Three months ago, a teenage boy walked into a gaushala in Rampur Bushahr (also known as Rampur), a small town tucked into the hills of Shimla district. He was in search of work, something that would give him food and a place to sleep.
The gaushala offered him both, along with a monthlysalary of Rs 6,000, and Jayesh Bodade, 19, became a caretaker at the cow shelter. Thepradhan (chief) of the gaushala, Puranchand Sharma, remembers their first conversation clearly.
“I told him if you serve and take care of the cows sincerely, something good will definitely happen to you,” Sharma recalls while talking to The Indian Express on the phone.
Three months later, Jayesh would find what he lost years ago — his home, his father and brother in Akola district of Maharashtra.
Jayesh was only 12 years old in 2018, when his mother took him and his brother, Yogesh, who was then 14, and left home. They boarded a train to Shegaon, in Maharashtra’s Vidarbha region. While Yogesh soon left Shegaon and reunited with his father in Akot, in Akola district, Jayesh remained with his mother.
“I was working in Shegaon too,” says Jayesh while talking to The Indian Express. One day, he had a quarrel with his mother, and left town. “I first stayed in Madhya Pradesh for three months, made some friends there, and then went to Goa. After that, I moved around New Delhi, Chandigarh, Jammu and Kashmir and finally reached Himachal Pradesh, where I have been for the last five years,” he says.
Back home in Akola, his father, Sudhakar Bodade, a daily wage labourer, filed a missing person complaint at Khadan police station. But days turned into months, and months into years, with no trace of his younger son. “Eventually I gave up,” Sudhakar says. “I had to take care of my other son. I toiled and made sure he studied. Yogesh has a diploma in education, he will soon become a teacher,” he says.
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Meanwhile, Jayesh survived alone by working odd jobs, wherever he could find them. Eventually, as he drifted from one job to another, acquaintances led him northwards, into Himachal Pradesh.
When Jayesh arrived at the gaushala in Rampur, he didn’t tell anyone his story. He didn’t even say where he was from.
“He never told us where he hailed from. He only said, ‘I have no one. If there is work that gives me food and a place to stay, let me know.’ So we kept him,” says Puranchand Sharma.
The turning point came during a routine police verification in December. Because people from several states live around the gaushala, and following reports of smuggling in the area, the local police asked workers to produce identity documents, says Sharma.
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Jayesh didn’t have an Aadhaar card or any other valid document. He was taken to the local police outpost for questioning. That was the first time he told them where he was from.
“He told them he was from Akot in Maharashtra,” Sharma says. “That is when the connection was made.”
Back in Akola, Khadan police station was already revisiting old missing cases under Operation Muskaan, a programme aimed at tracing missing children. “This case was registered in 2018,” says Police Inspector (PI) Manoj Kedare from Khadan police station. “The boy had been missing since then, we tried to trace him, but could not. There was no contact, no information.”
Local police in Shimla contacted Akot police after Jayesh mentioned his hometown. Further inquiries led them to Akola’s missing cell, and finally to the original complaint at Khadan police station, Akola Superintendent of Police Archit Chandak says.
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A video call followed on January 10. “I spoke to the boy myself over video call,” Kedare says. “We took all the details and then contacted his father.”
“He didn’t immediately express a desire to return,” Kedare says. “But after we spoke to him, built some trust, he realised he still had family. I asked him directly, ‘Do you want to come back?’ He said he wanted to visit his father.”
Recalling the call from the police, Sudhakar says: “After so many years, the police called me and said my son has been found in Shimla… For years, I searched for him everywhere.” When police showed him Jayesh on a video call, he immediately recognised him as his younger son.
Last week, on January 14-15, Sudhakar travelled to Shimla alone. And, father and son finally met for the first time in almost eight years, at a police station in Shimla. They then returned to Akola together.
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Jayesh is now back home, but his heart longs for the mountains. “Right now, it feels good to be back, but I think I will go back again. What will I do here all day? I have got used to living in the mountains. I don’t feel comfortable here. There is a lot of noise. The weather has affected my health. My father keeps telling me not to go back, but I am trying to convince him that I will visit them often, or they can come and visit me. When I left home as a child, I was scared. Now, I don’t feel scared at all, I can live alone,” he says.
For now, he spends most of his time with his friends from school. After studying until Class 7, Jayesh did not pursue education further. Asked if he wanted to study, he says, “Kaam hi karna hai (I want to work)”.
Asked how he felt when he met his father after so many years, he says: “I became very emotional. My father was crying too. My plan was to come back later in the year and surprise everyone, tell them that I am alive… but the police found my father first.”
His mother has not been traced.
Back in Rampur, Sharma reflected on the youth who once walked into his gaushala. “I told him that serving cows brings blessings… Maybe, he received the reward for that service,” he says.
