SRINAGAR: In 1991, he went missing from his home in Uttar Pradesh. Nine years later his family gave up their search and performed Kedaar Ballabh Tripathi’s last rites in absentia.
But all of a sudden they have reunited – at a psychiatric hospital in Kashmir, nearly one thousand miles away from where they belong to.
“It is a new life for me,” says Shyam Sunder, Tripathi’s brother, who has come to take him home, finally.
“We had lost hope. Thinking that he was no more we had also performed his last rites,” he told the Greater Kashmir newspaper.
The hospital is where Tripathi has spent half of his life after he left home – being treated for ‘memory loss’.
He was brought to the hospital in 2003 by the local police, doctors say. The doctors had found him suffering from gross psychotic illness and then he also suffered from psychosis – a mental state involving loss of touch with reality.
To recall who he was and where he came from, it took him until now.
“When Tripathi spoke his first words in the hospital, we tried to connect him with his family,” says Dr Arshad Hussain, a senior psychiatrist in the hospital.
“We made several calls outside Kashmir and browsed internet numerous times and finally traced the village where Tripathi lived,” he told the newspaper.
During his stay at the hospital, Tripathi had also to be operated upon for eye cataract and a brain stroke, the newspaper writes. But nobody knows exactly how he had found his way to the Himalayan valley.
Sunder, who traveled to Srinagar along with his son, narrates that Tripathi is unmarried and worked as a treasury clerk when he went missing from his native town 22 years ago.
Having had his brother’s last rites performed, a joyous Sunder is now all thanks to the doctors who treated Tripathi and took pains to reunite him with his family.
“The hospital administration contacted my nephew, Rinky, a manager working at a super specialty hospital in Uttar Pradesh who then informed us,” he says.
Dr Margoob, a senior psychiatrist says he saw “tears of gratitude” in the family’s eyes.
“That is enough a reward for our services.”
(With details from GK)
