A man who had gone on missing since 1994 reunited with his family here on Friday. Pradip Kumar Mallick of Palakana village had left home at the age of 17 in 1991 to work as a plumber in Hyderabad. He worked there for couple of years but didn’t get monthly wages properly from the contractor. So, he went to Goa and worked at a fishery company there.
The family members were in contact with Pradip till 1994. “We had lost hopes that we would ever see Pradip again and had taken it as granted that Pradip was no more in this world as in the last 20 years he never made any contact with us,” said Pradip’s father Purusottam Mallick, with tears rolling down his eyes. Pradip recalled that in 1994 he along with 11 others was going to lakshadweep from Goa by a mechanised boat with rations to unload it near the Arabian Sea area. But they were hijacked by the liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (lTTE) in the deep sea.
The lTTE personnel killed two crew members and took others, including him, to Sri lanka. After staying in the extremists’ camp for more than 18 years, they got an opportunity to flee during a cyclone that hit the Sri lankan coast in 2012.
With a boat they reached Chennai and later Goa to find out the address of the fishery company, but the company was already closed. Pradip settled in Goa for a year by doing odd jobs before returning home.
“We were speechless and failed to believe our own eyes for a few seconds when he stepped forward to hug us,” said Pradip’s mother Chanchala with hundreds of villagers gathering in front of Pradip’s house to see the happy reunion.