Kolkata: A nine-year-old boy, who was spotted roaming around aimlessly near the Karunamoyee bus terminus in Salt Lake on Sunday morning, was rescued by police and handed over to the couple, who have been raising him at their CE Block home.
Police said the child was from Siliguri. After his father died, his mother remarried, leaving him with his grandmother, who worked as a domestic help at the CE Block couple’s ancestral house in Siliguri.At the grandmother’s request, the couple, who themselves have three children, had brought the boy along with them to their Salt Lake home.
It was around 9 am on Sunday that traffic cops deployed near Karunamoyee bus terminus saw the boy roaming around. Alerted by them, officers from the Bidhannagar North police station arrived at the spot and asked him about his whereabouts but he could not say anything—parents’ names or where he lived—clearly. Police also spoke to a few locals but none could say anything about the boy’s background.
The police then took the boy to the Bidhannagar North police station, where after much effort, the boy initially mentioned his name. Police circulated his photo online, asking residents to alert them if anyone knew about his family or home. Subsequently, the boy mentioned a phone number. Cops called on the number and found the receiver was one of the teachers at the school, where the boy studied in Class III. The teacher then contacted the Salt Lake family, who came over to the police station and a verification was carried out. The boy was reunited with the family around 11am.
On speaking to the couple, police found out that one of their relatives was supposed to visit their Salt Lake home on Sunday to take the boy to Siliguri to meet his grandmother. But on Saturday, they had told him that he would not be allowed to visit his grandmother if he did not stop being naughty. The next morning, the boy left home and had walked till Karunamoyee, police said. After waking up, when the family could not find the boy anywhere in the house, they had started looking for him in the neighbourhood. Around the same time, they received the call from cops and rushed to the police station.