In July 2006, five-year-old Prince Kumar Kashyap fell into a 55-foot-deep hole. He was rescued after a 49-hour ordeal inside the claustrophobic, dark hollow. When he emerged he became an instant, if unlikely, celebrity.

Over the next few weeks and months, Prince, or rather his family, were awarded several lakhs of rupees by the Haryana government and a Hindi news television channel. He was often made a special guest at jagrans and yagnas in the surrounding villages of Kurukshetra district. He even visited Bollywood sets where film stars fawned over him. Salman Khan’s father, Saleem, even gifted him a kiddie bike.

But those are hazy memories of another day. Now, seven years later, Prince is almost back to anonymity. He himself remembers little of those hectic post-rescue days, except tha the got to meet Sunny Deol in Mumbai. The class six student now is just another village boy whose family life has been a bit of a rollercoaster. His parents separated a few years ago and earlier this year his father, Ramchandra, remarried.

It’s a holiday but Prince is not at home in his village Haldaheri. Neither is his father, who owns a patch of land but generally works as a share cropper. He must be fishing by the pond, a neighbour says.

Prince turns out to be shy and reticent. “I wasn’t fishing. I was just watching others,” he mumbles. But slowly he opens up. “I have no bad memories of those hours spent inside the hole. I have no bad dreams,” Prince says. But he clearly remembers how he fell into the hole created by a borewell contractor digging for water in the parched village.

“I saw a mouse run out of a grocery shop and chased it. But the mouse hid in an empty sandbag that covered the hole. I jumped on the sandbag because I wanted to squash the mouse butIwentdown with it,” he recalls as his friend Angrez, who had seen him fall down and was the first to call for help, listens.

Reality TV masquerading as news television took over next. It kept India glued to the idiot box for days. Several public schools offered to take in Prince, who became a young mascot for true grit. He was admitted briefly to one such school. “But he couldn’t settle down there,” says Balkar Singh, who runs a kirana store. Prince preferred the primary government school, a stone’s throw from his house. Now he studies at the senior secondary school in the nearby Samalkhi village. He is an average student, his friends say. “I like to draw, fly kites and play kabaddi,” says Prince.

In the weeks after the borewell episode, Haryana politicians, including chief minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda, had visited the village and announced a Rs 20 lakh grant for the village. Sarpanch Jaswinder Singh Sonu recalls that after the incident, the village bylanes were cemented and spruced up. “Politicians had also promised more electricity, among other things. Those promises were not kept.”

Prince was rescued after a tricky Army operation. Later the Army issued a certificate stating that if the child met the requisite criteria when he turned 18, he would be given an opportunity to join the Army. That is something Prince is looking forward to.

