Rajasthan woman lost in Kerala united with husband through kindness of doctors

At the Government Mental Hospital in Thiruvanthapuram, psychiatrists realised Rameela had no memory of her home and that she suffered from bipolar disorder. As many trains from north India terminate at Thiruvananthapuram, the hospital gets patients who have drifted from other parts of the country to Kerala.

Dr R S Dinesh, a senior psychiatrist at the hospital, said: “She had forgotten her entire past after she left home with bipolar disorder. However, after she became rather normal, she started to respond to our queries regarding her home. When we took her son to her, initially she could not recognise him. Since there are nomadic women who abduct children, we wanted to ensure she is his biological mother. We conducted a DNA test and confirmed that she is the child’s mother. Often she would speak about her other five children, which we confirmed only later.’’

Rameela gained a degree of stability in October 2016. The attempt to trace her family started after she mentioned the place Bichhiwara. Psychiatric social worker K Maya said: “We googled for Bichhiwara and found it is a place in Rajasthan’s Dungarpur district. After several attempts that ran into days, we managed to get more details from her, including her name. We also took the help of a translator to understand her language. Based on the inputs pieced together… we contacted the police in Bichhiwara. As there was no missing person case at the police station, the police in Rajasthan could not help us. Several times, they were unresponsive.”

Maya said that two months ago, the hospital made her speak to the police in Bichhiwara.

Rameela explained to the police the details about her family. On November 14, Maya got a call from Bichhiwara police. They had tracked down Devi’s husband Ranchod Lal Kharadi (34), a small-time farmer.

In the nearly two years that his wife was missing, Ranchod Lal said he searched for her in vain. The couple have six children. Rameela was the only daughter of her parents “who died two years ago (2015)”, Ranchod Lal said. “She had been down since the death of her parents and would often cry…. Now, doctors say she left home because of her mental disorder,” the farmer said. In December 2015, when Ranchod Lal was out in a farm and their five children away in schools and anganavadis, Rameela left home with their youngest child, Ravi.

He spoke to Rameela after all these months from the local police station in Rajasthan and informed the hospital he would board the train to Thiruvananthapuram at the earliest.

On Saturday, Kharadi reached the mental hospital with a letter from the sarpanch. “However, we put him among other men and asked Rameela to identify her husband,’’ Maya said.

In his village, the missing wife had sparked a rumour that Ranchod Lal had killed her to grab her property. Fearing that police would arrest him, he did not file a missing person’s case. “I had vowed that I would not wear slippers until I find my wife. I wanted to tell everyone in my village that I haven’t killed my wife,” Ranchod Lal said.

Before leaving for home, the couple met Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan, who wrote on Facebook: “The light that heralded into the life of Kharadi is making all of us happy. It is a moment of pride for Kerala….’’