M I John with his family at Vaipur hanging bridge across the Manimala river in Theyilapuzha Kadavu. Photo: Rijo JosephPathanamthitta : When they took their wheelchair-bound father to his hometown of Mallappally in the district all the way from Hyderabad, M I John's three children were keeping the eternal spirit of Christmas – hope – alive.
John worked as a civil engineer in government service at Hazaribagh in Jharkhand before moving to Hyderabad with his children who had settled there. A heart attack in 1996 and a stroke in 2016 left him paralyzed. Soon, dementia set in.
In a moving act of love along with the hope of reviving at least a part of John’s fading memory, his children – Shelvy Roy and Mathews John in Hyderabad and Shanly Johns, who is works in the US – decided to take their incapacitated father on a 2,700 km-long journey to his hometown and back during Christmas.
On December 1, the group set out on its 21-day trip from Hyderabad by train. At Ernakulam railway station, the family members took a van and traveled to Munnar and Alappuzha. After soaking in the sights, sounds and smells of the hills and the sea, they boarded a houseboat to enjoy the pristine backwaters of Kuttanad. Their next destination was Mallappally and the scenic locales along the Manimala river – places where John spent his childhood and where he still owns a small piece of land.
The support offered by his caring children gave John the strength and the energy to revisit the land of his birth. But will the journey bring back his memories? Shelvy, Mathews and Shanly hope that it would.
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