Lost On The Ganges, Found on Facebook: The Tale Of How A Man Was Reunited With His Boat

Janardan Rai was asleep on his wooden boat at Digha Ghat in Patna when his phone rang. It was past midnight on September 5. His nephew Balram was calling to say that the iron boat — the new one, barely three months old — had been seen drifting in the Ganges. Rai had tied it up himself at a nearby ghat at 8 pm. He ran there and found one rope slashed, the other undone.

But the boat came second. His son Golu, eight years old, had been sleeping on it. For a few minutes Rai could not think. Then someone found the boy at a government flood relief camp nearby. When the rain started, Golu had climbed off and walked to the camp to sleep.

The child was safe. The boat was somewhere on the river, moving with the current in the dark.

Rai is 47 and lives in Nakta Diara, a settlement on the Ganges floodplain, twenty minutes by boat from Patna. There is no bridge, no road. Everyone here owns a boat the way people in the city own a scooter; you need it to get anywhere. Rai has been rowing since he was ten. "Children in the diara don't learn to row," he says. "They just pick up the oar."

He had got the new boat built by artisans in Sonepur. Twenty-six feet long, six feet wide, iron sheet. It cost ₹2.6 lakh. He sold his old boat and borrowed a lakh from a moneylender to pay for it. The monsoon months are when boatmen earn the most, ferrying passengers across the swollen river, and he had commissioned it for exactly this season.

 Janardan Rai (Image credit: Afzal Adeeb Khan)

When floods hit in the last week of August, he brought the boat to a relief camp on the Patna bank.

After it went missing, no one in the household cooked for four days. "Naav hi humara jeevan hai, humara sampatti hai," Rai told Decode. “The boat is our life, our wealth. When your wealth disappears, how do you sleep?"

That same night, Rai fuelled a speedboat at Janardan Ghat and went looking with four or five men. They searched downstream past Fatuha and came back at seven in the morning with nothing. He refuelled and went out again, checking ghats across Patna. The next day, Naya Gaon and Dighwara in Saran district. The day after, the riverbanks in Nalanda.

Three days on the water. After more than 150 kilometres and fifty thousand rupees in petrol, he stopped looking. He bought iron sheets for a lakh and told a boat-maker to start building a new one.

On the evening of September 9, four days after the boat vanished, Rai's nephew Lalu was scrolling through Facebook. A video came up on his feed from Vaishali Bihar Samvad, a small local news page. It had been posted the day before. Fifty-six seconds long. It showed a blue boat beached at the riverbank near Khalsa village in Vaishali district, under Bidupur police station. A voice explained that the boat had been pulled from the main current of the Ganges. Locals figured it had floated down from Nepal — the last week of August had brought devastating floods across the border, washing LPG cylinders, almirahs, all manner of debris into Bihar's rivers. They were talking about selling it.

The video had 1,400 likes and 35 shares. Lalu sent it to Amit (16), another son of Janardan Rai. Amit showed his father.

 The missing boat found on a Facebook page with modest following

Rai knew the boat at once.

By 6am on September 10, he was on a speedboat with a dozen men, heading for Khalsa, 55 kilometres upstream. They had no GPS coordinates. They asked villagers along the river for directions, following the geography of the video the way someone in a city might follow a forwarded location pin.

At Khalsa Ghat, a crowd of about a hundred had gathered around the boat. Three men were arguing over who had spotted it first and who deserved the money from selling it. The fight had got loud enough for someone to call the police. A dozen officers from Bidupur station were already there when Rai arrived.

He pushed through and said the boat was his. People wanted proof. Rai had brought the keys to all three padlocks on the boat. He unlocked them, one after another. Then he showed the bill for the engine. The police let him take it.

A Bidupur police officer, who did not want to be named, confirmed this to Decode. Locals had reported the boat to the station, he said. Officers went to the spot and the ownership evidence checked out.

Before leaving, Rai gave ₹4,000 to the men who had hauled the boat ashore. He gave ₹1,500 to the man who ran Vaishali Bihar Samvad.

Rai had spent three days and ₹50,000 searching 150 kilometres of river by speedboat. What found the boat was a 56-second clip on a Facebook page with a modest local following — watched by someone in his family, forwarded on WhatsApp to an eleven-year-old, and shown to his father on a phone screen in a flood relief camp.

In the diaras and along the Ganges floodplain, pages like Vaishali Bihar Samvad have become a kind of local notice board — carrying news too small for any TV channel or newspaper but urgent to the people it concerns. A boat adrift is not a story for Patna television. For the few thousand people following this page, it was.

Rai still does not know who cut his boat loose. He has a stack of iron sheets he no longer needs. He has his boat back.