Ashwini Kumar (left) with his wife and grand daughter after his release from Beur jail in June. Telegraph picture

Patna, Aug. 11: Once a popular Bollywood formula, the city has played its part in a real-life lost-and-found drama that ended in a happy family reunion after about two decades.

Kanpur-based businessman Ashwini Kumar was found to be languishing in Beur jail in Patna where he had been lodged since 2004 after police suspected him to be a terrorist.

Kumar, now in his early fifties, had left his Kanpur home in 1993 after incurring heavy losses in his brush-manufacturing business. His wife Chhaya Devi was left to fend for herself and their three children — Jimmy, Gaurav and Mani.

All the children are well settled now. While Jimmy has a courier agency in Delhi, Gaurav runs a vegetable business at Kanpur. Daughter Mani is married to a Mumbai-based person.

Kumar’s case was taken up by Prison Ministry of India (PMI), a Bangalore-based voluntary organisation which works for the welfare of prisoners. The organisation took up Kumar’s case at the behest of Beur jail superintendent O.P. Gupta, who was convinced of the man’s innocence. The organisation fought the legal battle in a Patna court, which led to Kumar’s release from prison on June 10 this year.

Kumar had landed in prison on September 1, 2004, when he was arrested by the local police for alleged suspicious movement in the city’s cantonment area. The police suspected him to be a terrorist and since Kumar, who it was later found was in a state of shock, kept mum or came up with incoherent answers during interrogation, his case became weak.

“We took up Ashwini’s case after jail superintendent Gupta persuaded us to. Though Ashwini didn’t cooperate much initially, one day he gave us a partial address of his native place. During a chance interaction with a Kanpur-based person in Patna, we narrated his case. This person helped us dig out Ashwini’s details and family background,” PMI’s Bihar co-ordinator, Sister Joel, told The Telegraph.

She said the organisation immediately contacted Kumar’s family members. In the meantime, Kumar’s case came up for hearing in a Patna court, which acquitted him of all charges.

His family members were there when he walked out a free man and took him back to Kanpur. Though he was still in a state of shock, Kumar had no difficulty recognising his wife and children.

Speaking to The Telegraph over phone from Kanpur, Chhaya Devi said after her husband went missing in the early nineties, she was forced to move to Delhi with her three children. “I worked in Delhi as a house help in order to bring up my children,” said the lady.

Kumar has not told his family what he did after he left home, nor have his wife and children asked him too many questions. Chhaya Devi said it was perhaps in this mental state that her husband kept moving from one place to another and finally landed in Patna.

Back in Kanpur, Kumar is leading a normal life with his family but he still avoids talking to others.

“Though we believed that our father was alive, we couldn’t have imagined that someone away in Patna would prove so helpful in re-uniting our family. We just want to keep him happy so that he can come out of the shock of spending the prime of his life away from us,” Jimmy told The Telegraph over phone.

Praising the efforts of PMI for taking up cause of prisoners, Beur jail superintendent Gupta said: “We select those prisoners who have no visitors and are in need of help. We then hand over their cases to PMI. In the past one-and-a-half-years, seven such prisoners have been released from jail after PMI took up their cases.