Jammu, March 20 -- For over a decade, Lalita Devi existed only in memory. Her family had mourned her, searched for her, and ultimately surrendered to grief - lighting the funeral pyre and completing the last rites that Sanatan tradition prescribes for the dead. Life, painfully, moved on.
But Lalita Devi had not died. She had simply been lost.
For reasons her fractured mind could not explain, the elderly woman had spent years wandering the bus stand and markets of Surankote, in Poonch district. Mentally unwell and unable to identify herself, she survived on the quiet kindness of locals who gave her food and looked out for her - strangers who became, without knowing it, her only family.
It was Station House Officer Abid Bukhari who changed...