The search

Car Nicobar,part of the Andaman and Nicobar archipelago,is an impossibly isolated drop in the ocean,the northernmost of the Nicobar group of islands. The sea is an overwhelming presence anywhere on this 126.9 sq km land. That year on December 25,the evening of Christmas Day,Ravi’s eight-year-old daughter Apurva would build little sand pyramids,like she had seen other children do,and wait for the sea to come crashing in. Sometimes her thirteen-month-old brother Aditya brought them down and she didn’t like that! That night,as they went home at sundown,Ravi’s camera loaded with memories,the sea looked like it had on all previous evenings. Nothing about it prepared them for the next day.

Morning of December 26,Mamta was in the kitchen when she felt the ground tremble. She woke Ravi up and as he lay in bed,with Apurva beside him in deep slumber after the previous evening’s jaunt,he felt it too. He jumped out of bed — “It’s an earthquake” — lifted Apurva and took the stairs down his first-floor quarters. Mamta followed with their son. The neighbours were out too,and now the earth shook violently. Ravi remembers sitting on the ground and clinging on to a tuft of grass. After a while,the tremor stopped but they could see the sea rise. Just then,a truck came that way and people waved it down. Ravi and his family got in,along with many others. Where was he going? He didn’t know,“anything to get out of there”.

“There were a lot of people in the truck. Mamta and Aditya were somewhere in the front and Apurva and I were at the rear. It was an open truck and we could see the sea closing in on us. And then,a wave came dangerously close. I remember looking at Apurva and she looked back at me. I told her to hold on to the truck tightly. That was the last time I looked at her,” says Ravi,his tears flowing freely. As if he owed the tears to Apurva,needed them to keep going. “Main apne beti ke mamle me thoda emotional hoon,” he says.

Another wave,this time it hit them hard and toppled the truck and everyone was under water for a few seconds. When he bounced to the surface,Ravi felt the current dragging him. The water took him to the boundary wall of the runway and as he held on to it,he saw a portion of it collapsing. He drifted again till he hurled himself towards a coconut tree and held on.

A few minutes later,the water receded. “I have no idea how long it lasted. Probably five minutes,maybe half an hour…but it seemed forever.” The island and the Air Force station were torn apart —trees were uprooted and people walked as if in a daze. Ravi remembers being hit by the feeling that he was all alone. How would he find Mamta,Apurva and Aditya?

He went to the camp,found a few of his friends. They were all looking for someone. By evening,Ravi saw one of his friends riding up to him on a motorbike. Sitting pillion was Mamta,still clinging on to the baby as she had been when he last saw her. He remembers feeling relieved — at least the mother and the boy were safe,now to find Apurva. But it was only when they came nearer that Ravi realised that Aditya was dead,and Mamta had been holding on to him all this while,even as she was drowning. If only he had held on to Apurva.

That night,everyone slept on the runway,the ground beneath them rumbling from the aftershocks of the earthquake that had struck off the west coast of Sumatra in Indonesia,thousands of kilometres away,and stirred the sea into generating angry waves. “Tsunami. That’s the first time I heard the word,and I thought I knew the sea,” Ravi says wistfully.

Next morning,December 27,people in the Air Force camp and other tsunami-affected people on the island were evacuated to Chennai. Ravi and his wife left too. From there,they went home to Chota Gobindpur town in Jharkhand. Meanwhile,Ravi was posted to the Air Force camp in New Delhi.

Before they left Car Nicobar,Ravi asked a friend to get his camera from his house. “It must be hanging from a nail in the living room,” he told him. The friend found the camera,fortuitously hanging from that nail,but Ravi found out later that the sea had damaged the camera,wiped out all the memories it held — like it did with Apurva’s sand pyramids. But he would find her to rebuild them,he thought.

A month after the tsunami,on January 27,Ravi and his former colleagues at the Car Nicobar Air Force station,Mr Gupta (Ravi doesn’t remember his first name) and Gopalkrishna Murthy,went to the Andamans to look for their children. Each carried a photograph. Ravi had Apurva’s,taken from his parents’ album in Jharkhand.

Several camps had been set up for tsunami refugees from the Andamans and Nicobar. So if Apurva had been found alive in Car Nicobar,she would be in one of the camps. “We went to a camp run by volunteers of the Art of Living Foundation near the Port Blair aerodrome. The refugees of this camp had been brought here a few days ago from a bigger camp a few metres away. We saw a woman on the verandah and each of us took out photographs of our children and asked her if she had seen them. She said no to my colleagues but when I showed her Apurva’s photograph,the woman called some of the other women from inside the camp. They all looked at the photograph and one of them said,‘Yes,she was with us in the bigger camp.’ The others agreed.”

Apurva is alive,Ravi told himself.

Ravi and his friends went to the bigger camp but Apurva wasn’t there. Someone claimed to have seen her but said he didn’t know where she was now. He spent the next two days making the rounds of relief camps and visiting the government office that controlled relief and rescue operations,but made no headway. From there,he went to Car Nicobar and headed straight for his quarters at the Air Force camp. He hoped he would find Apurva there. He knew it was an impossible hope,but he went anyway and brought back some of her clothes and books.

After three days in Car Nicobar,Ravi came back to his base in Delhi,upset that he couldn’t find Apurva but glad she was alive —the woman at the relief camp had told him so.

