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Runaway youngsters return home

M D Riti in Bangalore

On June 1, Gayatri Ramnath, 18, and her friends, Adesh, 22, and Vinanthi Pathak, 17, who had gone away from home with their Tae Kwon Do teacher Daniel George, 28, more than six weeks ago, finally returned home to their anxious parents.

"They are quite safe and well, just traumatised by their unpleasant adventure," says Gayatri's father K R Ramnath, a retired government officer who was once personal secretary to dignitaries like Vikram Sarabhai and T N Seshan.

Ramnath, who has been spokesman for the worried trio of parents all along, now spoke to Rediff On The NeT on behalf of the three parents and their three children. "The children are just recovering from their trauma, and are not in any condition to speak to anyone about their travails yet," he says.

The credit for the recovery of the children goes largely to the single-minded investigative efforts of Ramnath, whose endeavours had been chronicled here in some length last month.

After the trio disappeared on April 15, Ramnath spent all his time trying to trace George, the martial arts teacher he had hired four months earlier to run classes in the ISRO Colony residential layout. He kept coming up against dead-ends as George had wound up his rented digs, sold his cars and cell phone and vanished without trace.

Even locating George's old house was a tough call as the man had given no correct address anywhere, even at the posh city school that he had taught martial arts in. However, Ramnath traced an ex-neighbour of George and zeroed in on the martial arts exponent's old house in Kodihalli on the outskirts of Bangalore. He did the rounds of all the telephone booths in the area, in the hope of tracing any outstation calls that George might have made, so that he could track down George's network of friends or relatives.

It was this move of Ramnath that finally paid off. He picked up several numbers from a couple of such booths, one of which was in Nepal. He also remembered that George had spoken about going to Korea some time before. So he contacted both Korean Airlines and the Korean embassy, but could not trace any George who had either gone or booked to go to Korea.

However, there was a man with the surname Vaid with similar credentials. By comparing the handwriting of George and the so-called Vaid, he was able to establish that they were the same person.

Ramnath then got a friend to contact the Nepal telephone number he had picked up from the public call booth, and ask for George. The response he got was that no such person was there. However, the people he spoke to at that number did mention the name Kathy, which was the name of the woman George had introduced to the residents of ISRO layout last year as his wife.

So Ramnath decided he was on the right trail. He persisted with calls to that telephone number, purportedly from agencies wanting to discuss George's plans to visit Korea.

Little did Ramnath know then he was absolutely on the right trail. George had, according to the trio who have now returned, kept them in semi-confinement in that same house in Nepal. They say that he told them that he was starting a fabulous new martial arts school in Nepal with Korean funding, and that he had chosen them to help him set it up. That is why they went away with him from Bangalore.

When they had said, before they left, that they would inform their parents before they left town with him, he had discouraged them, pointing out that as they were all academically and professionally successful youngsters, with career courses charted out for them -- Gayatri was in a professional college, Adesh worked for a software firm and Vinanthi was about to get into professional college -- their parents were unlikely to permit them to start a Tae Kwon Do academy.

Once they succeeded in their mission, they could contact their parents and share the glory of their achievements with them. Their happy parents would certainly support them in their efforts after that, he said.

The young people, who Ramnath previously described as being in awe of their teacher, agreed readily. "The kind of hero worship they had for this man is unimaginable," a distraught Ramnath had said before their return. The group travelled to various parts of the country until the end of April, and finally ended up in the house in Nepal. It was only here that they began to suspect that their teacher might not be all that they thought him to be.

Why, then, didn't they simply walk out and come back home? Because, they now say, they could not decide whether George was a fraud or a man who had dedicated his whole life to the martial arts. Besides, the fact that they were in a foreign country, far away from home, with no money or papers, was a deterrent.

They now say that they shared that house with a woman called Alice, believed to be George's second wife, and her child Karen, whom they had helped to have delivered in a Bangalore nursing home some weeks earlier.

Meanwhile, when the calls instigated by Ramnath started coming in at the Nepal house, George decided the trail was getting too hot. So he packed the missing trio off from Nepal, brought them to Gorakhpur, Allahabad and finally Nagpur, where he made them sign documents saying that they had gone with him of their free will.

Somewhere along the way, he let Adesh call his father in Bangalore, and inform him that they were safe. A terrified Pathak promptly warned his son to be very careful of George. But George left them in Nagpur, advising them to contact the local police, and then ask their parents to take them home. The three youngsters did just that. And Ramnath went to Nagpur on June 1 and brought them all back. All three parents (Adesh and Vinanthi lost their mother some years ago) are just thankful that their progeny have come back absolutely well and undamaged.

Their only loss seems to be some psychological trauma caused by their strange adventure and the toppling of their idol George from the pedestal that they had put him on. For the police too, who are used to dealing with elopements, runaway couples and routine abductions, this unusual case, in which there was a complete absence of any romantic involvement or interest between any of the people involved, was a first.

They are now on the trail of Daniel George and the two women who profess to be his wives, all of whom seem to have vanished without trace.

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