R Sundari is curled up on a mat inside her tile-roofed home at Neelambur in the outskirts of Coimbatore. She is exhausted. Only last week, she undertook the journey of a lifetime. The 68-year-old travelled to Punjab to bring home her 41-year-old son R Prakash, who was rescued from bonded labour from Jasraur village in Amritsar, after he went missing 23 years ago.When Prakash sits down to eat his lunch of rice and brinjal curry, she is on her feet, fussing over him, asking if he would like some curd. Prakash’s rescue is nothing short of a miracle and Sundari still cannot believe he is back.“He was 16 when he ran away from home,” she recalls, settling on her front porch that she shares with a calf and a cow she is raising. She and her late husband Ramamoorthy, who moved to Coimbatore from Poomalaipatti village in Virudhunagar district for a better life after marriage, were construction labourers then.
R. Sundari with her son R. Prakash, who was rescued from bonded labour from Punjab with the help of Coimbatore journalist T Muthaiah
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“We’d just bought a bike for our sons,” she says. Prakash, all of 16, angered that he had to share it with his younger brother Prabhu, ran away from home after a heated argument. Initially, the couple assumed their son would be back in a few days once he cooled down. But when he didn’t, they started searching for him. “We were worried about him, but I kept telling myself that he was old enough to take care of himself and that he will be fine,” she says.Prakash called a neighbour’s grocery store two months later from Chennai. “But he didn’t share his address,” she says. That was the last time she heard from him. When weeks ran into months, she realised she may never see her son again. “I would look for him everywhere. Every time I saw someone sleeping on the streetside, I would run to see their face,” she says, as Prakash sits down next to her. “I have even hopped off buses too peer into the face of someone on the roadside. What if he was my son?”Sundari had given up all hope of finding Prakash. “When Corona happened, I thought my son too might have been among the many people who died when they caught the infection,” she says. But everything changed when a relative in their native village received a phone call about a Tamil boy in Punjab.