“I have another reason to believe she is alive. A few days after the tsunami,while we were in Jamshedpur,my friend from Pune called and she said she knew of an evangelist who could make accurate predictions and that she would ask him about Apurva. A few days later,the friend called to ask if on the day of the tsunami,Apurva was wearing something that had yellow,green and white on it. My wife remembered Apurva was indeed wearing a yellow dress with green and white floral prints. How did he know that? The evangelist apparently said my daughter would come back.”

Apurva is alive,he told himself again.

Every year after that,Ravi would print pamphlets with photos of his daughter and take it to his friend R Venkatraman in Chennai. And every time he went to Bangalore or Chennai,he would put out advertisements in local papers —“I believe she is somewhere in the South.” He has no particular reason to believe that,except that the tsunami refugees were evacuated to Chennai. But he says it with so much conviction that it feels cruel to question his belief,ask him,“what if”.

“I wouldn’t have been able to do this if it wasn’t for the Air Force. They gave Mamta a job in the CSD canteen in Delhi so she could take her mind off the tragedy for a few hours every day. And they let me go on long leave whenever I had to go out of the city to look for Apurva. The Air Force PROs in Thiruvananthapuram and Bangalore also issued press releases seeking help from the public in tracing my daughter,” he says.

That helped. On June 22,2009,an Urdu paper reported that a girl resembling Apurva had been spotted in Malur in Karnataka’s Kolar district in the company of beggars. Ravi rushed to Kolar and scoured the city for Apurva. Where would he look for her? He stayed in a lodge in Kolar and bought a second-hand Scooty. “It was easier that way. I would stop randomly and show people her photograph and ask if they had seen her.”

After a month in Kolar and Bangalore,Ravi came back to Delhi.

In September 2009,the Malayala Manorama reported that a gang of burglars had been arrested and they had with them a girl who stood out for her sharp features and distinct skin tone. The members of the gang worked as labourers in Makkaraparambu in Kerala’s Malappuram district by the day and broke into homes at night. The head of the gang,Veeran,who is now in Ottapalam jail,admitted that he had picked the child from a tsunami camp in Chennai. “I was sure this was Apurva. I went down to Malappuram,met the girl. There was no way I could speak to her,she spoke Tamil. My wife asked me to check if the girl had a mole on her back. She did,but a few inches above where Apurva had hers. I agreed to get a DNA test done and travelled with the girl to Thiruvananthapuram. It is a mere formality now,I thought,” he says.

That was when The Sunday Express first got in touch with Ravi,over the phone. After speaking about the paternity test he was about to undergo,he said,his voice crackling with excitement,“I am going to Thiruvananthapuram tomorrow. I can’t speak about this now. I’m at a critical juncture in life. I am finally going to get my daughter back. Ma’am,if you have a diary,please note that on this day,Ravi Shankar said he would find his daughter.” A month later,we called him again. This time,he was in Delhi. The paternity test had turned out negative.

Now,months later,sitting in his house in Vayusenabad near Tuglakabad in Delhi,he speaks about how he was “dead sure” the girl with the gang of thieves was Apurva. He remembers sitting on Kovalam beach,waiting for news from his friend on the result of the paternity test. Would he finally get his daughter? Would things ever be the same again? Just then,his phone rang and his friend told him the test had turned out negative — the girl wasn’t his daughter. “I felt suicidal,wondered if I should jump into the sea and put an end to this suffering. Then I remembered Apurva and thought she must be waiting for me to find her. After all these years,she probably speaks a different language,looks different,but I will find her,” he says.

Apurva is alive,he told himself.

Six years on,Ravi,now 39,continues to look for Apurva,clinging to every straw he can find — hope,spirituality and an eerily dogged perseverance. “There was a time I turned to spirituality,hoping God and gurus would help me find Apurva,” he says. So Ravi went to Vaideeswaran Kovil near Chidambaram in Tamil Nadu and experimented with the nadi shastra (a form of astrology in which a person’s destiny is said to be inscribed on palm leaves),tried meeting Sri Sri Ravi Shankar but gave up when his followers told him at the end of a long wait that it wouldn’t be possible to meet the guru,but he could try some Sudarshan Kriya instead! He even went to Puttaparthi to meet Sai Baba but could not get an appointment. “I realised I would have to find Apurva on my own. No one else would do that for me.”

On May 11,2009,Ravi and his wife were blessed with a child. Amartya is now a year old,old enough to walk up to a table that has Apurva’s photograph,pick it up and squeeze it in his little palm and look at the effect it has. “Didi hai,didi hai,” Mamta says,gently freeing the photograph from the child’s grip. Amartya lets out an angry squeal. “Amartya doesn’t look like Apurva,more like Aditya. Apurva was fair,had lovely hair,” she says,stroking Amartya’s head.

Amartya lunges at the photograph again,arching backwards angrily when Mamta pulls him away. Ravi looks at him and smiles. “He is a big distraction. Otherwise we would have all gone mad. But it’s hard to replace one child with another. My relatives and friends ask me if I am overdoing this,if I shouldn’t just give up. But how can I give up Apurva,” he says,his tears flowing again.

After he regains his composure,Ravi says,“Mein thoda zyada emotional hoon. My wife is stronger. This December,we are both going to Chennai to find Apurva. We don’t know where we will stay,what we will do,but we are going for sure.”

At times,the weariness shows: “I know I’ll find her,she will walk in some day. Yeh hope nahin,vishwas hain. But honestly,what I am looking for is closure. I saw my son dead so I know I can’t bring him back. But Apurva,she is there somewhere.”