Early Times Report
Jammu, Mar 20: For over a decade, Lalita Devi existed only in memory. Her family had mourned her, searched for her, and ultimately surrendered to grief — lighting the funeral pyre and completing the last rites that Sanatan tradition prescribes for the dead. Life, painfully, moved on.
But Lalita Devi had not died. She had simply been lost.
For reasons her fractured mind could not explain, the elderly woman had spent years wandering the bus stand and markets of Surankote, in Poonch district. Mentally unwell and unable to identify herself, she survived on the quiet kindness of locals who gave her food and looked out for her — strangers who became, without knowing it, her only family.
It was Station House Officer Abid Bukhari who changed everything.
When Bukhari noticed the woman lingering around the market, he did what good police officers do — he stopped, and he listened. Patient conversations, careful observation, and the painstaking assembly of fragments she let slip eventually gave investigato 11- years after performing their mother’s last rites, a family from Uttar Pradesh received the call no one dares to hope for she was alive.
The call that followed must have felt like a thunderclap.
Her family, upon hearing that the woman they had grieved and cremated in spirit was alive and well, dropped everything and made for Poonch. What awaited them was an reunion that defied easy description — tears, embraces, and the particular disbelief of people confronting a miracle they had long stopped praying for.
"It feels as if eleven years of exile have ended," the family said, still visibly overwhelmed. "Today is nothing short of a miracle for us."
They embraced SHO Bukhari and the Surankote police with deep gratitude — and it is hard to argue that the feeling was not well earned. In a world where the missing routinely stay missing, one officer's decision to simply pay attention gave a mother back to her children and an ending to a story that had seemed, for far too long, already over. |
