First Gudiya, now ‘back from dead’ Arif loses second wife

Arif had married 23-year-old Shahyista 10 months after Gudiya’s death. “I was happy and had almost got over Gudiya and even the memories of the Pakistani jail (where he spent four years). But it seems God has different plans for me,” he says, standing next to Shahyista’s grave.

Two years back, just a few metres ahead, Arif had buried Gudiya. The irony isn’t lost on the soldier. “Both were lying in the same ward at the Army Research and Referral Hospital in Delhi,” he says.

Shahyista has left behind a four-month-old daughter, Anam Rani. “The child has a hole in her heart,” says Arif’s aunt Raeesa Begum. Anam has been sent to Shahyista’s parental home and is being taken care of by her younger sister, who is also nursing a child.

Last Monday, Shahyista was taken to the hospital in Meerut for a routine blood check-up after she reported feeling a little tired. “Her condition worsened quickly,” Arif says. On Friday, Shahyista passed away around 9 pm.

“During her pregnancy doctors had told her about her ailment, but she did not tell me,” Arif says.

Life has come full circle for the Armyman who was given up for dead by his family and newly wed wife Gudiya when he went missing inside Pakistan in 1999. His mother died of grief. In August 2004, when he unexpectedly returned, he found Gudiya had remarried and was expecting a child from her second marriage.

The story shook the country’s conscience when Gudiya’s two husbands battled it out on national television, her at the side, to lay claim to her. Finally it was decided that Gudiya would go back to Arif. However, she never recovered from the shock and, after battling illness, died on January 2, 2006.

Ten months on, Arif married Shahyista in a sober ceremony.

Standing in the graveyard where his two wives lie buried, Arif talked of his September 1999 wedding to Gudiya in a grand ceremony. “There was one elephant and four horses in my baraat,” he says. Ten days after that, Arif had to leave for the warfront, and nothing was ever the same again.

He has no plans to remarry, says Arif. “I am just too scared, I won’t be able to handle any more grief.”

As for Gudiya, there are few traces of her in Mundoli village. Her child — a healthy three-year-old — lives in Pataudi village with the man who was her husband for some time, while her grave is an unmarked mound, somewhere among the kikar trees.