A lost child, an interloper, the big reveal: Man held after living as Nalanda landlord’s son for 41 years

According to the police, the story begins in 1977, when 16-year-old Kanhaiya, son of Kameshwar Singh and Ramsakhi Devi of Murgawan village in Nalanda, did not return home after writing his Class 10 examination at Chandi, a neighbouring town.

A missing persons case was lodged at Silao police station, but nothing came of it though Kameshwar, who had seven daughters and Kanhaiya from his two marriages, waited desperately for any news of his only son.

Then, according to the court records, in 1981, a young man dressed as a “sanyasi turned up in neighbouring Keshopur village calling himself the missing son of Kameshwar”, who owned over 100 bighas and had been mukhiya of Morgawan village for several years. Kameshwar was also the cousin of former Rajya Sabha MP Dilkeshwar Singh.

The ‘sanyasi’ was presented before Kameshwar, who promptly accepted him as his son though the rest of the family and the villagers were suspicious about his whereabouts between 1977 and 1981. Kameshwar’s wife Ramsakhi, too, wasn’t convinced – her son had a scar on his back from a healed wound, which she couldn’t find on the young man, the court records said. Over the next many years, while she and her five daughters wanted the ‘interloper’ out of her house, the young man refused to leave. In November 1981, Ramsakhi Devi lodged a case in Silao police station against Gosai.

Soon after, the couple passed away – Kameshwar in 1990 and Ramsakhi in 1995 – after which the case was closed.

But Gosai’s rivalry with his ‘sisters’ continued. As he allegedly sold 55 bighas of land and also tried to claim the family’s properties in Patna, Vidya Singh, one of Ramsakhi’s five daughters, slapped a case against Gosai.

Vidya Singh’s lawyer Rajesh Kumar told The Indian Express: “After her parents’ death, Vidya wanted the case to be reopened but that was not allowed by the Patna High Court on some technical and legal grounds. In 1995, we moved the Supreme Court and a year later, succeeded in getting the case reopened.”

Police investigation revealed that Gosai was from a village under Laxmipur police station of Jamui and that his family “made a living out of begging, usually in the guise of sanyasis”.

The case played out in the Biharsharif court over the next many years until 2019, when the court asked the accused to go in for a DNA test. According to advocate Kumar, Gosai refused, “deepening the court’s suspicion”.

The court also pulled Gosai up when he produced a ‘death certificate’, claiming it was that of Dayanand Gosai. “The court asked him why he would have Gosai’s death certificate, to which he had no answer. They later found the certificate was forged,” says Kumar, adding that Gosai had no reply to the court’s query on his whereabouts between 1977 and 1981.