Red card for the coronavirus? ... If only he could Stuck in the US, ex-referee hunts for route back home

Pradip Nag

Arindam Bandyopadhyay, TT, 8.05.20, Calcutta:  Pradip Nag would have loved to show the red card to coronavirus if he could. But he can’t and, instead, the former Fifa referee is stuck at Somerville, a city to the northwest of Boston in the US, where his son stays.

Before leaving for the US, Nag had a long wish list — to watch at least three live matches of Major League Soccer, go to Florida and spend some quality time with family at the Miami Beach, witness the Boston Marathon live and have a meeting with the US referees’ association. But now all that the 74-year-old wants is to return to his home in Agarpara safely. Even that is proving to be too tall a wish.

“My son Partha Pratim is a scientist, he works at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. So we, my wife Santana and I, came to Somerville to meet them on December 12 last year. All was well but suddenly the outbreak of Covid-19 has made things difficult for us.

“Validity of our tourist visas end on June 12 and my stock of medicines, which I brought for six months, is almost over. It is very difficult to get Indian medicines here,” Nag told The Telegraph from Somerville.

“We have applied for visa extension last week but are yet to receive any reply from the authorities concerned. Flights for India will be available from May 7 to 13, but as we have already applied for visa extension, opting for that facility is difficult for us. Tickets would cost Rs 1 lakh per person. Moreover, flights from the US to India will mostly be to the cities of Kochi, New Delhi, Mumbai and Chennai. So reaching Calcutta from any of those cities in this time of lockdown will be another big headache.

“Not only that, even if we reach India, we will have to go to quarantine for 14 days. How and where that would happen is not very clear to us. I am a patient of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, for me it would be very difficult to face such a situation,” Nag, who was also Cricket Association of Bengal’s Grade I umpire from 1968 till 1989, said.

Nag and his wife were scheduled to fly back to Calcutta on May 3. The airline informed Nag that it would not refund the money but the same tickets would be valid after the lockdown gets over.

“I am not the only one who is facing such a problem. But I am not sure whether we would be able to go to India by the first flight after lockdown,” he said.

Nag officiated in seven Mohun Bagan-East Bengal Derbies, notorious among referees for being high-pressure matches. But those experiences are not helping him much in the current crisis. “What I’m facing now is incomparable,” the septuagenarian sighed.