Amritsar, July 24 : It's a saga waiting for Bollywood directors to be filmed on cellulloid.
Pratima Ruidas, a woman residing in Akui village of West Bengal's Bankura district has been lighting a lamp in front of an idol of Goddess Kali for the last 17 years, praying for her husband Subodh Ruidas to return.
Return he did, but as a mental wreck.
Subodh left his home 17 years ago, and spent nearly 12 years in a jail in Pakistan after he boarded a train in a state of “mental illness.
He was repatriated to India in 2007 and since then, he had been undergoing treatment at Vidya Sagar Mental Health Institute, Amritsar, reports Indian Express.
After the efforts to trace the address of Subodh and 14 others like him who were repatriated from Pakistan and are undergoing treatment at the institute failed to yield any result, Institute director Dr B L Goel used the help of BSF personnel hailing from different states to talk to them in their respective languages.
“It was then that we found his address and reached the family. I wrote to the Resident Commissioner of West Bengal in New Delhi informing him about the address a couple of months back and today his family came to take him,” Goel said, adding that eight more persons from Odisha, West Bengal, Haryana and Assam would soon be reunited with their families.
Pratima, now 39 years old, was reunited with her husband Subodh, now 43, at the Vidya Sagar Mental Health Institute in Amritsar on Monday.
The reunion came 15 days before the couple's younger daughter, Kuku Moni, is scheduled to tie the knot in their village.
As an emotional Pratima met her husband in hospital, she asked her husband, “Chinte Parcho (Do you recognise me)?”As Subodh answered in affirmative, they hugged each other, tears rolling down their eyes.
“I knew he would be back. I did not have any idea that he had gone to Pakistan and was taken prisoner there. He had left home after having a dispute with my parents. He was hit in the head in the scuffle and had became mentally ill,” Pratima said.
Pratima is elated. “My prayers have been answered. Now, he will do the kanya daan of our second daughter, who is getting married on August 6,” Pratima, said, adding that she married off their elder daughter a few years ago.
Besides two daughters, Subodh has a son who was only two-and-a-half-years old when Subodh went missing. His daughters were five and seven years old.
