Home again,after 10 months in captivity

With tears rolling down her cheeks,Pushpa Chauhan hugged her 23-year-old son,Prashant,and recalled the long days and nights she and her family spent waiting for him. “When Prashant was being held captive,he could call me only once in two months and that too for just a minute. He would never talk about his health. He would just beg us to do something to save him. I used to feel so helpless,” she said.

Sailor Ravi Aryan’s wife Sampa couldn’t help but recall the brief phone calls her husband would make from captivity. “Every time he would call,I could hear people shouting for help. I cannot believe I finally have my husband in front of me,” Sampa said.

Pirates had hijacked the ship last August,taking hostage six Indians,11 Egyptians,four Pakistanis and a Sri Lankan.

Narrating the 10 months he had spent in captivity,

39-year-old N K Sharma,third engineer on board the MV Suez,said,“We had a very torrid time. We were kept in the dark and beaten up by the pirates. We had no food to eat. We were treated worse than animals.”

Ravi Aryan,30-year-old second officer on the MV Suez,recalled how the

pirates would give the crew of 22 just two to three potatoes a day. Six persons were supposed to survive on just a bottle of water for three days. “We were lucky that it rained. We collected the rainwater in containers and then drank from it later to survive,” Aryan said.

Prashant recounted a time when the pirates gave them water mixed with diesel to drink. “They weren’t human beings. We were under constant guard,and were not even allowed to talk,” he said.

The survivors’ families said they were grateful to Pakistani human rights activist Ansar Burney for brokering the crew’s release. Ravi Aryan’s wife Sampa said Burney was like an

“angel” to her. “He arranged for the ransom money,and it is mostly because of him that our people are back here,safe,” she said.

Most of the families don’t want their men to return to the sea again. Sampa has served an ultimatum to her sailor husband. “I have made it clear to him that I will file for divorce if he takes up such an assignment again,” she said.