While on patrol last week looking for any tourists who might have gotten stuck in the landslide-prone forests in the southern Indian town of Gokarna, police inspector Sridhar S.R. spotted a statue of a Hindu deity peeking out through the lush green vegetation.
Moving closer, he saw makeshift curtains made of red saris that obscured the entrance to a cave. When he looked in, he was surprised to find a woman and two young girls living inside.
The discovery on July 9 in Karnataka State set off days of sleuthing by police and government officials to piece together a nine-year odyssey that had led her to the cave.
The woman, it turned out, was a 40-year-old Russian national named Nina Kutina. She had been living in the cave, which she sometimes used as a retreat, for a week with her daughters, aged 4 and 6. She practiced yoga and meditated by candlelight, and cooked on a wood-fired stove, Mr. Sridhar said. Photos of Hindu deities lined the walls.
“Caves are heaven in her mind-set,” Mr. Sridhar said.
Mr. Sridhar and his team initially tried to cajole Ms. Kutina into leaving the cave in the gathering dark, given the area’s heavy rainfall, perilous location and reputation as a habitat for poisonous snakes.
But Ms. Kutina told them that she was “interested in staying in the forest and worshiping God,” said M. Narayana, the superintendent of police for Uttara Kannada, the district in which Gokarna sits. The cave is in the town’s Ramateertha hills, where seasonal waterfalls and landslides are common.
Eventually, the police escorted the trio to a shelter for women run by a nonprofit group.
There, after charging her mobile phone, Ms. Kutina emailed her relatives in Russian. “Our peaceful life in the cave has ended — our cave home destroyed,” she wrote, according to a translation provided by the police. “From years living under the open sky in harmony with nature, we know: no snake or animal ever harmed us.”
The discovery of Ms. Kutina on July 9 raised a bigger question of where she had been since she arrived in India nine years ago, which police and government officials began piecing together from documents and interviews with her. In 2016, she had entered India on a six-month business visa and traveled to Goa, a state known for its beautiful beaches that is crowded with foreigners who also come to meditate, practice yoga and find spiritual connection.
India, with its huge array of gods, deities, gurus, saints and mystics from multiple faiths, has long drawn notable visitors from around the world. In the 1960s, The Beatles famously spent time in Rishikesh, a town in northern India that sits by the Ganges River sacred to Hindus, practicing Transcendental Meditation with a guru who later became world renowned.
Ms. Kutina overstayed her visa by a year and was allowed to leave India by government officials in Goa in April 2018. She then went to neighboring Nepal, which is also a common destination for travelers seeking spirituality, on a 90-day tourist visa and left that country in September, according to a stamp in an old passport that sat among her belongings in the cave.
Indian intelligence officials said Ms. Kutina had been back in India since early 2020, having re-entered the country on a multiple-entry tourist visa. She arrived with two sons and a daughter, according to government records. Her elder son died at 21 years of age, in a bike accident last year, and the whereabouts of her younger son, who is 11, are unknown, according to police officials. Her 6-year-old daughter was born in Ukraine, and the younger one was born in India.
In Goa, Ms. Kutina worked as a tutor of Russian language and literature. She had made the roughly three-hour trip from Goa to Gokarna — a town of about 20,000 people locally known for its temples and beauty — multiple times in the past, said Mr. Narayana, the police superintendent who provided the details of her travels. “She had stayed in the cave at least four times,” he said.
Ms. Kutina could not be reached at a phone number shared by Karnataka police officials.
Inside the cave, Ms. Kutina used to prepare simple meals of roti and vegetable curries for her family, said Mr. Sridhar, the Gokarna police inspector.
“She is an adventurer type of person, she knew lots of things about nature,” he said.
But on Monday, Ms. Kutina and her daughters were sent to an office of the Indian government agency that oversees immigration, in Bengaluru, the capital of Karnataka. In a photograph provided by officials, Ms. Kutina could be seen sitting cross-legged on an empty row of chairs, combing her hair. Her daughters were also seated, and one of them was using a mobile phone.
The agency ordered that she be kept under “close watch,” and now government officials are working on deporting her and her daughters to Russia. They have since been moved to a detention center in another city.
Anupreeta Das covers India and South Asia for The Times. She is based in New Delhi.
Hari Kumar covers India, based out of New Delhi. He has been a journalist for more than two decades.
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