Her story has a potential for any run-of-the-mill Bollywood version of a lost-and-found movie plot -- siblings getting lost in childhood and amazingly being reunited before the climax or denouement to the rejoice of the naïve viewers of yore, who loved the idea of a meaningful coincidence in life, especially when it leads the hopeless beginnings to an expectedly happy ending. But not anymore! With a heartrending statistics of over one and a half lakh children, who go missing in the country every year, out of which forty-five per cent end up being untraceable forever.
Bollywood has lately abandoned the lost-and-found formula for movies, exception being Bajarangi Bhaijaan, but there, too, more than the divine decree, it was the heroics of the Bhaijaan that brought about the reunion of the lost child with her parents on the other side of the border.
But then, who says that meaningful coincidences do not happen in real life for people who have little faith in them. Till a couple of days ago, she had a single name, Rajani, and incidentally, it was the lack of a surname that initially set the ball rolling leading to her reunion with her family from which she had been separated twelve years ago. When she was in Class-II, she accidentally boarded a Chennai-bound train from the Bhadrak railway station alone. How and why she had a few memories. Thanks to the railway police at the Chennai railway station, the girl landed in the safety a government orphanage there. Two years later, she was sent to Odisha, courtesy the intervention of Childline, because it was found that she belonged here. And then she lived at the Utkal Balashram in Brahmapur, a children’s home, from where she did her schooling at the Government Girls’ High School on Giri Road. She is pursuing her Plus Two through distance education.
And then, a real quick spate of fast events, the meaningful coincidences at rocket speed. An enrolment for a short training at the ABIRD (Andhra Bank Institute of Rural Development) at Tampara near the Ganjam district headquarters Chhatrapur, and hardly a week into it, her lack of a surname raised serious curiosity among the officials there. She narrated whatever little she remembers of her past -- Bhadrak, her native place; Dukha, her father; Kuni, her mother, and Rabi, her brother, were the only names she remembered. The caterer there felt deeply sad to learn the story.
The good thing was that his brother is a journalist, who did a story the same day in a vernacular daily along with a current photograph of Rajani who is now 21. Next day, Thursday, which was the Rakhi Purnima, her mother along with her elder brother joined her in Ganjam after reading the report in the newspaper, but not before making a phone call to the organisation and confirming some vital body identification marks unique to her. On the day, she found herself in the media limelight when she tied a Rakhi on the hands of her brother in front of the media, district administration officers and local MlA Priyanshu Pradhan.
Rajani’s family, though had done a frantic search for her in 2004, sadly did not file a ‘missing’ complaint with the police then. Brother Rabi Hansda says it was because the family had no photographs of her. They lived in the Dogra slum near the Bhadrak railway station and Rajani’s father worked as a labourer. Whatever, the wait for a reunion had been too long. Going by the easy way she had been reunited with her family, one doubts what took so long for her to be traced back. But then, as some people explained what might be an inexplicable laxity on the part of officials of the orphanages, which though had given her a good upbringing and reportedly had released some ‘missing’ classifieds in newspapers earlier, the fatalists advocate that it is the time that matters; the time has to be divinely ordained to be a time proper. Maybe, they are right. Rajani had serendipity on the very day the Rakhi festival was celebrated. When I asked her if she was positive all these years about an improbable but possible reunion with her family about whom she remembered almost nothing, she declined without any show of emotion. She said she had never been hopeful, but then serendipity has its own law, the law of proper timing.
I asked her brother Rabi if he had been positive about his sister being traced back. He said yes but added that his father knew it would not be before twelve years. A local priest had told the family that the girl would be found exactly after twelve years. Hence, they were positive. The law of meaningful coincidence had worked to reaffirm their faith in the divination. Maybe, it was complacent to wait for that long, but then again, the timing of synchronicity of events has its own rules and ways. That many lost children do not get traced back due to lack of sufficient and sincere attempts at it by one or all who matter -- the family, the officials and, sometimes, the lost people. Rajani told me that at the orphanage, there are young people who know about their families but do not wish to go back to them. And that there are also families who know about the whereabouts of their lost kids but do not want them back, possibly to escape the economic burden of raising them.
Tara Acharya, the happy Director of ABIRD, whose institute played an unanticipated hand in the pleasant but unplanned events that ended meaningfully well, says he aims to inculcate a strong sense of positivity among his trainee students to have faith in their human resource potentials, apart from the vocational trainings they receive at his place. One hopes his ilk grows in all institutes where lost kids are sheltered.
(The writer is District Information and Public Relations Officer, Ganjam. The views expressed are his own)