Home after 21 yrs, Pak days fill his memory

‘‘But soon we realised we were not strong enough to even walk a short distance. We couldn’t keep our eyes open in daylight. We were always in a state of trance,’’ he adds.

Narayan was arrested by the Pakistan Navy in 1982 when it seized the fishing vessel, Jeevadani, on which he was working from the Arabian Sea for straying into Pakistan’s territorial waters. He has long since forgotten the date of capture.

He insists he and the 13 others who were taken into custody that fateful day are innocent. ‘‘We didn’t know that we had entered Pakistani waters. We were just on a fishing trip.’’ But the Pakistanis were hardly convinced. For the next one month, all of the captured seamen, suspected to be Indian spies, were tortured, he says, adding: ‘‘They used to beat us severely to make us reveal our ‘real’ identity.’’

‘‘The Pakistanis realised we were innocent. The torture stopped and we were lodged in a dark room,’’ he says, recalling the nightmare. ‘‘At Moovalli,’’ he says, ‘‘even my mother was unable to identify me. After all, it was the first time she saw me in almost 30 years.’’

Narayan had worked in Bangalore as a hotel boy before shifting to Mumbai where he drove a taxi and then tried his hand as a mechanic. Since he was not allowed by the Pakistanis to communicate with anyone, he says, ‘‘Everyone thought I was dead.’’

In prison, Narayan enjoyed the company of a family of sorts: seven Maharashtrians, two from Tamil Nadu, three from Kerala and one from Andhra. Their conversations were thus smattered with Tamil, Hindi and English.

The food was sparse: two chapattis with sabji thrice a day and water. The only link with the outside world: a prisoner who brought them food and water and another who shaved their heads once in three months. ‘‘We never knew the day or time. But we were able to calculate weeks because of the Friday prayers and the years because of the annual celebration of the Pakistani Independence Day on August 14,’’ he says.