Very soon the teacher noticed that he was missing and informed the head teacher, who started a search and quickly found him standing in the road. The head teacher was very angry and called my father in to the school to talk to him about my brother breaking the school rules. My brother was terrified, standing there and hearing his father apologize for his bad behaviour and promise that it would not happen again. After issuing a severe warning my brother was allowed to return to his class and my father to his work. When school was over my brother was frightened of returning home. He knew there would be severe punishment from his father that night. He didn’t want to go home but he couldn’t think of anywhere else to go. New Delhi is but one district of Delhi, the Indian capital, a city of more than 27 million souls. Every year about 40,000 children go missing in the city, snatched from the streets by the Beggar Mafia and forced into a life of slavery as labourers, beggars, prostitutes or ‘orphans’ for sale to foreign childless couples. What our family felt as we slowly began to realize that my brother was missing was beyond all description. My mother started crying and family members, neighbours and friends gathered in our house. People searched every room, and my father went to the local police station to start a missing person enquiry. Everyone was sure that he had gone to the house of a friend or a family member.
But by the next day it was clear that this hadn’t happened. The family started searching in a different way. They paid to have thousands of posters printed and posted everywhere in the town, on the trains, and even put notices in the national papers and made appeals on TV. As a result, after three days, we got a call from someone in Patna, a city none of us had ever visited, saying ‘We have seen your boy in the train station, and he is in a safe place at the Railway Police Station. Please come and collect him.’ My brother, we later learned, had walked nearly five miles from the school to New Delhi Railway Station, the busiest railway station in all of India, with links to 867 destinations, and got on to a train. He had no idea where the train was going. My father left immediately and travelled the 450 miles to Patna and found him safely. Now my brother is 40 years old and still living in the same part of town. Every time I see a missing animal poster I remember those three days of pain and anxiety. There are no words to explain what my family and I went through. I pray to god that the owner will find his cat or his dog soon.
GOLD DUST
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Gold Dust
issue 32 winter 2017