After 40 years presumed dead, on his way home to Kerala

“I wonder how they will react back home; they had given him up for dead years ago,” M P Haneefa, his nephew in Dubai, told The Indian Express.

“I have been working here for the last 20 years as a driver, and it now feels so strange to know that my uncle, who we thought had died somewhere in the desert, was living in the same city all this time.”

After arriving in the UAE in the mid-1970s, Baputty was in touch with his parents for about two years before going out of contact. It was after he was admitted to a Dubai hospital for acute diabetes in September that he finally revealed to his only friend Abdul Gafoor that he was not Abdulla Punathil Usman, as they knew him, but Baputty.

“He still hasn’t told us why he cut off his family like this,” Gafoor said. “Last week, he said something about how he didn’t get a decent job at that time. That’s all. When he realised that he had been traced, he was a bit tense initially. But now, he is relaxed and we even went out shopping together.”

Contrary to the usual thread in such stories that emerge from the Middle East, Baputty’s employer, an elderly Arab woman, footed his entire hospital bill of around 20,000 dirhams and got his ticket booked.

“He was happy in that house (in Dubai’s Hor al Anz area); they seem to have treated him well,” said Haneefa. “But now it is the turn of my mother Amina and uncle Moosa (Baputty’s other sibling) to take care of him. They are waiting.”