The year 2020 marked the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, which brought the global socio-economic order to its knees with its surges and waves. Grappling with the impact of such a sudden disruptive episode laid bare the multiple forms of social inequalities that permeate our society, drawing special attention to the pitiful socio-economic conditions of migrant workers in urban centres across the world. The imposition of nationwide Lockdowns and travel bans in India left migrant workers cramped up in their make-shift houses in city slums across the nation. As savings dried up, migrant workers were left to fend for themselves. Consequently, India witnessed the Great Exodus of poor migrant workers leaving the various metropolitan cities of India towards their ‘dehat’, or native village. Those who chose to stay behind were routinely harassed by state authorities to keep them inside their houses as the State campaigned for social distancing to contain the spread of the virus. Without resources to afford soaps, sanitisers, masks or constant supplies of water, migrant workers were routinely associated with being vectors of the virus. Therefore, COVID-19 brought forth new notions of purity and pollution, often re-instating earlier untouchability forms. The paper shall attempt to highlight the problems faced by migrant workers’ mobility and immobility during the Pandemic, their strategies to negotiate with state surveillance and popular narratives which discredited their contributions to the city-making processes and deemed their presence in the cities as a menace. Using oral histories of Bihari migrant workers settled in Kolkata, the study shall try to illustrate the complex social relations of the Bengali bhadralok and the myriad of Bihari migrant workers that they employ, and the Pandemic’s impact on further complicating the social dynamics of the two communities which have had conflicting economic interests for centuries.