‘I met my mother after nearly 40 years’

It was a reunion made possible by Facebook, emails, a TV station, several friends, and one man’s determination to find his family at whatever cost.

“For some reason, I was sure I would meet them some day,’’ says Kisan, 48, a computer engineer in the US. He has written a book titled The Last Orange about how he traced his family.

A day etched in his memory

Kisan Upadhaya still remembers the day it all began. He and his family – which included his father Indra Lal Upadhaya, mother and sister – were living in Guwahati, in the northeastern Indian state of Assam. It was the summer of 1969 and he was four years old. His father and his then eight-year-old sister Maya had gone to the market while he was at home with his mother, playing in the yard. “I’ve kept an orange for you in the kitchen,’’ she told him. “Go and eat it and don’t come out until you finish.”

“Ma,’’ he called out. Not getting a reply, he shouted for her. He searched their modest house but couldn’t find her. Panic setting in, Kisan started to cry. Hearing him, neighbours joined the search but Umoti could not be found anywhere. After his father, a police officer, returned home, he too launched a hunt for his wife but she had just vanished.

Although the search continued for Umoti, she could not be found. A week later, his father sent Kisan and Maya to stay with his sister in Nepalgunj, Nepal. As his police job involved travelling to different parts of the state, sometimes for days at a stretch, he felt the children wouldn’t be safe alone at home.

“Maya worked as a domestic help in houses, and in the evenings she sat on a pavement selling flower garlands to devotees visiting a nearby temple,’’ recalls Kisan. “Although only eight, she would collect firewood from the nearby forest and carry it back to town to sell it to get some money to buy food for both of us.’’

Kisan, just four, found a job in a roadside tea stall washing dishes. “I earned around Rs16 (in today’s terms about Dh2) a month,’’ he says. It was a paltry sum but together with the money Maya earned, it got them two meals a day.

One day Kisan accidentally broke a glass while washing the dishes and the incensed stall owner threw him out. With no place to go Kisan followed a group of street kids and lined up in front of a shrine where food was being distributed to the poor. “Devotees often distributed food to the poor in temples and I used to join those children making a dash for the serving every day.”

He wasn’t lucky every time. Several nights he and his sister went to bed hungry when she could not earn enough money to buy them food.

His sister tried to look after him, but she couldn’t give him medical attention because she didn’t have any money. His condition soon began to worsen. With nobody at the centre to help, he continued to suffer in silence.

“The shelter was close to the banks of the Bagmati river in Tripureshwor, in Nepal, where bodies were cremated,” says Kisan. “With each passing day, I realised I was getting weaker and very ill and began to wonder when my body would also end up on the river bank. But through it all Maya cared for me like no other. And she was only eight years old at the time.”

When Kisan’s condition started deteriorating, Maya carried her brother to a local hospital where she pleaded with the doctors to admit him and treat him. Taking pity on the children, the doctors took him in.

“I was diagnosed with pneumonia but at the hospital I got a second chance at life thanks to good food and medicine – and most importantly thanks to Maya for taking me there at the time,’’ says Kisan.

The long road to recovery

Once Kisan recovered, doctors sent him to Mendies Haven Children’s Home, a charity in Nepal for orphans and abandoned children.

“I didn’t even have a chance to say goodbye to Maya. She came to know of my departure and that I was at the children’s home when she visited the hospital months later,” says Kisan.

Growing up with other children there, Kisan was enrolled in school, where he excelled.

“Of course, I did miss my sister a lot and used to wonder where she was and whether she was happy,’’ he says.

“At first I agreed to go along with my sister, but on second thoughts I changed my mind,” said Kisan. “At the home, I was fed, clothed and educated. I did not want to forsake all this for an uncertain life. Memories of those days when I went without food and slept in the open in the cold kept haunting me.”

Fighting back tears, Kisan watched Maya leave. “I just hoped she would reach my family and bring my father soon to take me home. But it never happened.”

That was the last he saw of her for 40 years.

Kisan would later come to know that his father had remarried and although he tried to find his children a couple of times, he did not succeed and gave them up as lost.

Kisan, meanwhile, graduated in science from Tribhuvan University in Nepal. During his spare time, he worked as a tourist guide and also assisted Dr Dick Marten, a GP at the Mendies home, as a trainee nurse. He even helped out in the home’s kitchen as a cook.

“Those days, I aspired to become a doctor,” he says. However, when the cook at Mendies Home left, Kisan was asked to help out in the kitchen.

For pocket money he delivered newspapers and tended neighbours’ gardens at weekends.

After the course at Durham Tech, Kisan earned a degree in electronic engineering from Duke University. Today he continues to work there as an assistant engineer.

It was at Duke University that he met Pam Fox, a student there, whom he married in 1995. They adopted Sudheshma, a little girl from Nepal, in 1997. Their son Kevin was born in 1999.

Yet, one thing continued to bother Kisan.

“I wanted to find my father, mother and especially Maya, who loved me and took care of me during life’s dark moments,’’ he says. But he didn’t know where to start. “I contacted several people I knew in Nepal but nobody seemed to have an idea about where Maya was.’’ Attempts to contact his aunt were unsuccessful.

The search gets serious…

Deepak promptly agreed to help. “Although I’d never met Kisan, I wanted to help him because he appeared to be desperate to find his long-lost family,” says Deepak.

“I put up a post on Facebook detailing Kisan’s story and seeking information about his father, a former police officer in Assam.”

However, the going was not easy. Kisan could not remember if his father’s name was Indra Prasad Upadhaya or Indra Lal Upadhaya. Neither could he remember his mother’s name.

“However, he was sure that his father was a police officer,’’ says Deepak.

After several false starts, Deepak chanced upon the Facebook profile of a man named Pranabjyoti Goswami, the Superintendent of Police in Assam, and asked him to help find Kisan’s family. Pranabjyoti agreed.

Believing somebody in Kisan’s family could still be in Assam, the officer sought the media’s help and approached News Live, a local TV channel in Assam, with Kisan’s story.

The breakthrough came after Bal Ram Sharma, Kisan’s paternal uncle, called the studio. He had seen the programme and was keen to reunite the family. He had details of the family: Umoti, he said, had remarried and was now living in a remote village in Nepal, while Maya was married and living with her husband and three children in Tinsukia, Assam. Indra Lal, Kisan’s father, had died several years ago.

News Live arranged a meeting of the trio in the virtual world on August 28, 2011, a date Kisan is unlikely to forget.

“Over Skype from the US, my mother’s face was not clear and I could not talk to her properly due to poor network connection,” remembers Kisan. “But I was so happy to see her – even virtually.’’

Two weeks later, he flew with Pam to India to meet his long-lost family.

“While growing up at the charity and later in the US, there wasn’t a day when I didn’t think about my sister. She looked after me like a son, caring for me during the most difficult times.

“I’ve tried to put down all those thoughts in my book The Last Orange. The title says it all – my life changed after I had that orange in our house in Assam 40-odd years ago.

“Although the book is detailed with tragedy, I don’t want readers to feel sorry for me because there are millions of other Kisans and Mayas out there who still are suffering. I hope this book will become an inspiration to many.’’