When Daya Bhuyan, 65, was reunited with his family in Odisha on Sunday, one could have been forgiven for wondering why it had taken a migrant worker five months to return home after the lockdown.

Except that for Daya, the lockdown had lasted three decades. A lockdown of his memory that had shut away from him his entire past life, even his own identity.

Daya, then an unmarried young man, had left his village in Gajapati district to work as a construction labourer in Arunachal Pradesh sometime in the 1980s.

Nobody in his village of Abasingh remembers the exact year he left, nor whether he ever visited home in the years before his mind went blank. Most of his elders and some of his contemporaries in the village are dead.

Rubu Ama Sourced by Correspondent

Daya seems to have lost his memory, from whatever cause, by the late 1980s. The man from the Saora tribal community lived in a shack in the forests of Ziro Valley in Lower Subansiri district, keeping himself alive by selling firewood.

It’s an unlikely friendship that he struck up there with a teenage boy named Rubu Ama, who would trek miles to visit him, that eventually led to his homecoming. Officials from the two state governments also played a part.

Daya’s nephew Mukunda Bhuyan said: “We are happy to see bada bapa (uncle) after such a long time.”

“We’ll take care of him. He doesn’t need to go anywhere or work any more. We are indebted to Rubu Ama Sir.”

Ama, now a 32-year-old school owner in Ziro town who had probably not been born when Daya first arrived in Arunachal, described to The Telegraph how their friendship began in 2003, when he would have barely been 15.

“He lived in a makeshift hut of bamboo and tarpaulin near a hill 7km from my home. Of this, 4km was navigable by car but one had to walk the remaining 3km,” Ama said over the phone from Arunachal.

What began as a boy’s curiosity about a mysterious forest dweller who spoke little and “did not remember anything”, not even his own name, grew into a lasting friendship.

The local people used to call Daya “Jagapati Karji” — the first word a distortion of “Gajapati”, Daya’s home district whose name he seemed to remember, and the second an Odia surname familiar to the villagers, thanks probably to some other migrant from Odisha.

“When I first met him I was not interested in finding out where he was from or what his past life had been like,” Ama said. However, he realised his friend’s many vulnerabilities and chipped in with help whenever he could.

When Daya fell ill last September, Ama, owner of the Royal Blue Pine Academy (Class I to X), started providing him with monthly rations, bringing it himself or sending it through others.

In October, Ama shot a video of Daya on his mobile and passed it on to a WhatsApp group of Odias living in Arunachal, requesting them to circulate it across social media platforms. They did but with little result.

When Daya’s health worsened during the lockdown, Ama kept in constant touch, more determined than ever to reunite his friend with his family.

“He couldn’t recall his parents’ names properly, and identified himself as Jagapati Karji. But he was able to name his district and village more or less correctly,” Ama said.

“On July 26, I made another short video of him and shared it on social media. Through some Odia people here I got in touch with a man called Abhilash Panda, who helped me track down Daya’s home address.”

Panda, an ABVP member from Bhubaneswar, told this newspaper: “I contacted a journalist friend who helped me trace Daya’s village in Gajapati.”

The journalist also found out that Jagapati Karji’s real name was Daya Bhuyan.

Ama later showed Daya photos of himself as a young man as well as those of his brothers and his village, all sent by Panda, and told him the little that had been gleaned about his past life.

“Daya broke down and pleaded with me to take him home,” Ama said.

“I brought him to my house on August 8 and got him to speak to his family through a video call. Although he could not recognise them, he was desperate to return home.”

Daya, however, fell ill and was admitted to hospital for a week from August 13.

“I spent a whole night with him at the hospital to see him recover,” Ama said. By then the Odisha and Arunachal governments had got in touch.

“Today (Sunday) we took him to his village. The entire village was elated to see him back,” said Gajapati district assistant labour officer Subhash Chandra Mandal, who had accompanied Daya back from Arunachal.

Sources in the village said Daya seemed to have recognised his younger brother Suku Bhuyan.