Lankan Tamil refugee desperate to reunite with his father

He can now go back to Sri Lanka only if police issue clearance certificate

RAMANATHAPURAM

After landing clandestinely on Rameswaram coast three years ago to seek medical assistance, 46-year-old S. Samuel alias Rajendran (name changed as he is a HIV-affected person), a Sri Lankan Tamil, has been wandering here and Tirunelveli, desperately trying to return home and join his aged father.

When Sri Lankan Tamils made influx to Tamil Nadu as refugees in 1985, Rajendiran, then 13, flew to Tiruchi with his mother and two sisters and later settled in Chennai. He joined Class VIII at Ramakrishna Mission Residential High School in T. Nagar, Chennai, little realising his life would go amiss soon.

His elder and younger sisters joined Sarada Vidyalaya High School in the city. The family began to start a new life but faced turmoil after a local Tamil married his elder sister, Rajendiran recalls. He was forced to drop out from school and somehow landed in Mumbai. He says he is unable to recollect how he made his way to Mumbai.

All of a sudden he became an orphan and spent more than 25 years in Mumbai as Samuel, after he was given shelter in a Christian institution and converted to Christianity. When he returned to Chennai in 2011 to reunite with his family, he found that his mother was no more and his sisters turned hostile.

He then went to Puthalam in western Sri Lanka and found that he had contracted HIV, probably during a blood transfusion after he met with an accident in 1982. As he could not afford to meet the medical expenses, he clandestinely landed in Dhanushkodi in May 2015.

He was arrested by the police and lodged in Puzhal Central Prison, Chennai. After he served three months in jail, he was released on bail to get medical assistance. And since then, he had been shuttling between the ART Centre, Tirunelveli Medical College Hospital, to get medicines and the offices of the Collector and the Superintendent of Police here, seeking permission to return home.

The distressed Rajendran says he can return home only if his case is disposed of. “I want to join my father,” he says, stroking his untrimmed beard. As he arrived in India without a passport, he can get back to his country only if the police issue clearance certificate, he says and moves on carrying a file containing petition copies and court case details and a travel bag.