BENGALURU: A techie returning home from work in a cab in the wee hours of Wednesday spotted a boy in a school uniform sitting alone opposite the old Talaghattapura police station on Kanakapura Road. While many others driving past were oblivious to the child, Shaan Shanmugam RK followed his instincts to reunite the teenager with Down Syndrome with his family.
Shanmugam, tech manager at a software firm and resident of Judicial Layout, said the boy was wearing a clean uniform and was not seeking help though it was 1.30am, which seemed unusual. “My gut feeling said he needed help. I requested the driver to take a U-turn and we approached the boy. I realised he had Down Syndrome and looked like he was 13 or 14 years old. I tried conversing with him but he was unable to respond,” Shanmugam said. He convinced the boy to drive with them in the cab, hoping to find his home.
“I asked him if he knew where his home was, and he responded with ‘straight straight’. After over an hour of driving around, I approached cops at Konanakunte police station. It was there that he finally said his name is Aakash,” Shanmugam said, explaining that he had tried to find the boy’s ID in his bag. With assurance from cops, Shanmugam left Aakash with them and shared a message among his contacts, which was widely shared, requesting community action to reunite Aakash with his family.
The techie said cops identified the boy’s school uniform — a special school near Dairy Circle — and called them. The school reached out to Aakash’s mom Bharathi, a single mother who runs a tea stall in Madiwala. Shanmugam found that Bharathi had been frantically searching for her son since 9am on Tuesday.
Speaking to TOI after reuniting with her only son at 9pm on Wednesday, Bharathi said, “Every day I drop Aakash near St John’s Hospital and his school van picks him up around 8.30am. On Tuesday too, I dropped him at the spot 10 minutes before the van arrived. However, I got a call from the school saying Aakash had not arrived. I suspected he had taken some other bus to KR Market and Majestic and started searching for him there with my brothers.”
Bharathi also called her relatives from Tiruvannamalai in Tamil Nadu for help. On Wednesday evening, she received a call from her son’s school. “I was relieved that my son was with cops... His father had abandoned us after his birth because of his condition and Aakash is my only reason to live,” Bharathi said, adding she was thankful that he was found by the right person. “If we would not have found Aakash, I had planned to end my life after my relatives travelled back,” an emotional Bharathi said. She and her brothers — who spent nearly two days without food or sleep — were reunited with Aakash at Talaghattapura police station.
Shanmugam said his love for his own child drew him to Aakash. “If I hadn’t taken that U-turn, I would not have slept in peace thinking about the boy,” he said.
