SEARCH MISSION OF A MISSING FATHER - THE MOST DIFFICULT CHALLENGE

At a few minutes past six on the evening of 8 November 2012, Srividya was travelling on the Vasco Express from Goa to Bengaluru with her two-year-old daughter. They were going home for Deepavali. It was supposed to be a journey filled with the anticipation of a festival, the comfort of family, and the simple happiness of being together.

Then her phone rang. It was her sister calling from Thiruvananthapuram.

“Appa has not come back.”

Their seventy-five-year-old father had left the house at 12:45 that afternoon, after lunch. He was wearing his usual dhoti and shirt. He had taken neither his phone nor his purse.

Before he left, his granddaughter, a fourth-standard schoolgirl, had pleaded with him.

“Thatha, please don’t go. Amma has told you not to go out alone.”

He had reassured her that he was not going anywhere in particular, only somewhere nearby.

Their sister Uma had been out buying clothes for him.

He never returned.

That one sentence, Appa has not come back, would divide Srividya’s life into a before and an after.

A life already stretched to its limits

Six months earlier, Srividya had been posted to Goa.  Her husband, who worked in the software industry, could not leave Bengaluru. Their little daughter was just two. Her father, who was living with dementia, stayed with her sister in Thiruvananthapuram, where he could speak his native language, and enjoy the familiarity of neighbours and surroundings he understood.

Their mother had passed away nearly thirty years earlier.

Srividya describes that period in Goa as one in which she had “absolutely zero support in terms of managing work and a two year old, who had to be put in a day care facility. Yet, even before her father disappeared, she had learnt to negotiate life with a resourcefulness that was both extraordinary and matter-of-fact.

Both she and her daughter were in an unfamiliar space and needed tremendous adjustments be it food, language and culturally too.  She recounts incidents like when she would tie her dupatta and put her kid in the pillion so that she could hug her and sleep while she was riding.  On days when she couldn’t keep the child in day care, she would take her to office and make some temporary arrangements to ensure that her child did not have problems and also that her work didn’t suffer.  She recounts such incidents without self-pity or resentment.  She also proudly says that she learnt to ride a scooter thanks to this office stint in Goa at the ripe age of 40.  She says that all these incidents shaped her to be the confident person that she is today.

“Whatever circumstances give me, I will not fight it,” she says.  It also taught her that she will sail through the challenges with confidence and faith in herself and the strength given by her parents.

It is a philosophy that sounds simple until one understands how much life had already asked of her.

And then, life asked for something far more difficult.

Searching for a face that would bring them home

Deepavali that year, Srividya says, “was never a festival.”

Her daughter arrived in Bengaluru with a high fever. Her husband, understanding that something far more urgent was unfolding, encouraged her to go to Thiruvananthapuram.

“Your sister needs you more than anything else.”

Her sister had a small tumour in her heart and had been advised to avoid panic and stress. Now, the sisters were faced with a nightmare neither had imagined.

Their father was missing.

They approached the police. One of the first questions they encountered was whether they had scolded him. They searched CCTV footage from railway stations, including Thiruvananthapuram Central and Kochuveli. They reprinted his photograph and circulated it on buses travelling Bengaluru to Thiruvananthapuram. Her sister reached out to the the then Chief Minister’s Office in Kerala. They approached astrologers and even a woman who read tea leaves.

The woman told them, “Your father is in a very nice space. You just let go.”

They could not understand how anyone could ask them to let go when they did not even know where he was.

Then came the search they had never imagined they would undertake.

They went to the morgues.

“We opened each and every face to see if it was our father,” Srividya recalls.

At night, they looked at people sleeping on pavements, hoping to find him among them.

They were no longer searching merely for a missing person. They were searching for their father, the man whose familiar presence had been part of their lives for as long as they could remember. Every unfamiliar face carried the possibility of terrible news. Every unanswered question prolonged their helplessness.

Her sister’s heart surgery was scheduled, but refused to undergo it until she had some closure.

Eventually, their prayers changed.

