CHENNAI: Anyone who visits 55-year-old Padma’s fruit salad shop opposite the University of Madras campus would get the impression that her two little grandchildren giggling and running around the fruit cart were raised by just another happy couple. But a conversation with the fruit vendor would reveal that the children — six-year-old Lavanya and five-year-old Anandhi — have no one to care for them. They live solely with the hope that their mother, 28-year-old Latha, would come back to them soon.Latha went missing three months ago and the kids’ auto-driver father, Saravanan, too left them and went back to his hometown.Padma recalls June 30 — the day her eldest daughter Latha went missing after having lunch at her mother’s house in Triplicane, leaving her two kids behind. “We went in search of her for almost a month, hoping that we would find her. We went all over the city,” recalls Padma. “We even went to Virugambakkam when we heard people say that they kidnap lonely women and make them beggars there. We even went to all the mental hospitals. We then lodged a complaint at the Triplicane Police Station. We even went to Ponneri to identify a body when police called us. But it wasn’t her.” While neither Padma nor her three other daughters have any clue about what made the woman leave her two children, they say her marriage was never smooth and suspect that her husband could be a reason for her disappearance.Padma claims that she got her daughter married to Saravanan without knowing that he had drinking habit. “He has not brought a single penny home. Right from the day we got Latha married to him, we had to take care of her. He would pick up fights with her almost every day. But my daughter always kept quiet and never uttered a word,” the fruit vendor says angrily.But things did not change even after the birth of their two daughters. Padma claims that problems got worse four years ago when Saravanan had demanded his wife to bring `1 lakh from her parents, as he had borrowed a lot of money to construct a house at Ice House. She further claimed that Saravanan and his sister demanded that she never enter their house without the money.But Padma, who could not afford such a huge amount for her daughter, helped her live away from her sister-in-law. “Despite all the efforts I took, I don’t know what went wrong. She never told me what was happening in her family. There was a point when she even became mentally disturbed. She just left us,” cries the 55-year-old.Latha’s two children, who were too young to understand the issues in the family, now keep asking Padma about their mother. “My son-in-law went away with his parents to his native place near Tiruvannamalai. Till now, he has not even called us. Every morning, when I wake them up, the little ones ask me –‘grandma, where’s mom? Her image is flashing in front of my eyes’. I feel like dying when I hear the kids say that. I earn a meagre amount by selling fruits and with that I’m trying my best to feed and educate them. No matter what I do, there is nothing like a mother being around. We know she’s alive and we just hope she returns soon,” says Padma.
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