In the summer of ’69, a four-year-old boy in Guwahati was asked by his mother one day to go into the kitchen and eat an orange she had left for him there. By the time he was done, his mother had bolted out of the house and abandoned him. She never returned. The boy and his eight-year-old sister had barely coped with the loss when their father, who was then posted in the Assam capital with the 4th Assam Police Battalion, sent them to a relative in Kathmandu. They confused their way and found themselves instead on the streets of Nepal, alone and inching towards certain death.

That little, lost boy, Kisan Upadhaya , is today a top notch IT specialist who provides tech support to four institutes within Duke University , North Carolina — Social Science Research Institute, Duke Institute for Brain Sciences (DIBS), DIBS Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, and Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions. But in all these years, as he scripted a phenomenal success story for himself, there was always something that ate him up from inside – the thoughts of his family and the sister who tried hard to feed and protect him. He had to find them.

Forty years after that fateful trip from Guwahati to Kathmandu, Upadhaya has reached his goal.

“I got my first job at 4, at a tea stall,” he tells TOI from his house in Durham, US, recounting the amazing turns his life has taken. “I used to do the dishes there and my sister, Maya, became a garland-maker at a temple, getting a rupee every day for it. But the verbal and physical abuses took a toll on my health. I fell ill and was fired from my job. To stay alive, I begged. One day when pneumonia had nearly killed me, Maya took me to a hospital run by Christian missionaries in Kathmandu. I stayed there for six months. When I came out, Maya was gone.”

Luck shone on Upadhaya in 1987 when an American doctor working in Kathmandu saw something in him and offered him a scholarship to study in the US. He relocated the same year. Though his search had continued all the while, the world of social media, which burst into our lives some years back, gave his mission a new impetus and urgency. “Through Facebook, I got in touch with two senior officers of the Assam Police. And they did what nobody else could have done, probably,” he says.

Rajen Singh, commandant of the 24th Assam Police Battalion , found a retired havaldar who knew Upadhaya’s father Indra. “SP (security) Pranabjyoti Goswami and I browsed through 40-year records of the Assam Police, but couldn’t find the man. Then one day, I met retired havaldar Hom Bahadur Thapa, who told me about Indra Upadhaya,” says Singh. “He had passed away in 1988, but had left behind his second wife and her children. We also took help from a local news channel, and they flashed relevant information about the family. One of Upadhaya’s uncles saw that newsflash and got in touch with us. We soon traced them. From there it was easy. Upadhaya was reunited with his sister, mother, uncles and aunts, half brothers and sisters, stepmothers and stepfathers. I’ve never seen anything like this.”

Upadhaya, however, was disappointed, once again, in his mother. “She had no remorse for what she did,” he says. ‘‘The 10 days I spent with her, I realized that she could leave me all over again. We were travelling in a car and I said I wanted an orange. I said that thrice so that mother would get the reference. But if she did, she didn’t show it. That’s when my sister, whose name I got to know just last year, started crying. She was the only one who had truly loved me.”

Upadhaya, now husband to an American wife, Pam, and father to son Kevin and daughter Kaitlyn, recently sold the rights of his touching and courageous story to a big-ticket publisher in the US. He has dedicated the book, which he calls The Last Orange, to Maya.

Abandoned kids:

Roughly 20 million children in India are orphans

Of them, over 99% are abandoned by parents

On an average, 44,475 children go missing in India

11,000 children are never found

