Patiala: For 26 monsoons, the waters of Bhakra Canal hid a grisly secret as three families of Ropar grappled with grief and hope. On Sunday, a mangled Maruti Omni, rusted and falling to pieces, was winched out of the depths, still holding a child’s school uniform, luggage, personal belongings and a few bones — the remains of four missing persons.Finally, there is closure for the families who had never given up the search for them though it drove them to penury. The photographs of Munni Lal, Tej Ram, Surjit Singh and Surjit’s eight-year-old son Kalu that hung on the walls of their homes all these years have now been garlanded. And their kin can say goodbye.All four were returning from a wedding on Oct 17, 2000, in the Omni that Tej had bought only a month earlier. They never reached home. Their families in Kotla village (80km from Chandigarh) desperately looked for them. They hired divers to scour the canal, sold off land to keep the search alive, but all in vain. The case went cold.The breakthrough came on Sunday when local diver Kamalpreet Saini plunged into the deadly currents of Bhakra Canal near Nakkian village to look for another missing person and spotted the heavily corroded van, 32 feet deep on the canal bed.After a nearly three-hour operation under difficult conditions, the vehicle was pulled to the surface.According to Saini, the rear portion of the van and its roof were badly damaged, possibly due to impact and prolonged exposure to strong water currents and pressure. A few skeletal remains, clothing, shoes and the school uniform of the child were recovered.Sita Devi, wife of Muni Lal, said the tragedy had shattered their family financially and emotionally. “We kept waiting for him for years. His parents died, pining for him. Due to lack of proof, we could not even obtain his death certificate that’s required for official purposes,” she told TOI.Mounting debts forced the family to sell their dairy shop five years after the disappearance, but they continued the search. “Even after all these years, I and my children never lost hope,” she said. Pointing at a photo of her husband, she said, “I have garlanded him after his last prayers.”Tej Ram’s son Bhupinder, who was five years old at the time, recalled the hardships the families endured after the incident. “I am told my father sold 3 kanals of land (around 16,335 sq ft) to buy the Omni barely a month before the accident. We sold another 5 kanals (27,225 sq ft) to finance search operations in the canal,” he said.The families borrowed heavily to hire private divers after official searches failed, he said. “Despite all the hardships, my brother and I somehow managed to study till Class 12,” added Bhupinder who runs a cyber cafe.Saini said multiple professional diving teams from Dehradun, Delhi, Haridwar and Rajasthan conducted unsuccessful searches in 2000. The victims’ families spent over Rs 1.2 lakh to hire another private diving team from Faridabad, again in vain.“The canal bed at this point contains heavy junk material, including iron debris and submerged vehicle parts. Diving here is extremely risky because of the strong pressure underwater. The diver has to hold a tyre strong in order to slow down his own speed due to the extremely strong pressure,” Saini said, adding that simply attaching chains and cables to the wreck was extremely dangerous. “But it brought closure to the families,” he said.Kiratpur Sahib SHO inspector Rahul Sharma said the families, with the help of local divers, had recovered the van themselves and then informed police. Preliminary information suggested skeletal remains of at least one person were recovered from the vehicle but it was not disclosed to police, he said.Some bone fragments that were found tangled in the victims’ clothes, including the child’s, were immersed according to religious rituals. The families held a collective Ardas at Gurdwara Patalpuri Sahib in Ropar.
