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.

“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.

This was possible because of a journalist who just wouldn’t give up. T Muthaiah, a reporter who covers Palladam and Tiruppur for Afternoon News, tracked down Sundari. He heard from his cousin brother that Apna Farz Sewa Society, an NGO based in Lachkani village in Patiala, had rescued a Tamilian who was chained to his bed as a bonded labourer in Jasraur, a village near the India – Pakistan border in Punjab.

Former Haryana Legislative Assembly Secretary Subhash Chander happened to notice Prakash during his visit to the NGO. “I have been volunteering at shelters for destitutes and people who have been rescued from bonded labour since 2018,” says Subhash, who has so far reunited 2,300 people with their families.

Subhash alerted Muthiah’s cousin S Balakrishnan who works as the Deputy Secretary at the Tamil Nadu Legislative Assembly Secretariat. “Prakash was rescued in 2022 and was brought to the shelter. But back then he couldn’t recall much about his hometown,” says Muthaiah.

In 2023, Prakash was able to recall his old neighbourhood near Kavundampalayam from his childhood. “But there was only a burial ground in the place he pointed to,” says Muthaiah. “His family had moved elsewhere.” He finally managed to locate Prakash’s mother in Neelambur.

Muthaiah travelled to Punjab twice by train last month. Once with Prakash’s brother and an interpreter and then with Sundari herself. “On my first visit, the NGO refused to send Prakash with us saying they needed official documents to support our claim,” he says.

Sundari had an old ration card with Prakash’s name at home. Thanks to the support of Coimbatore district collector Pavankumar G Giriyappanavar whom she reached out to at a grievance meeting, she was able to gather the required documents.

She sold two of her cows to be able to undertake the trip. “We finally boarded a train to Punjab on July 26 armed with these documents,” says Muthaiah. It is a journey he will never forget. “I was anxious about Sundari,” he says. “She refused to eat. She kept asking when we would reach; she was very emotional.”

It was in Punjab that Muthaiah was witness to the spirit of Tamil brotherhood. “About 50 people from the Tamil Sangam in Chandigarh accompanied us to the shelter on the morning of July 28,” he says. “They all stood by us with unshakable determination.”

After a tearful reunion of mother and son, they were brought back home by another Salem-based NGO that booked flight tickets for them. “We got to experience the kindness of so many people,” Muthaiah recalls.

Seated with her son at home, Sundari says her late husband would keep telling her that their son would come home one day. “He would say Prakash’s light would lead us to him.”

Published - August 05, 2026 12:51 pm IST