KASARAGOD: The COVID-19 pandemic, it seems, is also the time to correct past mistakes and seek redemption.
A serendipitous incident on the 26th day of Ramzan took Basariya -- a homemaker in Nellikkunnu in Kasaragod -- back by 20 years.
Late in the evening on Tuesday, when Basariya was preparing for the Iftar, a young man knocked the door of her house with a large food pack.
She was pleasantly surprised, but it was not uncommon for families to exchange Iftar food in Kasaragod. She asked the person, who was wearing a helmet, who he was. But the young man replied that he was just a delivery boy and another person had sent it.
Before she could press further, azan -- the call for prayer -- echoed from the mosques and Basariya went inside for a short prayer and broke the fast.
The man sporting the helmet also left.
The food pack had rich ghee rice and steaming beef curry. But it also had a small jewellery box. Inside it, she found two gold coins and a handwritten message on a paper torn from a school notebook.
The message read thus: 'I had gotten the gold you lost 20 years ago. I could not return it to you then. Please accept these coins and forgive me'.
A stunned Basariya took a photograph of the note and the gift and WhatsApped to her husband Ibrahim Thaivalappil, who runs a small footwear shop in Sharjah.
Twenty years ago, Basariya lost a portion of her gold waistband during a wedding in Kasaragod, said Ibrahim over the phone.
The waistband weighed around 28g. "A part of the chain weighing around 12g was stuck to her waist but the rest was lost," he recalled.
The family searched for the gold chain in the wedding house but gave up and forgot about the incident until the note arrived.
"We are in awe of the person who returned the gold in these troubled times. He has a big heart," said the husband.
Ibrahim has been running the footwear shop in Sharjah for the past 28 years. "Now the business is down and we are going through a rough patch," he said.
Ibrahim said he did not know whether the person would be happy to read this in the newspapers. "We are just sharing our joy. Not so much in getting the gold coins but in knowing such people exist among us," he said.