourers took him to the medical college where he was declared brought dead," Circle Officer (city) Praveen Kumar said.
The day before, 50-year-old Tabarat diedin Sendhwa in Madhya Pradesh after cycling over 390 kilometres to get home from Bhiwandi in Maharashtra to Maharajganj in Uttar Pradesh, about 1,600 km away. "He died on Thursday near Sendhwa in Barwani possibly due to fatigue and heart attack, said Ramesh Pawar who was with him.
Recapping the arduous journey, he said the group of 11 had left on their cycles on April 25 to get to Maharajganj.
Those accompanying him wanted to take his body to Maharajganj but police did not give permission given the ongoing lockdown restrictions and he was buried in Sendhwa, his desire to go home unfulfilled.
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The first reported casualty of this exodus was 39-year-old Ranveer Singh, who worked as a delivery boy for a restaurant in Delhi and died in Agra after walking for over 200 km to Morena in Madhya Pradesh