“We started praying that we don’t mind even if we don’t get our father alive, but we want to know the closure.”

It was the desperate prayer of two daughters who were prepared to face the worst, provided they were no longer condemned to uncertainty.

The answer came, but almost a year too late

Both sisters were back in Bengaluru - Srividya from Goa and her sister from Thiruvananthapuram.  But the search never stopped, Srividya and her sister reached out to all their known sources in office and outside who could give them the smallest of clue about their father.  She still remembers how both the sisters would look upto to Google for magicians whoever could just locate their father.  There was one person Alphonse Kurian who was associated with the Lions Club and was known to the sisters through blood donation drives.  He suggested to reach out to Helping Hands.  This too did not yield any results.  Finally, just out of the blue, Mr. Kurian asked us to speak to the Autoraja Ashrama.  Now, Auto Raja runs this ashrama in Bengaluru wherein, he takes abandoned people on the roads and gives them a dignified life and subsequently a dignified death too.  Now, this was a little difficult for Srividya and her sister to accept as her father begin abandoned was too much to swallow.  So, they sent a mail with all the details. On 25 October 2013, Srividya received a call from the Ashram.  She still remembered the words - We saw your mail. Is it possible for you to come over to the ashram.  This is about your father.  Srividya was in office when the call came and she asked if her father was with them.  He just answered, that they should just come over.  Srividya excitedly called her husband, sister and brother in law and told that ‘ We have news about appa”.  

With hopes in their hearts, both the sisters went to the ashram, straight to the office.

“Where is my father?” they asked.

The answer was devastating.

Their father had died.

He had apparently travelled by train to a place where he had lived twenty years earlier, only to find that the world he remembered had changed. His dementia had taken away the names of his daughters. He could tell the police only that he had two daughters who were working somewhere.  The police had kept him till 8 pm in the night but could never get any information about him.  So, they had to reach out to Auto Raja with a noting that they found an elderly gentleman who has been abandoned.

Instead, the police kept him until eight that evening and recorded a report describing him as an elderly gentleman abandoned by his children. He was then sent to an ashram that accommodated people considered abandoned.

But he was not abandoned. He was loved. He was being searched for. His daughters were desperately trying to find him.

On 23 November 2012, his seventy-nineth birthday, he died at 7:15 in the evening. And the sisters were planning a grand sadabhishekam for their appa.

The irony was, that day, Srividya was at home in Bengaluru. She never knew her father was just a few kilometers away from her home.  So near, yet so far.

Neither daughters knew that their father had been dead for almost a year.

There is a particular cruelty in such a loss: not only the death itself, but the knowledge that, somewhere, a father had spent his final days without the comfort of knowing that his daughters were looking for him, and two daughters had spent nearly a year wondering whether he was hungry, frightened, lost, or waiting for them.

They had been searching for him while he was already gone.

“A man needn’t preach”

The pain was compounded by the words people used. 

The police asked whether the daughters had hit their father or treated him badly. The neighbours asked whether the daughters had denied food and that’s why he left home. When her sister returned to follow up on the case, one person asked her sister whether she should not be glad that one headache had left her life. Neighbours called her a mad woman for running after her elderly father.

Her sister’s response was immediate and instinctive.

“What do you mean, he’s my father?”

For Srividya, the answer to every cruel assumption lay in the man her father had been.

He had studied only up to the tenth standard. He had started his working life from a modest position and worked hard to give his wife and daughters the best he could which has shaped them to reach the place they are today - Happy and successful. 

Parents need not scream from the rooftops about the way children need to live their lives - they simply guide by the way they live their lives.  Perhaps, those small subtle lessons gave Srividya and her sister, Uma the strength to face the most horrifying challenge in their lives and continues to guide them.  

Even though the sisters have got a closure, every joyous event in the family misses the father’s presence and as Deepavali approaches every year, there is a slight sadness, wish Nov 8th could just be erased from their memories.  The irony is Deepavali will be celebrated on Nov 8th this year.