A moving story of a father’s desperate search for his missing sonIt has been 20 days since 62-year-old Ashok Kumar Sinha is living in his son’s bedroom in a sparsely furnished 3 BHK apartment on ECC Road, Whitefield. At night, he lies on the mattress that is spread on the floor, but sleep evades him. Every time the doorbell rings, his hopes soar. But there has been no good news. There has been no bad news. It gets to him that after all this time, there has been no news at all of his missing son.When he first came here, Sinha spent a lot of time walking the lanes of Gunjur (on the outskirts of the city) clutching a spare key to his son’s grey Maruti Ciaz. Every few minutes, he would press the car locator button and strain to hear the car’s alarm.Sinha’s 29-year-old son Ajitabh Kumar, a techie, went missing on December 18. Two days later, the father arrived in the city from Mumbai. He has since been tireless hunting for Ajitabh, who is suspected to have been abducted. The Maruti Ciaz, which he was going to sell, is missing too. The last signal from Ajitabh’s phone was traced to Gunjur. Ajitabh had posted an ad on OLX to sell his car on November 17 and the police suspect someone lured him to Gunjur on the pretext of inspecting the vehicle.“It is like a never-ending nightmare. I am a God-fearing man. Why is this happening to me? ,” asks Sinha, a retired banker, torn between despair and determination. He came to the city with his elder son Arunabh and his son-in-law Mimic.The three have been tirelessly working with the police, and coordinating with relatives and friends of Ajitabh to get clues on where he might have been.Sinha, in his desperate search, even hired private detectives, paying a hefty sum of Rs 50,000, only to be disappointed. They wanted another Rs 50,000 to continue the hunt. Sinha had to let them go.He got into WhatsApp communities, even ones as unrelated as rural bank offices, convincing them to post appeals to locate Ajitabh.Above all, in these last 20 days, he has made countless trips to the local police station to get updates on the case. He has even sought legal support to get the case transferred to the CBI.Back in his son’s apartment, Sinha spoke to Mirror on Friday. “I cannot sleep. I have nightmares and I wake up in the middle of the night, sit up and try to make sense of the sequence of events, and I ask myself, ‘Where could Ajitabh be now’. It is horrible,” he says.Sinha, a diabetic who also suffers from hypertension, says he fears that the ordeal might make him sick which would be worse because then he won’t be able to look for his son, he says. “Every time the doorbell or the telephone rings, I wish it is him trying to reach us. It has been so many days,” he says.Ajitabh’s room is left exactly as it is when he left it at 6.30 pm on December 18. A packed guitar is perched on an almirah alongside a can of protein supplements.(His son was very health conscious, says Sinha.) A couple of English bestsellers from various genres are stacked up on the table. There’s ‘The Prisoner of Azkaban’ from the Harry Potter series, along with a couple of novels from the Twilight saga.Sinha had tried calling Ajitabh from Mumbai at around 8 pm on December 18 but the phone was switched off. He pointed this out to his wife Asha (56) who quickly dismissed his fear saying Ajitabh could be sleeping or busy with some work. But his fears came true when he received a call from Ajitabh’s roommates saying they could not find him. “I asked them to search at city’s hospitals and also inform the police,” he says. Two days later, Sinha came to Bengaluru with his son and son-in-law.As a missing complaint had already been filed, they went on social media, posting appeals to locate Ajitabh.“We wanted our appeal to be heard everywhere. He could be anywhere, maybe in a rural area without any proper channel of communication,” Sinha says. Bijaykumar Shetty, the cook, is the last person who saw Ajitabh before he left home. But Shetty told BM that all Ajitabh told him was that he was going out.After police told Sinha that Gunjur was the location where Ajitabh’s phone was traced before it became unresponsive, Sinha took the duplicate keys of Ajitabh’s car and for two days walked around in Gunjur, desperately looking for the car. His roommate Ravi Kumar (30), who is also Ajitabha’s schoolmate from Patna, said: “We went around Gunjur and border areas near the toll plaza and showed Ajitabh’s photograph to the locals. But nobody had seen him.”When someone suggested hiring a private detective to locate Ajitabh, Sinha agreed and found a city-based detective agency. They charged Rs 50,000 as initial payment but delivered no results. Later, they asked for a second instalment of another Rs 50,000. “I said ‘no, thank you’ to them and asked them to stop their efforts. They were not doing anything,” Sinha added.After his online appeals went viral, Sinha has been receiving phone calls from all over the country by people offering to find Ajitabh for a ‘nominal’ fee. “I received a call from Kolkata. A man claimed he was a journalist and he would find my son for a nominal amount. Do journalists work like this?” Sinha asks.Ajitabh was his mother’s pet, says Sinha. He believes his wife, Asha, in Mumbai is even more anxious to see their son again. Sinha says he stopped talking to her over the phone for almost 10 days because he did not have an answer for her. Finally, it was his elder son Arunabh who insisted that he speak with his mother. “What will I tell her? I am doing everything I can but I do not have anything to say to her. So I stopped talking,” Sinha adds.Sinha said Ajitabh’s bank accounts and funds had not been tampered with. He had got admission for an Executive MBA at IIM Kolkata and was apparently trying to fund his education by selling his car.Sinha found that Ajitabh had applied for a private loan of Rs 8 lakh and the sanctioned money had been lying in his account untouched.Multiple trips to the Whitefield police station have become routine for Sinha and his son. Sinha says while he has confidence in the Bengaluru police, he is anxious about the time lost. He went to the High Court with a writ petition, seeking a CBI probe. The court has taken it up and asked the police to file a status report on Jan 8. The residents’ association of the apartment complex has also sent a petition to BJP MLA Aravind Limbavali to speed up the probe.Police realised it was an abduction case almost nine days after the missing complaint. It was on December 29 that the Whitefield police lodged an FIR with abduction charges after being convinced of ‘foul play’.Deputy Commissioner (Whitefield) Abdul Ahad told BM on Sunday that the case would be cracked in a couple of days. But, clearly, it is turning out to be more complex than they thought. “We are working on the case and following all available angles. We will crack the case at the earliest,” said the DCP. As of now, the police suspect that Ajitabh was lured to Gunjur by someone who spotted his OLX ad online to sell his car. They had identified three OLX users who had contacted Ajitabh and were trying to zero in one of them who had provided some fake credentials. The police are trying to retrace Ajitabh’s digital footprints both on his laptop and phone.Meanwhile, Sinha still finds it hard to believe it. “Why would anyone do this to Ajitabh? He is not involved in anything. He was a Peace Education Program volunteer. He had also adopted a Tamil Nadu-based family and was helping them financially,” says the father.