Transported to the capital accidentally at a tender age, Jahangir, now a youth of 24, still searches for his parents and identity.

"I was in class one then," Jahangir, now a sweeper at the Dhaka Medical College Hospital (DMCH) tells The Daily Star. "As we were running through the compartments, the train suddenly started moving. Everyone managed to get down, except me."

The train brought Jahangir to the Kamlapur Railway Station in Dhaka although the little boy had no idea what place it was. "It was afternoon when I got down from the train. I felt lost and everything--the cars, huge buildings, people around me--were unknown to me. There were hundreds of people, but nobody to look at me."

Unmindful, Jahangir began walking around. Suddenly a rickshaw or a van--he cannot remember which--knocked him down alongside the road. "I can only remember that some people in white clothes were around me," he says.

He was actually in a ward of the DMCH. Some employees, who were present there on that day, say it was about a year after the heavy flood of 1988. Jahangir could not remember the name of his village, union, police station or the district, they say.

Although he was released two or three days later, Jahangir did not know where to go or what to do. "I used to roam about within the hospital area and would beg to anyone around me when I became hungry," he says in a choked voice.

Moved by his ordeal, Abdul Khaleq, the then joint secretary of the DMCH Fourth Class Employees' Association, picked Jahangir and employed him for pulling trolleys at the emergency ward of the hospital.

"I told him to call me 'father' and use my address," Khaleq tells The Daily Star, adding that Jahangir has always been very hard working and loyal to him. He earned Tk 200-300 a day by pulling trolleys or carrying patients.

"Being the emergency ward, there are frequent shortages of trolleys, especially when injured people and political leaders are rushed to the hospital following clashes or accidents," Jahangir describes.

"Carrying many injured political leaders has given me opportunities to be introduced with them," he says. This has also made him familiar with the hospital's higher authority.

This correspondent has also seen Jahangir carrying many patients and victims of accidents or rallies without the help of a trolley.

Besides pulling trolleys, Jahangir also worked as a microbus helper while carrying dead bodies to their homes. "I did this voluntarily with a hidden will to find out my village and with an urge to meet my parents, my brothers and sisters, whom I had lost at an early age," Jahangir says in a melancholy mood.

He thinks that his village is not very far from Dhaka. "I believe it is somewhere in Gazipur, as I can remember a lot of jungles in my village and the surrounding area."

Even with a stable life after being appointed as a sweeper at the DMCH, life still continues to feel empty to this young man.

"After a long struggle, I got a government job in the hospital, but I always feel an emptiness for my parents, brothers, sisters and relatives," he says.

"Can anyone give me the location of my village, surrounded by trees with the rail tracks running by my school?" Jahangir urges.