NEW DELHI: When 75-year-old Ghulam Qadir Burki, a retired gemstone businessman and dementia patient from Srinagar, went missing in south Delhi, his family’s lives came to a standstill.For 26 days, every phone call sparked hope, every night ended in despair, and the question of whether he was even alive loomed painfully over them. What followed was an exhausting search involving police, relatives coming in from Kashmir, and finally, an unexpected act of kindness by a fruit-seller that helped find the man.
Burki arrived in the national capital on Nov 13.Burki had come to Delhi with his wife to spend the winter with his daughter, son-in-law and their two teenaged sons at their home in Lajpat Nagar. Just days later, on Dec 2, a quick run to a bank at Bhogal Road turned the lives of the family upside down. While his wife suggested that they go shopping, Burki insisted on going home instead. However, he never reached.
The family rushed to Jangpura police post, where Burki was registered as a missing person. Police teams combed nearby markets, scanned CCTV footage, and questioned shopkeepers, vendors and passersby. DCP (southeast) Hemant Tiwari formed a team with ASI Chhattarpal Singh as the investigating officer.“Our officers went every day to the market and checked CCTVs, speaking to as many people as possible, but to no avail,” Singh told TOI. Three of Burki’s relatives travelled from Kashmir to Delhi to assist in the search. As days passed, hope began to fade. “There was so much uncertainty, we didn’t even know if he was alive,” recalled his son-in-law Sajid Navi Nanda. With no leads forthcoming, the distraught family and police decided to circulate photographs of the missing septuagenarian. Posters bearing Burki’s image and contact details were pasted in Bhogal, Lajpat Nagar and nearby areas.Their efforts finally bore fruit. On the 26th day. In Okhla’s Jamia Nagar, Ghulam Barish, a 22-year-old pineapple seller, noticed an elderly man near his stall, appearing dishevelled. He recognised him from a ‘missing person’ poster he had seen near Bhogal Masjid. He approached the man, gently asked his name and tried to confirm his identity. “He looked very frail, dishevelled and confused. I fed him some fruit and asked the man whose number was on the poster to come and get him,” Barish told TOI.For Nanda and his family, the call was difficult to believe at first. Weeks of false leads and prank calls, exacerbated by the mention of a reward on the posters, made them cautious. Only after a video call, when they saw Burki themselves, did the reality sink in.Burki is unable to recall much of what happened during the period. The family does not know how he reached Jamia Nagar, nearly 6km from where he went missing. He was no longer wearing the same clothes he had on the day he went missing. They say they think of it as a miracle that he survived these weeks. “He had Rs 3,500 cash with him. We don’t know if someone took it or what happened. It was very little money and he was missing for 26 days,” Nanda said.
