The tale of the lost and found girl

Her twin sister held her hand, while Anjali talked to us about the time she spent in a home for destitute children. She returned home after 15 months. The family spoke about their reconciliation with the fact that Anjali was gone, and the bouts of hope, and how they never really gave up, and we listened to the fascinating story of faith and loss and of hope.
An edited version appeared in the Indian Express on November 18, 2009.

Chinki Sinha

New Delhi, November 17, 2009



Pastor Anil Johnson kept repeating hallelujah over the phone.

Amita Raj listened in, wondering why her pastor had called her on a Thursday afternoon. Then, in a soft voice, he told her that Anjali, her daughter who had been missing for 15 months, had returned, and she was with him at Aaya Nagar. They needed to come to the church right away.

She was safe, he added.

Anjali, who was 11 years old at the time, went missing one afternoon last August after she fought with her younger brother Abin. She went downstairs first to buy biscuits, then came back upstairs and took some money from her mother’s almirah and then disappeared into the narrow, winding alleyes of Block B in New Ashok Nagar in East Delhi. Abin sat at home, waiting. His mother and uncle were at work at the school for handicap children. Anjali’s twin sister Anisha was with them.

But Anjali never found her way back home. She walked to the bus stop, spent the night in a bus parked in the lot, and in the morning walked to the railway station and got into a train. She thought she would go to her aunt in Tamil Nadu, but there were too many trains, and she followed a stream of people and two days later, Anjali got down at the Secunderabad station.

A field worker from Aman Biradari, an NGO based in Hyderabad, found Anjali at the station. She had been standing in a corner, crying. They brought her to the Rainbow Home where Anjali spent a year among other destitute children. She would often cry, and sulk, and withdraw. She would not eat, and urge the NGO workers to take her home. But the teams that they sent out were not able to find the church in Aaya Nagar. The church that Anjali’s family attended relocated from a rented house in the locality. So, Anjali remained among the children in an alien city.

Three months ago, a field worker from Hyderabad accompanied her to Delhi and she started living in the NGO’s Kilkari Rainbow Home near Kashmere Gate with 65 other chidlren. Once in while, she would go with the NGO officials to the places she remembered. It was on one such trip to Aaya Nagar when Pastor Anil Johnson spotted her. He was at a shop, near the site of the former church, when he saw Anjali. At first he wasn’t sure if it was her. Her hair was cropped short, and she was with someone. But Johnson had prayed for her at the church, holding out her photograph to the congregation. He couldn’t be wrong. He called out her name, and she turned back to look at him. It was Anjali.

On Thursday, when their pastor called, Amita was at work, tending to disabled children at the Mata Bhagwanti Devi Chadha Charitable Trust, where Anjali’s twin sister Anisha is a student, too. She ran up the flight of steps to the canteen where her brother Wilson Raj was busy preparing meals. She hugged him, and wouldn’t stop crying. Anjali had raised her children on her own after having divorced her husband and moving to Delhi in 2000. It wasn’t easy, she said.

“It was awkward. Everyone was looking at us. At first, I thought one of the children fell down and got hurt,” Wilson said. “Then she said Anjali has been found.”

For 15 months, ever since Anjali, went missing, Amita has prayed, fasted for days in a row, never losing her faith in her god, hoping that her daughter will return someday.

On August 26, 2008, when Anjali went missing, their mother and uncle came home in the evening and waited for hours, combing the neighborhood for her, finally registering a complaint at the police station. But nothing ever happened.

“The police used to tell us if you find her, let us know,” Amita said. “We had no hope. We only had faith.”

For 13 days, Amita and Wilson went to most of the city’s NGOs asking about Anjali, showing her pictures to the officials.

In the nights, Amita made the bed for her missing daughter, spread the blankets, too. In the mornings, Anjali was the one who would bring tea to her mother, tug at her gently to wake her up.

“I would often turn over in bed and get angry,” Amita said, holding Anjali’s hand at the family’s residence. “After she was lost, I got up angry, and I told God I would never ever scold her. But he should give her back to us.”

Her twin sister Anisha prayed, too. They were born on December 21, 1998, in Kanyakumari. At 6 p.m., Anisha’s tiny feet appeared, and a minute later, nurses brought in Anjali into the world. They were identical twins an their mother dressed them in similar clothes. If it were not for a scar on Anisha’s stomach, even the sisters could not identify themselves in the pictures.

On Tuesday, a day after she returned home, Anjali flipped through an old family album, and asked her mother if she recognized who was who. Both sisters wore blue frocks that Amita made for them.

“Anjali never smiled. Anisha always did. So you can make out,” she said.

In the corner, sitting by the door because she can’t walk, Anisha smiled mischiviously. Last year, on their birthday, the family fasted, praying for Anjali. On Dec. 21, they will celebrate once again and Anisha will make her sister a card, and Abin will give her a doll set.

“She loves dolls,” Abin said. “At least she won’t run away again.”

Mehnaz Khan, the manager at the Rainbow Home in Delhi, said Anjali had ran away from home in the past, too.

“If someone says something to her, she wants to run away,” she said. “When she first came to us three months ago, she would hardly eat. She wanted to go home. But we couldn’t find the place.”

Last year, Amita moved to New Ashok Nagar from Badarpur to put Anisha in the school for the physically and the mentally challenged kids where Amita too would take up the nurse’s job. Abin and Anjali had yet to be admitted to a school. But then, 11 days after they moved to the new place, Anjali went missing.

Now, Amita doesn’t want to send her to school. Anjali has lost two years of her life, and the family would rather get her private tuitions and make her appear for the open school examinations later.

For Anjali, who hugged her mother tight and kept crying when she met her at the church, it is back to the familiar world.

“I was angry with my brother. I didn’t want to be at home,” she said. “But I wanted to come back home. I cried so much.”

In the home for the destitute children, Anjali learned to paint and draw. She even danced at times when she was happy.

Back with her mother and sister, Anjali is now trying to get back to a life that was lost. In the intervening year, she has outgrown her clothes. So, on Monday when the NGO handed her over to her family, they went to Sarojini Nagar to shop for new clothes for her.

After all, it is yet another beginning. She was lost and found.