VELLORE: For 27 days, every phone call made 48-year-old Smitha Arun's heart race.
Ever since the Chennai resident’s 81-year-old father R Narayan went missing during a train journey on May 13, Smitha and her younger sister, Swapna Narayan, lived between hope and dread. Their father has been battling dementia, and the worried sisters searched railway stations, hospitals, bus stands and even mortuaries across Tamil Nadu, fearing the worst but refusing to give up.
On the evening of June 9, the call they longed for finally came. The railway police informed Smitha that her father had been traced to the Government Vellore Medical College Hospital in Adukkamparai.
Looking at the photo the police shared with them, the sisters recognised their father immediately. Though their father appeared disheveled, the sisters finally heaved a sigh of relief.
The ordeal began when the family boarded a train from Vadakara in Kerala to Hosur in Tamil Nadu on May 13. Around 1 am, while everyone else was asleep, Narayan got up saying he was going to the toilet. "We thought he was in the toilet and waited. When he didn't return, panic set in," Smitha recalled.
The days that followed blurred into one long search.
The sisters travelled repeatedly between Erode, Salem, Katpadi and other stations, following every seeming lead after CCTV footage from Erode revealed Narayan had boarded an unreserved compartment of the Nizamuddin Express soon after alighting from his train. The railway police traced his movements as far as Salem but could not determine where he had alighted.
As days turned into weeks, the search expanded. Family members circulated his photographs on social media. NGOs shared missing-person alerts while police teams searched at hospitals, shelters and in other public spaces.
In the meantime, Narayan had somehow reached the Vellore New Bus Stand. How he got there remains a mystery, even to him. For days, he survived largely on tea and biscuits handed to him by strangers.
On May 23, weakened and exhausted, he collapsed. Members of the public took him to the Vellore medical college hospital, where he remained under treatment.
The breakthrough came more than two weeks later when the Tamil Nadu railway police finally connected the unidentified patient to the missing-person complaint lodged by Smitha and her sister.
For Smitha and Swapna, his return feels nothing short of a miracle.
"This has never happened before," Smitha said. "We never leave him alone. We always ensure he carries a pocket-sized notebook with our contact details, and a mobile phone. However, he often refuses to keep it and removes it."
Today, Narayan is recovering at a private hospital in Chennai, his family hoping that he can soon head back to Swapna’s residence in the city where he stays.
