ABSTRACT
This chapter explores complexity of multiple homes of migrant workers, in the context of an emergency government measure meant to lock people down in their homes. The depth of urban distress became apparent in the enormous risks people took to try and get to the home in the village without public transport in the middle of a pandemic. It brought also to fore the massive scale of employment migration in India. The middle-class home is the primary site of modern constructions of domesticity. In most of the world, capitalist industrialisation has wrought a sharp cleavage between domestic and public, coeval with a separation of home and workplace. While capitalism divides the home and the workplace, the home is never (or at least in our historical experience so far) wholly devoid of labour content. Indeed, even though reproductive work has been moving out of the home, there is always some residual work in the home.
