Rescued 40-year-old 'discovers' cars, fruit

NOIDA: Home after 31 years, Bhim Singh has finally found family and love. The rest, for him, is a strange world.

On Thursday afternoon, their first full day with him since he was a nine-year-old boy, his parents and sister had a tough time convincing Bhim to eat. Fruits looked alien to him, and the sight of a gulab jamun put him off so much that he refused to eat it till his mother pleaded with him to try.

Kept chained and confined at an animal farm in Jaisalmer, where he was made to toil as a slave since he was abducted from Noida in Sept 1993, Bhim had no contact with the outside world till he was rescued last week by a Delhi-based businessman who happened to be passing by, noticed him tied to a tree at the farm and brought him back with him.

So, everything Bhim sees - from smartphones to cars - is a discovery. The only foods he knows of are roti, dal and chai, which is all he would be given at the farm.

"When I offered him a gulab jamun, he frowned and asked, 'ye kya hai?' (what's this) When he finally agreed to eat it, he found it delicious. He loved apples and mangoes as a child. Now, he can't recognise any fruits," his mother Leelawati told TOI at the family's house in Shaheed Nagar.

Leelawati was in tears when she first met Bhim at Khoda police station in Ghaziabad earlier this week. "He may have these problems from years of captivity and torture, but recognised me instantly. As soon as he saw me, he said, "Meri ma aa gayi (my mother has come). It took a while to sink in, but it was my son who was standing in front of me," she said.

"It didn't take me a second to recognise her. My mother's face hasn't changed, she only looks old now," Bhim said.

Other than Jaisalmer, Bhim has no clue where he was. The only concrete lead about the place is a name - Sairam - that he knew his captor by. When he was still a boy, the death of a goat had enraged this man so much that Bhim received a severe beating that left him with a broken jawbone and a fractured right hand. He was never taken to a doctor, resulting in a permanent deformity on the right side of his face. His right hand does not function properly either, and his speech is affected.

Bhim, who was tied up when he wasn't toiling at the farm, said he was beaten almost daily. "I tried to escape, but there was no road beyond a point," he said. "I was in a hut in the middle of nowhere. There was no other house nearby. So I could not reach out to anyone for help."

The only other humans he saw were people who came to buy sheep and goats from Sairam. Some of them enquired about him, but Sairam dismissed him as a 'paagal' (madman) who lived nearby, according to Bhim. "It was only this Sikh man who came to purchase animals who spoke to me and asked me where I was from. When I told him, he took me to his truck and brought me back to Delhi," said Bhim.

"He dropped me at a railway station in Delhi and put me on a train going to Ghaziabad. He told me to go to the police," Bhim said.