TIRUCHY: Four-year-old Punith came running towards me as I parked my vehicle outside his house. “Did you come to meet my brother?” he asked. As I struggled to find an answer, the boy held my hands and lead me to a spot covered with concrete. Shrubs and grass were slowly conquering that space. It was exactly there, on this date (October 25) last year, the attention of entire nation converged, after Punit’s younger brother, two-year-old Sujith Wilson, fell into a defunct borewell.
The unsuccessful operation to rescue the boy went on for 80 long hours even as the boy’s family and millions of others waited with a glimmer of hope. Three-sixty-five days have gone by, and a pall of gloom still hangs heavy over Nadukkattupattai village near Manapparai. Many people who pass through the village still stop by the boy’s house and pay a visit to the now-closed borewell.
After seeing several strangers visiting the site where Sujith disappeared, Punith now believes that his young brother has become a god. “Whoever visits the house, he takes them to the site of borewell,” says the boy’s father, Britto Arokiyaraj. Kalamary, the boy’s mother, is still haunted by the ordeals of the five days when rescue forces tried in vain to bring the boy out of the narrow hole. “No one in the world should go through the pain and loss I suffered. My child lost his life in front of my eyes.
I was totally helpless and it is horrifying. All the things, which unfolded on those five days haunt me even now. I feel that my boy is still with me and I can never accept that he is not coming back,” a teary eyed Kalamary says. Britto and Kalamary recall how Punith coped with the fact that his brother would never come back. “For first few days, we kept telling him that Sujith had gone to a relative’s house and would come back soon. But very soon, he realised that Sujith would never come back and that he had died in the borewell,” the parents say. When Sujith died, Punith was studying in kindergarten.
The house seems to be filled with memories of Sujith as the parents have hung several photographs of the boy in all the rooms. “Every time I came back home after work, Sujith would climb on top of me and want me to play with him. Now, I feel a huge void in my life,” says Britto, who continues to earn his living as a construction worker. The family received several offers of help after the incident, but nothing much seems to have changed for them. “No money can bring my baby back. We have not used any penny that we got. We are satisfied with my husband’s daily wage of `500. So much has been said about the financial help we received, but what no one understands is that we are the unlucky parents who lost their child in front of their eyes,” says Kalamary while trying to control her tears.
For the last one year, she has not moved out of the house even for a single day. “I feel my baby still lives here. Hundreds of people who cross our house slowdown or even halt to remember our Sujith. If he is living in so many people’s memories, how can I call him dead?” she says. Meanwhile, the incident has created a creepy reaction among many villagers who are too scared even to think about borewells.
Anbusundaram, a villager says there is a widespread fear among them about uncovered borewells. “Sujith was lost not only to the parents, but to the entire village. Although many things have changed in last one year, we all still feel a strong guilt when we pass by their house as we could not do anything to save the boy who had grown up in front of us,” he says. Some villagers have put up memorial posters near the burial ground in Fathima Puthur village where Sujith was laid to rest. “Let us take an oath to close all the defunct borewells in the country to make sure no other Sujith loses his life,” reads one such poster.