Bereft: The Dasades with their missing son’s picture. Pic: Gajanan Dudhalkar

At the Dasade’s poky little house in a slum in Kalwa, Thane, Maharashtra, the cell phone is the only expensive item in the household. Right now, the family is keeping vigil by the cell phone, hoping for the call that would bring back the smile into their lives again.

Three months ago, on April 14, 18-year-old Ketan Dasade disappeared after telling his family that he was on his way to a summer job. Since then, the Dasades have been doing the rounds of the hospital morgues in the city and the railway yard office where gruesome photographs of those run over by local trains are kept for identification. They also visit Mumbai’s jails to check if their son was caught and jailed by a railway ticket collector for non-possession of a ticket. They also push their luck at the Maharasthra Industrial Development Corporation zones where small businesses are run to see if Ketan has landed a job somewhere and does not wish to keep in touch.

Ketan’s father Gopichand Dasade works night shifts as a security guard. His mother works as an ayah in Kalwa’s civic hospital. They have two other children, a 12-year-old boy and a 15-year-old girl. The mother weeps incessantly and says there was no love affair or family problem that could have driven their son away.

In Mumbai’s vast cauldron of humanity, looking for a missing loved one can be a traumatic exercise. Over 2,349 children below 18 in Mumbai went missing in the year 2005, though 1,516 were eventually traced. Some 7,700 adults disappeared in Mumbai in the same year of which 3,479 people were tracked down or came back on their own.

Says Santosh Shinde from Bal Prafulata, a non governmental organisation (NGO) that runs a project for missing children, “For the family members the problem starts right from day one as the police will not register a complaint for the first 48 hours.”

The overburdened Mumbai police generally put missing persons cases on the backburner as they involve a lot of leg work and investigation.

The city police headquarters has a Missing Persons Bureau but for some years now the bureau has not been investigating cases of missing people. Instead, it just gives certificates to those who want to show a missing person’s face on Doordarshan’s five minute capsule on missing persons that is aired thrice a week. But in a day and age when all eyeballs are riveted on satellite channel fare, to hope that somebody would catch the five-minute programme on Doordarshan and respond if he or she knows the whereabouts of the missing person seems like a tall order.

Unlike in the West where searching for a missing person involves a co-ordinated effort between the police and various social organisations, the situation in India is still archaic. Mumbai’s Missing Persons Bureau has computerised records, but it also has a huge contraption that is lying unused. “That’s the Internet machine; we have yet to fix it,” says an official from the department.

Mumbai’s NGOs try to play the Good Samaritan in this regard. For instance, Bal Prafulata co-ordinates with all the street children organisations and the remand homes to track missing children. They also co-ordinate with a child helpline. So far they have united 500 children with their parents in the last two and a half years.

Says psychiatrist Harish Shetty, “There are two categories of missing people who are likely to come back ? teenagers and women. But old people, especially old men and the very young, that is, children below six or seven years, are unlikely to come back as they tend to forget and get lost.”

At the Missing Persons Bureau in Mumbai, the case histories of missing people give a fascinating glimpse into the lives of people who just walk away without packing their bags. There is the case of a 27-year-old married woman who took her eight-month-old baby along to visit her mother-in-law in the hospital and then disappeared. Then there is Surendra Hansraj Bhatia, a 72-year-old retired Navy captain, who went for a morning walk one day this April and has not been seen since.

Dr Shetty says that depression in the elderly often leads them to just walk away. “When you are old, you feel that you are a burden, that you are not wanted. So sometimes, they just want to go away.”

But some missing people do get tracked down. Fourteen-year-old Mehboob Qureishi whose parents have a mutton shop in Mumbai disappeared on May 1 this year. He was eventually traced in Delhi where he was working in a mutton shop. Again, Vinay Kumar Aggarwal, a bank employee from Jaipur, who disappeared after an altercation with his boss, was found in Ajmer. He was using his ATM card and was tracked down with the help of ICICI Bank records.

Their family members are the lucky ones. For the majority, though, the nightmare continues.