Ahmedabad, October 02: A chance conversation, a scar and a deformed finger ended in uniting a 42-year-old woman with her family in a remote Kashmiri village, 17 years after her husband allegedly declared that she had drowned.
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Hafeeza, a Muslim from Baramulla district, spent all those years in a temple in Khatanpur, a village in Rajasthan’s Dhaulpur district.
How she landed there is still not clear because nobody at her brother’s Zehanpora village understands the language she now speaks.
“But she immediately recognised her two sons when we brought her back,” says her cousin Javid Iqbal. They were three years and eight months’ old, respectively, when she went missing in 1992, four years after her marriage to Sakhi Mir, a driver from Zojyar, also in Baramulla district.
Hafeeza’s brother Ghulam Mohammad says but for a hearing problem she was healthy when they married her off. Mir “wanted to get rid of her because of marital discord”, he alleges.
Mir, who has since got remarried, had told villagers that she drowned in the Jhelum river, says Javid. For six months, the family fished for the body in the river but had no luck.
“We even went to the Kaman Post near the line of control to search for the body in the river, which flows into Pakistan,” says Javid.
They accepted that she was dead.
Seventeen years later, a chance conversation between a mason from Khatanpur with one of Hafeeza’s relatives changed everything. The mason, who was working in Baramulla, casually mentioned a Kashmiri woman named Champa living in a temple.
This was enough a hint for the family. “We showed her picture to the mason, who immediately recognised her but said that she had grown frail,” says Javid.
“We asked the mason to call up villagers in Khatanpur to find out if she had a scar on her right palm and had a deformed finger,” Javid said.
When the villagers confirmed this, Javid, Hafeeza’s brother Manzoor Ahmed and one of their uncles left for Rajasthan on Eid to bring her back.
“When we asked her name, she said ‘Hafeeza’. When we asked where her home was, she said ‘Zehanpora’,” says Javid.
“But we had a tough time convincing the people at Khatanpur that she is a Muslim and our sister,” he says. For them, she was a pious woman from whom they sought blessings.
Hafeeza, too, seemed reluctant initially, but agreed to accompany them back, he said.
“Before we brought her home, we took her to the local police station,” Javid says. The family has lodged a complaint that Hafeeza’s husband Mir had misled the village about her death.
The police are waiting for Mir to return, who is one of his trips outside the state.
Hafeeza cannot speak Kashmiri or any other local dialect, and Javid says the family can’t comprehend the language she speaks now. But she makes signs of moustache, a potbellied man, chains and blindfold.
“Perhaps, she is trying to convey that she was chained and blindfolded by a potbellied man with moustache,” says Javid.
“She smokes beedis and chews gutkha and we have been trying to get her off these addictions,” he says.
Hundreds of people are thronging Javid’s house every day to have a glimpse of Hafeeza. “But she gets agitated on seeing people from her in-laws’ village. We have told them not to come here,” says Ghulam.
Khursheed Ahmad, in charge of Sheeri police station, said they were recording statements of people who knew Hafeeza. “We have to wait till her husband returns. I am also trying to take the help of people from Rajasthan because nobody here understands what she says,” he said.
–Agencies–