Lost… & Found!

It’s strange what you discover when you are lost

It lasted barely about 10 minutes, but those 600 seconds or so felt like hours and were the most harrowing, heart-stopping, and stressful moments we experienced as first-time parents some 20 years ago.

My wife and I were with our two-year-old daughter out shopping in a busy mall one weekend. I was holding the hand of our little one and walking, while the wife was busy checking out store windows when we bumped into a friend and his family. I left my daughter’s hand for a moment to shake hands with the friend and give him a hug, and the next moment, I looked down to hold my daughter’s hand and she seemed to have disappeared.

To say I was scared would be an understatement. I was terrified-  what if she had stepped out of the mall and walked onto the busy road? What if she is sitting and crying somewhere scared and stressed at not finding us? What do we do? Where do we start searching?

I rushed to the security guard to ask if he had seen the child. Our friends joined  in the search. “Don’t worry sir,” the security guard said. “Your daughter is surely in the mall itself. The exits are all monitored and our staff will not allow an unaccompanied kid to walk out alone.”

That was little relief. We still could not physically see her or hold her.

Luckily, in less than 10 minutes we found her- standing next to a mannequin and crying. “I got lost,” she said, between sobs. “I didn’t know where you were, and was waiting for you to find me and take me home.”

Most parents would have very likely experienced such situations. Although this happened more than two decades ago, the nightmarish memory of that day still raises goosebumps.

So imagine what it would have been to be ‘lost’ in space waiting for someone to rescue you and take you back home!

Sunita Lyn "Suni" Williams knows it only too well. Setting off on what was supposed to be an eight-day test flight aboard Boeing's Starliner spacecraft, technical malfunctions forced an unexpected extension of her stay in space- an extension of 286 days.

Of course, the entire world knew where she was and what she was doing. But few knew how to get her back home and to her family. Technically speaking, she wasn’t ‘lost’ because by definition lost means “unable to find one’s way”. Sunita surely knew the way; at least she had enough gadgets to point her in the right direction. But her team members on Earth were at a loss, trying to find a way to bring her back, although, without doubt, they were trying desperately.

Life does have some strange ways of leaving one lost at times - whether in a bustling mall or the boundless cosmos. But clearly, no matter how far we stray, how long the wait, or how impossible the odds may seem, one truth remains: we are never truly lost as long as there is someone looking for us.