On the eighth floor of a residential complex in Kovpakivs'kyi district in Ukraine’s Sumy, Tapan Kumar Bugudai, 23, has just woken up to phone calls – while the windows inside his dark room tremble with every explosion in the distance.
“I wake up at 3 am every morning, because my parents call me. The conversation always starts the same – ‘are you safe? where are you? have you eaten?’ We make small talk about the news, and the call ends with them saying, ‘We pray to god that you come back to us as soon as possible.’ I try not to fall asleep, because every call that goes unattended makes my family extremely worried,” he said, adding that he attends nearly 60 such calls each day – “to keep everyone calm”.
