It sounds unbelievable, but it is true. A youth from Sohanjana village in the Tawi Island area of Jammu district, Jammu and Kashmir, stopped his own funeral after his family mistakenly presumed he had died and began preparing for his last rites.
A phone call saved a family from a funeral that should never have happened.
In a case that has left an entire village reeling between grief and disbelief, a family from Sohanjana village in the Tawi Island area of the Jammu district of Jammu and Kashmir had already identified a body, brought it home, and begun cremation rites for their son – when the very same son rang them up to say he was alive and well.
Five Days of Silence, Then Tragedy — Or So It Seemed
Twenty-two-year-old Vishal Kumar, alias Baba, works as a security guard at a private company in Bari Brahmana in Samba district. He had left home just five days earlier for his job. With his phone out of order and a punishing night shift schedule, he went silent — no calls, no messages, nothing. Days of silence turned his worried family's unease into panic, and they filed a missing person's report with the police.
Then, cruelly, the pieces seemed to fall into place. An unidentified young man's body turned up in the Bari Brahmana area and was sent to the Government Medical College (GMC) Jammu for a post-mortem. Acting on the missing person's complaint, police summoned Vishal's family on Tuesday to identify the body. They looked, and they believed it was him.
A Funeral Interrupted
Convinced that it was Vishal's body, the grieving family carried the body home and began preparing the last rites. The village plunged into mourning. Neighbours gathered. Grief took hold of Sohanjana. And then, mid-ritual, a phone rang.
It was Vishal. Alive. Unharmed. Utterly unaware that his own funeral was underway.
He explained the ordinary, almost mundane truth behind the terror: his phone had broken down, cutting him off from his mother and the rest of the family for five days. The moment he got hold of a new handset, the first call he made was home.
Shock, Then Relief — Then Questions
The family's disbelief gave way to overwhelming relief. But the mystery deepened: if the body wasn't Vishal's, whose was it?
The unclaimed body was rushed back to the mortuary at GMC Jammu, and news of the extraordinary mix-up spread fast, drawing crowds to the hospital premises as word got around that a "dead man" had come back to life.
Vishal himself walked back into his village soon after, and the shock on his family and neighbours' faces turned instantly to joy. The case of mistaken identity, however, remains unresolved — the real identity of the young man whose body was almost cremated in Vishal's name is still unknown, and there are growing calls for authorities to properly investigate the identification lapse and determine who he really was.
