One injury made him lose his memory at 16; decades later, another jolt to the head brought him home

Shimla: Just 16 when he went missing after losing his memory due to a head injury, a 61-year-old has been reunited with his family following another head bump that brought it all back, a miracle story from Himachal Pradesh that defies belief and could be straight out of a Bollywood playbook.

Rikhi then and Ravi Chaudhary now returned to Nadi village in Sirmaur district last week with his wife and children. It had been 45 years and the family could scarcely believe he was back in their midst.

There was music, flowers and tears as villagers and family members welcomed their Rikhi. His siblings -- Durga Ram, Chander Mohan, Chandramani, Kaushalya Devi, Kala Devi and Sumitra Devi - broke down to see the brother they had given up for dead alive after all these years, said cousin and local Nadi man Rudra Sharma.

“Such instances are rare. There is so much happiness in the family and in the village,” Sharma told PTI.

Rikhi was working at a hotel in Haryana's Yamunanagar when he met with a major road accident during a trip to Ambala in 1980. He sustained such a serious head injury that it led to a complete memory wipeout with Rikhi even forgetting his identity and name, Sharma recounted.

Later, his friends named him Ravi Chaudhary.

With no memory of his past, Rikhi moved to Mumbai, survived by doing small jobs and settled in Maharashtra's Nanded after he started working in a college. He later got married to Santoshi. They have three children, two daughters and a son, according to Sharma and other locals in Nadi.

A few months back, another head injury changed his life again.

Old faded images of a mango tree in his village Nadi, narrow paths and the courtyard of a house in a place called Sataun started appearing in his dreams. Soon, Rikhi realised that it was not dreams but memories, Sharma added.

He then sought help from a college student to locate Sataun, and they came across a phone number of a cafe while searching for Nadi village and Sataun on Google.

Rikhi called the number and interacted with a person named Rudra Prakash, a village elder.

As word travelled, one of Rikhi's relatives, M K Chaubey, remembered the distant past and he was finally united with his family members on November 15.

"Though nothing is impossible, such cases of memory restoration after injury have been rarely documented. The exact cause can be known after medical investigations and brain scans," mental health expert Dr Aaditya Sharma told PTI.