Tirupati: Over 36 hours of intense agony for a city family ended at about 6.30 am on Monday, when their 13-year-old son, who had gone missing on Sunday evening, called them and said he was coming home.
He had gone to Tirumala to offer prayers. His family had gone to the temple 18 times in the past.
Early on Monday, he called his mother from a bystander’s phone in Tirumala. Immediately afterwards, his mother informed, who informed the Tirupati police and the teen was traced.
Recounting the sequence of events, police said he had left home on Sunday to go to tuition classes and did not return. Based on the family’s complaint, police tracked to the Malakpet railway station, from where he took a train to Tirupati.
He reached Tirupati between 6 am and 6.30 am on Monday, and went to Tirumala along with other co-passengers. He joined the queue around 10 am and left the temple between 5 pm and 6 pm, Tirupati DSP Ravi Manoharachari told the reporters.
The teen returned to Tirupati from Tirumala and was found wandering at the bus stand on Tuesday morning by RTC guards. They contacted the teen’s parents and later informed the police.
The RTC staff kept the boy with them until the police arrived and took him to child welfare home, sometime between 7.30 am and 8 am on Tuesday.
Before the RTC guards spotted him, he had called his mother from a borrowed phone, police said.
“Since the rules of the child care home do not permit anyone other than the minor's parents to pick them up, we've sent the father to bring him back. There's also an uncle of the boy who lives in Kurnool, who is accompanying the father," Meerpet sub-inspector K. Sudhakar said.
Speaking to the media later, the young pilgrim revealed that he had taken money from his savings. Asked what he had prayed for, he replied, "No one reveals what they prayed for."
The boy, asked how he felt about his parents having to undergo such trauma, shrugged and said: “Well, I now came here and will anyway be going back home.”
Speaking to Deccan Chronicle, the teen’s mother said, “I don’t know what suddenly happened to him. He would never step out of our house too.”
Recalling their ordeal, which ended happily, the boy’s father recalled: “It was hard for us to sleep.”
The boy’s brother, who is 15 years old, said, “We usually go to tuition together, but that day we did not for some reason. He usually was very aloof, and did not have any friends either. He never told me about anything and just left that day.”
