Kasaragod: Certain occurrences in life appear stranger than fiction. Hashim, a resident of Kasaragod in Kerala who arrived perchance from a riot-hit North Indian village to his current home 16 years back, has one such tale to tell. In the November of 2005, seven-year-old Hashim walked into a family's house in Kanhangad in Kasaragod, holding the hands of a 15-year-old boy of the family, Shajir.
What followed is a story of adaptation, care, and most of all love. 16 years on, however, Hashim wishes to reunite with his biological parents. Since the day he walked in alongside Shajir holding a chit that said "this boy is an orphan. Someone please admit him to an orphanage", a lot has changed in his life. Shajir's parents, Abdul Kareem and his wife took to Hashim as their own and brought him up.
After completing his studies in Kerala, Hashim was provided a job in the Gulf, from which he has recently returned on a break. Having remembered bare minimum details about his abandoned homeland in North India, it has been a difficult tracing process for both him and his parents. The 23-year-old has so far only been able to recall that there was both a temple and a mosque in his ancestral village and that residents used to do embroidery work on sarees.
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"I do not have the pain of not having parents. Here I have my father and mother. But I always would love to see my biological mother," he said. Hashim recalls that his parents were named Jasin Muhammad and Marjina. No significant markers such as the name of any state or village, however, are remembered by him.
