Laxmi Bai (80), from Jalgaon, is elated after having met her family members at the Government Care Home at Pulayanarkotta in Thiruvananthapuram on Sunday. | Photo Credit: S_MAHINSHA more-in Destiny—and a dose of technology—brought a 80-year-old Maharashtrian woman to her family, two years after she had wandered into a Kochuveli-bound train at Surat. Laxmibai Krushnarao Panpatil fought back tears when her daughters and grandsons came all the way from her home town in Jalgaon in Maharashtra to take her home. Considering her ordeal, she couldn’t have had prayed for more. The elderly woman had gone missing on April 22, 2016, from Surat railway station where she went from Amalner in Jalgaon to visit her children. With age catching up with her, her fading memory led her to unfamiliar places after she absent-mindedly stepped on the Porbandar-Kochuveli Express. “She was nowhere to be seen when I had reached the railway station. Our worried family has been looking for her in many parts of Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra and Gujarat, where our relatives are settled. We began to fear the worst,” says Mehul Ramrao Panpatil, Ms. Laxmibai’s grandson. Lost and wandering the streets of Thiruvananthapuram, she found herself at the Government Care Home at Pulayanarkotta a few days later after being produced by the Fort police at the Chief Judicial Magistrate court here. “We tried all we could do to communicate with her including bringing persons who were well-versed in Marathi, Gujarati and other languages. All of our efforts were in vain,” M. Shinymol, superintendent of the care home. The decisive moment in their quest came when Biju Prabhakar, Special Secretary, Social Justice Department, made it mandatory for all inmates at all rehabilitation centres to be enrolled for Aadhaar cards early this year. Attempts to capture Ms. Laxmibai’s biometric data were rejected, as they already existed in the database of the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI). The discovery enabled them to trace her native place. Efforts to trace family Thiruvananthapuram district legal services authority (DLSA) secretary and Sub-judge Siju Sheik said they soon got in touch with the member-secretary of the Maharashtra State Legal Services Authority, who forwarded the information to the DLSA in Jalgaon. On Sunday, she met her daughters Sadhana, Vimal and Savitha, her daughter-in-law Mangala, grandsons Mahendra, Mehul, Sushil and Vishal. They said that the matriarch was an illiterate and could converse only in Ahirani, a local dialect. After the reunion, they boarded the Porbanar Express from the Kochuveli railway station, which had turned Ms. Laxmibai’s life upside down.

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