As children searched for him, ghazal maestro lay dying on a road nearby

No one knows where Pandit Rao, an Alzheimer’s patient for the last 10 years, was in those 28 days — or how he ended up emaciated, unconscious and dying near a busy flyover in Begumpet, about 10 km away from the family home in Goshamahal, a Hyderabad suburb.

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As his youngest son Santosh Rao told The Sunday Express: “Such a great musician, such a great teacher, and he died alone and in complete anonymity only a few kilometres away from home. That is the bigger tragedy.”

And, as Pandit Rao’s daughter Bindiya said: “It is a mind-boggling mystery… while we were searching for him all over, he lay dying in a hospital.”

The last rites of “Guruji” — as Pandit Rao was popularly known — were performed on Saturday.

“One moment he was with us in the queue coming out of the temple, in the next, he had disappeared,” said Santosh, recalling that afternoon in Shirdi.

“We looked for him everywhere and immediately informed police. Footage from one CCTV camera showed him exiting the temple from a gate but after that there was no sign of him in any of the cameras elsewhere,” he added.

The hunt then spread out with over 200 students of Pandit Rao searching for him at railway stations and bus stands across Shirdi, Pune, Mumbai and beyond. “We covered almost the whole of Maharashtra. We put up posters everywhere, and left messages and phone numbers on social networking sites,” said Santosh.

Yet, what’s left Pandit Rao’s family — wife Tara, eldest son Sanjay, daughters Sandhya, Bindiya and Seema, and Santosh — baffled is this: “He didn’t have a single rupee; his ID card, purse, even his footwear, were at the lodge where we stayed; he only had the clothes he was wearing; how did he manage?”

Santosh added: “Alzheimer’s had affected him so much that he could not remember who we were… he would recognise me by face sometimes.”

Then, on June 24, between 1.30-2 pm, Punjagutta Police Station received a call about an old man lying unconscious near the Begumpet flyover.

“He looked frail and had a thick beard. We checked his clothes and pockets but found nothing. We admitted him to the Gandhi Government Hospital, and a constable stayed back for a while to see if he would regain consciousness, but he did not,’’ said Inspector S Mohan Kumar from Punjagutta.

Pandit Rao’s children, meanwhile, had narrowed their search down to the Charminar area in Hyderabad.

“We had pasted around 3,000 posters all over the city with a photo of Panditji and contact numbers. We received a call from someone who claimed to have seen a man resembling my father. We rushed over and searched frantically but in vain,” said Santosh.

Later that night, Pandit Vithal Rao Shivpurkar, 86, suffered a heart attack and passed away.

“Just before he breathed his last, he whispered his name to an attendant,” said Sub-Inspector Shyam Babu who was coordinating with Shirdi police on this case.

According to Dr Hymavathi, the hospital’s resident medical officer, it took more than 24 hours for that name to reach the Punjagutta station and then Babu.

“I rushed to the mortuary on Friday morning. Based on information provided by his family members, I checked for a black thread on his left ankle, a red thread on his right hand, and the artificial left eye. Then, I called Santosh,’’ Babu said.

“You could not identify him just by looking at the body. The beard and the condition of the body had made it impossible,” he added.

On Saturday, there was absolute silence in ‘Sangeet Sadhana’, Pandit Rao’s home in Hind Nagar. It was from a portion of this house, neighbours recalled, that they once used to hear “Guruji” singing every day, late in the afternoon, engrossed in teaching his disciples.