‘When he called me mother… I was moved to tears’: Ghaziabad woman reunited with kidnapped son after 30 years (2025)

However, a small spark of hope remained. “I hardly had any hope of reuniting with my missing son… but then I kept telling myself, ‘what if they had found him?,’’ she says. “I had to go.”

Inside Khoda police station, Leelavati covered her head with her blue saree as soon as a man appeared. “He looked at me and shouted… this is my mother,’’ she recalls.

“I was a bit surprised and didn’t believe him. But when he called me mother again, I was moved to tears,’’ she says. There was another surprise for her though. She gave the policemen details of the marks on her missing son’s body and when they checked, her description matched. “He was indeed my son”.

Bhim is now a grown man. He is 40.

The tragic tale of this family, staying in a single-room house on the terrace of a two-storeyed building in Gali no. 6 of Ghaziabad’s Shaheed Nagar, began on September 8, 1993. Bhim, then around 9 years old, was returning from DBS Public school along with his two older sisters, Rajo and Santosh.

Bhim remembers that day vividly. “I remember asking my sister, Rajo, to buy me an umbrella while we were on our way back home. She didn’t want to and we were arguing,’’ he recalls. “Suddenly, a few men encircled me. They picked me up, pushed me into an auto (rickshaw) and drove away”.

For Santosh (45) and Rajo (43), that moment is etched in their memory. “He was wearing a white shirt and light blue trousers. We were minutes away from our home, when a group of unknown men took him away,” recalls Santosh.

At that time, Rajo and Santosh were 14 and 12 years old respectively. Bhim also had a younger sister, Hema, who was less than a year old at the time. The sisters say they ran back to their home and informed their mother.

“Their eyes were red. They were shivering and all they said was some people had taken Bhim in an auto. I ran barefoot to the spot. Their father was not home. I kept looking for him the entire day,” recalls Leelavati. “It was an unending trauma… we kept looking for him.”

After 31 years, two months and 19 days, the family was miraculously reunited.

“The last time I went to the police station three years ago. That time too my son wasn’t there. But I never lost hope. I knew he would find us one day,” says Leelavati

While Bhim was missing, a lot changed — both his grandparents died, two of his sister got married. “My in-laws had left to go back to their village, Baidpura in Dadri, a year after he was kidnapped. His grandfather died 10 years ago and three years later his grandmother also died,” says Leelavati. “Two of his sisters are already married. We have become old now.”

It was Bhim’s younger sister Hema who saw a picture resembling her elder brother in a local daily on September 22. “It was an article about a man who had been missing for a long time and the police were searching for his family to reunite them,’’ Hema says. A relative, who works as a constable in the Ghaziabad Police, asked the family to visit the police station.

At Khoda police station –Bhim had already been taken to six different police stations before this — he also recognised his sisters the moment he saw them.

“Besides, he had a mole on his right leg, a mark on left ear, a cut mark on his forehead and his hollow shaped head,” Leelavati says.

Bhim’s father, 70-year-old Tularam, however, wants to convince himself further. “We know he is our son. But we will get the DNA test done after December 6 to be sure about it,” he says.

The Ghaziabad police had been approaching the family because Bhim’s father had filed a missing person complaint at Mohan Nagar police station on September 9, 1993, a day after the boy was kidnapped. This case was unresolved.

Two days after Bhim was kidnapped, the family says, they had received a ransom letter. “We got a letter and his kidnappers demanded Rs 8 lakhs to set him free,” Tula Ram says.

While the family was frantically looking for him, Bhim says his nightmare began the moment he was kidnapped. “After taking me away in the auto, the kidnappers subsequently put me in a truck and drove away,’’ he says. The kidnappers, he says, had taken him to Jaisalmer in Rajasthan. “Before I could do anything, they chained me outside a hut of a herder,’’ he recalls. “They would make me rear sheep and cows…. milk them… during the day but they would keep me chained at night so that I couldn’t run away”.

When asked if he ever made any attempts to run away, Bhim says he couldn’t.

“I did not know where to go. For 30 to 40 km around the place, I knew there was no road. People travelled in camel carts. How far could I go on foot?” he says.

Bhim says that his “owner” was a man named Sai Ram who “kept an eye on me all the time”.

“Once, a sheep had become so weak that it was not able to stand and died. They beat me badly.. they broke my right hand. My jaw got dislocated, I was scared of them,” he says.

How did he escape?

“A few days ago, I met a truck driver while I was grazing sheep in the afternoon in Jaisalmer,” he says. “I narrated my entire story to him. He rescued me. He wrote all the information that I remembered on a piece of paper. This finally helped me reach Ghaziabad,’’ Bhim recalls. This note mentioned his name, his father’s name and that he is from somewhere in Ghaziabad.

“The driver dropped me off at a market somewhere in Delhi. From there, with the help of people, I reached Indirapuram Police station in Ghaziabad,” Bhim says.

He says that initially he cried a lot. “But now my tears have dried up. I can’t cry anymore.”

He says that he always missed his sisters while living in that desert far away. ”We would always play together in the house. I used to hate the fact that Happo would always get more milk to drink,” he smiles.

Bhim had given his own nickname, Happo, to his younger sister Hema – then just a newly born.

The sisters say while Bhim was missing, every Raksha Bandhan they would tie a Rakhi to his photo, which was clicked when Bhim was 6 years old.

Bhim, the Ghaziabad Police says, was rescued by a truck driver. “He found him somewhere in Jaisalmer. Bhim narrated the entire incident to the truck driver. This truck driver wrote his information on a paper and helped him reach the police,” Deputy Commissioner of Police, Ghaziabad, Nimish Patil says.

Bhim had reached Ghaziabad on November 22. For the next five days, he was taken to several police stations where families of missing children came to check. He had met three other families earlier but had categorically said they are not his family.

“It is a miracle,’’ Bhim’s father Tularam says. “We are going to teach him to use a mobile phone first and ask him to continue his education. He was in class three then, now he will start studying again.”