Fruits, cars, cellphones looked alien: Strange world greets Ghaziabad man chained for 31 years at Jaisalmer animal farm | Noida News – Times of India

NOIDA: Home after 31 years, Bhim Singh has finally found family and love. The rest, for him, is a strange world.
On Thursday afternoon, their first full day with him since he was a nine-year-old boy, his parents and sister had a tough time convincing Bhim to eat.
Fruits looked alien to him, and the sight of a gulab jamun put him off so much that he refused to eat it till his mother pleaded with him to try.

Kept chained and confined at an animal farm in Jaisalmer, where he was made to toil as a slave since he was abducted from Noida in Sept 1993, Bhim had no contact with the outside world till he was rescued last week by a Delhi-based businessman who happened to be passing by, noticed him tied to a tree at the farm and brought him back with him.
So, everything Bhim sees – from smartphones to cars – is a discovery. The only foods he knows of are roti, dal and chai, which is all he would be given at the farm.
“When I offered him a gulab jamun, he frowned and asked, ‘ye kya hai?’ (what’s this) When he finally agreed to eat it, he found it delicious. He loved apples and mangoes as a child. Now, he can’t recognise any fruits,” his mother Leelawati told TOI at the family’s house in Shaheed Nagar.

Leelawati was in tears when she first met Bhim at Khoda police station earlier this week. “He may have these problems from years of captivity and torture, but recognised me instantly. As soon as he saw me, he said, “Meri ma aa gayi (my mother has come). It took a while to sink in, but it was my son who was standing in front of me. I could picture his childhood face,” she said.
“It didn’t even take me a second to recognise her. My mother’s face hasn’t changed, she only looks old now,” Bhim said
Other than Jaisalmer, Bhim has no clue where he was. The only concrete lead about the place is a name – Sairam – that he knew his captor by. When he was still a boy, the death of a goat had enraged this man so much that Bhim received a severe beating that left him with a broken jawbone and a fractured right hand. He was never taken to a doctor and healed in his chains, resulting in a permanent deformity on the right side of his face. His right hand does not function properly either, and his speech is affected.
Bhim, who was tied up when he wasn’t toiling at the farm, said he was beaten almost daily. “I tried to escape, but there was no road beyond a point,” he said.
The only other humans he saw were people who came to buy sheep and goats from Sairam. Some of them enquired about him, but Sairam dismissed him as a ‘paagal’ (madman) who lived nearby, according to Bhim. “It was only this Sikh man who came to purchase animals who spoke to me and asked me where I was from. When I told him, he took me to his truck and brought me back to Delhi,” said Bhim, adding his rescuer had also taken him to a salon for a haircut and a shave.
During the ride back, the rescuer realised Bhim was from somewhere in Noida or Ghaziabad. “He dropped me at a railway station in Delhi and put me on a train going to Ghaziabad. He told me to go to the police,” Bhim said.
The reunion with his family took four days as the police tracked them down from old case files after Bhim told them he was kidnapped in 1993. He remembered his parents’ names but not where he lived.
Day of the kidnapping
Bhim’s elder sister Santosh said she had taken him and younger sister Rajo to school as usual. Bhim was in Class II, Rajo in Class III. “Around 2pm, Rajo returned home and told us she had a fight with Bhim over an umbrella. He wanted her umbrella when they were returning home, but she had refused. The angry boy sat on the roadside when he did not have his way. That’s when an auto stopped next to him and whisked him away. We didn’t see him after that,” Santosh said.
“A letter was dropped outside our house in the evening asking for Rs 7.4 lakh for his release, but there was no address or number to call. We didn’t hear from the kidnappers after that,” she added. The three sisters, like their parents, had given up on seeing Bhim ever again. But they didn’t abandon his memories – every year, they tied a rakhi to a portrait of Bhim that hung on a wall of the house. Much has changed in the house. Not this.
Saleemuddin, a childhood friend who called him ‘jhalmuri’ because of his love for spiced rice crisps, told TOI he couldn’t believe his ears when he heard about Bhim’s return. believe that his friend returned. “To check if he remembered, I asked where we played cricket. ‘In front of your house’, he said. He was right,” Saleemuddin said. “I can confirm that he is my friend.”