Comfortable in her worn longyi and shirt on a sticky afternoon in Delhi, Nang Bawk awaits her usual meal – khao suey, a traditional Burmese broth of beef and noodles. The 60-year-old refugee from Burma is a regular customer at this establishment – a cramped room that functions as a restaurant of sorts. Between steaming mouthfuls, she talks about home – Myitkyina, a bustling port on the banks of the Irrawady and capital of Burma's Kachin state.
'I miss my garden, and the fresh papayas and oranges we grew,' she says. 'I rarely get to eat anything fresh here. It's too expensive.' Back in Burma, she travelled often to Mandalay, where she sold handicrafts from Kachin. In Delhi, she makes a living off odd jobs, barely enough to pay for a decent room. Nang Bawk left when she was suspected of hiding pamphlets printed by the Kachin Independence Army, a separatist group opposed to Burma's military dictatorship, or Junta as they are known. It took her a week to trek through the remote border to reach Mizoram, where she stayed a few months before heading to Delhi. That was two years ago. 'I would love to go back, to see my children and grandchildren again but the Junta will never lose power,' she says. 'Till they do, I cannot return.'
The others, two women and a young man, are watching her. They live here, in this same room where they run the Burmese kitchen Nang frequents. Like her, they are refugees from Kachin. Unlike her, they refuse to talk.
Home to more than 50 million people, Burma has been under military rule since 1962. After the pro-democracy protests in 1988, and the subsequent election in 1990 that went unrecognised, students, political activists and elected representatives were forced into exile. Hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of Burmese have left the country since then. These men and women, and their families, make up much of the Burmese Diaspora.