‘Where ever she is, I hope she is being taken care of’

Thiruvananthapuram: “I have always taken care of her like a new born baby, never left her alone. I was too afraid to leave her on her own even for a brief moment and now I have not heard from her for two weeks,” says Andrew Jordan, 42, the partner of Liga Skromane, a Latvian national settled in Ireland, who went missing from Kovalam on March 14.
At the waiting room of control room AC’s office, he holds his broken phone and scours through the messages and phone calls trying to get one lead that would take him to Liga.

For the last few days, he has been to almost all police stations near Kovalam, pleaded with senior officials including DGP. He would take by-lanes, roads around Kovalam beach, talk to random persons hoping to find something that would reunite him with Liga.

Liga, who was employed as a waitress in Dublin met Andrew four years ago and they have been together since then. Andrew says Liga used to have nervous breakdowns. “It was in August 2017, when we were in UK, she first experienced a psychotic breakdown after we had got together. She was screaming for help. When we approached doctors, we were told it could be something from her past, for the last one year her life has been filled with anti-depressants, pills, too many medicines,” he says.

It was one of the reasons why he agreed to Ilze, sister of Liga, who proposed that she would be better with medical care in India. What awaited him was a message from Ilze saying that Liga had gone missing.

“Even when she was in Kerala, she never spoke over phone. It was so hard to get her to respond to messages. Mostly the text would be like, I am okay, safe and nothing more. A week before she went missing even that messages stopped,” recalls Jordan, who is a farmer in Dublin.

Once she had a nervous breakdown, Liga stopped working and Jordan always took her along to work. “When she was alone , she tried to kill herself with sleeping pills and from that day I never took a chance,’’ he says. “Sometimes she would wake up from her sleep and stay still, because she had a condition called sleep paralysis``.

I get these bad nightmares which are really scary. I go to the beach and stand there, I can’t sleep. I really hope that she is with someone who is feeding her and taking care of her,’’ says Jordan.

He says he doesn’t understand why police don’t try enough. “There were people who had spotted her near a resort at Kovalam, but police wouldn’t care. I have been to all hotels and approached number of guests, nobody speaks because for them it could harm tourism,” says Jordan.

Jordan believes she might be in a mental care home and is being taken care of. “She was never in a state of mind where she could make plans. We had big plans for our life and all of a sudden you hear that your life partner is missing. People tell me to relax, I just don’t get it, how do you relax when people you share your life with disappear suddenly,’’ he asks.