Shimla: It is a real-life script stronger than cinema unfolding in a remote hill village in Himachal Pradesh’s Sirmaur district, bordering Yumanagar in Haryana and the Dehradun district of Uttarakhand.
A 16-year-old boy, who vanished without a trace in a Haryana town, has walked back home after 45 long years, now a middle-aged man with a legally wedded wife and three grown children.
“The villagers watch in astonishment, amused and amazed, as fate delivers a twist worthy of a full-blown Bollywood masala plot—proof that sometimes even life outdoes the movies.” Chetan Parmar, a native of Nahan, acknowledges this.
Rikhi Ram—born in a Brahmin family in the village of Nadi—went missing in 1980, and after he lost his memory in an accident, he suffered a head injury while he was working in a hotel in Yamuna Nagar and forgot every bit about his identity, parents, or birthplace.
Last week, he came back home carrying a new identity—Ravi Chaudhary, the name his caregivers had given him during those decades of oblivion.
The story unfolds about Rakhi Ram, who, after he had recovered from the accident and head injury, could not recollect his memories of childhood and parental background.
Under a new name, he began his life. Eventually, he shifted to Mumbai’s Dadar, where he started earning a livelihood, believing that he was an orphan.