Soni with her mother and daughter at their Bhilai home

On a rain-drenched September night, Soni Baiee sat huddled in a traffic police booth at the Exide crossing. She could neither remember anything about her past nor did she have a place to go to. The rain was soaking her tattered clothes and she was barely conscious.

On Wednesday afternoon, Soni was reunited with her mother and two children in their home in Bhilai.

The efforts of a city-based NGO and Calcutta police had made a fairy-tale ending possible. “It’s wonderful that a woman who was found on the street in such a terrible state has been reunited with her family. When we first saw Soni on that rainy night, she was not even in a state to speak. She sat in the traffic police booth, unable to tell us how she had got there,” said a senior officer of Shakespeare Sarani police station.

He had called up Hive India, the NGO, seeking help. The members took the 35-year-old woman to a nursing home.

“We wanted to first take her to a place where she would get medication and food, and feel secure. Our team of psychiatrists worked on her for days. She started responding gradually,” recalls Netai Mukherjee of Hive India.

After Soni showed signs of improvement, she was taken out of the nursing home and shifted to a rescue home for round-the-clock monitoring. “She remembered that she had a seven-year-old son and an eight-year-old daughter. Sometime later, she managed to recollect that her home was in Bhilai. We kept asking her about the landmarks around her house and the members of her family,” said another member of the NGO.

“She could not recall how she landed up in the city and would not say even a word about her husband, who had probably deserted her,” added the NGO worker.

Over the weeks, it emerged that Soni’s home was near the Bhilai power station. When the NGO members found out that the locality she was describing existed, they contacted the police for permission to take her back home. The team left for Bhilai on Tuesday.