We all have our ghosts of the past that frequently resurrects itself from its grave to give us shudders. How much ever we try to forget those harrowing moments, paradoxically those bitter experiences get embedded strongly in our memory and we never are able to erase them completely from our memory.
I was working in England on a short stint 10 years ago. It was a small world for us — my wife and I and our two-year-old son. It was those days when smartphones, social media and web series were in their infancy. After working through five hard days, we used to spend the weekends in one of the many parks and malls of the city. Prior to that, we weren’t used to such humongous malls with multiple blocks, long corridors, huge atria, plethora of escalators and shops. Apart from the brightly lit and colourful designer brand shops, we spent the most time in the sprawling departmental stores. The stores had everything housed in them, with the products clearly demarcated and arranged in the many aisles. While my wife used to fill the shopping carts, I used to walk along the aisles showing the various stuff to my son.
On one such day, while I was engrossed at the wide display of electronic stuffs, I suddenly realised that my son was not around me. He always stood holding my hands or he would be kneeling down close to a product and mumble something to himself. He was a late speaker and except for bi-syllables, his vocabulary was in single digit. But that day, he wasn’t in the vicinity as I peered along the long stretch of the aisle on either side from where I was standing. There were only a handful of customers, typical of an English store, unlike the crowded ones in India. But my little one was not to be seen. I quickly walked across to peep into the next bay. Again, a long passage way, a few people, and no signs of my son. A sudden sense of fear and doom gripped me. I started sweating and panting.
I did not know which side to proceed next since there were 10 or more aisles on either side. What if I am pursuing the wrong side and moving far away from him? As I thought about his panic-stricken face, standing alone in an alien environment, I was shaken to the core. He can’t even tell anything to anyone. Should I inform my wife who was shopping on the other corner in the grocery section? We had only one mobile handset those days. I was in a quagmire. I took a quick decision and ran towards one side praying to God. He could not be seen anywhere. The store was eerily silent. Within a few minutes, I had reached the corner and now I saw my wife with the vegetable cart. With a mix of fear, apology and panic, I told her that I had lost him and we both frantically ran around the store. After searching every nook and corner, when we met again near the store entrance, we were in tears. We informed the store manager who immediately contacted her personnel through the walkie-talkie but no one spotted him.
We came out of the store and I climbed on one of the chairs placed in the corridor. I saw heads everywhere and people have started thronging the mall on that late Sunday morning. My hopes of spotting him from that vantage point quickly vanished. I spotted a policeman a few shops away, and we decided to seek his help. When I was about to reach him, I saw two old women walking towards us with our little one in tears. He ran towards us to hug me sobbingly. One of them looked like my mother about to thrash me with a broom for my carelessness. We thanked them profusely. They had spotted him in the corridor. Till today, we don’t know how he got out of the store, how he landed in their safe hands and how they spotted us.
A few decades ago, when communication was not so robust, missing a family member was not uncommon. My mother’s brother was lost in Madras when, in his teens, he went to attend a political meeting. No one had a clue about his whereabouts since then. My mother always looked for the moment he would pay a surprise visit to our home one day but in vain. She named me after him. Even in movies of 1980s and 1990s, a son, daughter or brother getting lost as a child only to reunite later was a common genre.
Missing someone dear is a terrible experience. Those moments that immediately follow their missing is one of the most dreadful feelings one can have. Most often, the family is reunited sooner. But some unfortunate ones are lost forever. And they never fade away from the thoughts of the family members. Unlike death of a beloved person, a lost person gives the family a feeling that they are so near, yet so far. The family continues to worry about their well-being. They are in constant fear and despair that the lost one could be suffering in wrong company and multiple grisly thoughts go through their minds episodically.
Even today, in the era of technological boom, where every nook and corner of the world is under constant vigil through cameras, and communication is so easy through phones, the list of missing children is long. Near-misses like the one I had will make an equally long list, I reckon. Those particular moments when I first noticed him missing in the aisle and when he was handed over to me are well etched in my mind, and I would be reliving it frequently in my failed bid to forget it.
