Before she waded into the water to take a holy dip among the teeming throngs at the world’s largest religious gathering, Draupadi Devi reached into her blouse and handed her husband a small pouch to safeguard.
Inside was a slip of paper with his phone number scrawled on it, so she would have it if they got separated in the tangle of limbs and luggage that is the Kumbh Mela, a Hindu festival held every three years in one of four cities in India.
This year’s version of the event is being called a Maha Kumbh, or Great Kumbh, because it coincides with a celestial alignment that takes place only every 144 years. So the multitude of pilgrims, devotees, seers and ascetics is even bigger than usual — and even easier to get lost in.
After her bath, as they made their way through the crowds, Ms. Devi lost sight of her husband, Umesh Singh. Gone, with him, was her pouch.
Confused and scared, Ms. Devi, 65, wound up at the festival’s lost-and-found center, part of the immense temporary infrastructure that attends to the faithful’s earthly needs as they perform rituals intended to purify the soul.
Over six weeks, from mid-January to late February, more than 400 million people are expected to attend the Maha Kumbh, according to government estimates. It is being held in Prayagraj, in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, where the Ganges and Yamuna Rivers meet. Hindus believe that a third, mythical river called the Saraswati joins the other two there in a sacred confluence.
The makeshift metropolis constructed for the event sits on 10,000 acres of land temporarily claimed from the Ganges, whose waters recede at this time of year. The “ephemeral megacity,” as Harvard researchers have called it, includes hospitals, pontoon bridges, nearly 70,000 street lamps, thousands of flush toilets, 250 miles of steel-plank roads resting on the silty river bed, and tents running from the modest to the luxurious.
While bathers may walk away free from sin, they can still make a wrong turn. That may explain how Ms. Devi found herself seeking help from lost-and-found volunteers.
They had little information to work with. Her husband was taller than her and two years older, Ms. Devi said. He had tanned skin and was dressed in a sweater in the same mint green shade as her head scarf.
She did not know his phone number — which was why she had written it on the scrap of paper, the one she had not retrieved after her bath.
“They said he will come,” Ms. Devi said the volunteers had told her. “What else will they say?”
The state and central governments are spending hundreds of millions of dollars to ensure the safety of Kumbh Mela pilgrims, an undertaking whose immense challenges became clear last month when 30 pilgrims died in a stampede as they rushed to bathe in the river.
Crucial to the safety effort are the lost-and-found center and its 10 field offices. They are a place of hope and despair, as devotees show up by the thousands every day to report missing persons and, sometimes, lost objects.
Attendees can use the public address system to make their own announcements in their own languages. One evening near the bathing sites, it was a nonstop frenzy — people seeking lost siblings, parents, cousins, children and spouses. One person was looking for his dropped army ID card.
Mani Jha, the project manager for the center, said the largest number of reported cases came from around the sites where people do their bathing rituals.
“When the devotees go for their holy dip, naturally there is so much rush,” Mr. Jha said. “When they come out, there is a rush of fresh devotees, so they have to move out.” In an instant, people can become separated. Others fall down and get left behind amid the mess of orphaned slippers and discarded shirts.
Many of the pilgrims are from rural areas and not used to large crowds. Some are poor and do not have their own phones. They sometimes “start to panic and weep” as they try to figure out “where to go, whom to ask, what to do,” Mr. Jha said. Police officers and volunteers from nonprofits console them and bring them to the nearest lost-and-found office.
Once someone reports a person missing, workers feed as many details as they can into a computerized system that uses facial-recognition technology. The information is shared with the police and other offices and also announced over the public address system. Those who are found are put up in a hall lined with beds made of cardboard boxes. This year, they were donated by Amazon and feature its logo prominently.
In 2019, when a smaller event known as a “half” Kumbh was held in Prayagraj, the lost-and-found center handled 39,000 cases, Mr. Jha said. Most were solved, he added.
“Reunions are very emotional moments,” Mr. Jha said. “You yourself get emotional when a situation like that happens.”
One recent morning, Tara Chand Bhat and his wife, Shanti Devi Bhat, were looking for her mother. They had become separated while watching the religious parades.
An entire day passed. The Bhats slept on the ground as they awaited news. The next afternoon, lost-and-found workers informed the couple that Ms. Bhat’s mother was in a holding area. She had been there all morning, waiting for her family to take her home.
A few days later, Sudesh Sharma, 58, paced around a bathing platform for four hours before being directed to the lost-and-found center with her husband. They had lost track of her two sisters after their holy dip. Ms. Sharma’s sisters had nothing but their bathing garments — no money, no phone — and they did not know her phone number.
Ms. Sharma was impatient to be reunited with them. “I do not know what is happening,” she said, adding, “The government is spending so much money, can’t they help people?”
When Sant Ram, 56, arrived at the lost-and-found center, he was clad only in his underwear. He, too, had lost track of his family after his sacred bath. The rest of his story was also familiar: His wife had his bag, and it contained his phone and his money.
He did, however, know his son’s telephone number. A police officer lent him a phone, and his family was soon on its way to meet him. The officer also gave him an undershirt to put on.
Ms. Devi, the pilgrim who had left her pouch with her husband, Mr. Singh, was reunited with him after about five hours.
She had given the lost-and-found volunteers the name of her village and its former headman. They tracked him down. He happened to have the phone number of her husband’s nephew, whom he called. The nephew then called Mr. Singh and directed him to the center.
Mr. Singh said his reunion with his wife had been delayed. While he had given her formal name to be announced on the public address system, she had provided only her nickname to the lost-and-found volunteers, and they could not match the two.
“I scolded her that you put me in difficulty,” Mr. Singh said. “But whatever happened, has happened.”
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