‘How do we tell him mother is dead, wife has married again?’

Sanjida can’t read but she keeps staring at the letter Arif wrote this July. ‘‘He asked about his mother and wife. How are we going to tell him?’’ she frets.

Abdul, Arif’s elder by six years, has more to worry about. He has been making rounds of the Meerut cantonment, the Mundali police station and dashing to the neighbours everytime there’s a call from Arif’s unit. So busy has he been with Arif’s return that he has had no time to attend to his field. He has asked his neighbour to take charge of the sowing this monsoon.

News of Arif’s ‘desertion’ in October 1999 — his strange case was first reported by The Sunday Express which pointed out how he had been wronged by the Army and was languishing as a PoW in a Pakistan jail — had brought life to standstill in Mundali.

‘‘We haven’t celebrated Id ever since he left in 1999 after his wedding. We had been renovating the house

but we left the work incomplete,’’ says Abdul. ‘‘He was the youngest in the family, everyone’s ladla,’’ says sister Aasho. Her elder sister too has rushed to Munadali, all preparing for the return home.

‘‘When he left for Kargil, he had been married only ten days. His wife waited for over four years, but then… it’s all destiny,’’ trails off Arif’s old aunt. Then she adds happily: ‘‘But we can now look forward to a festival bigger than Id.’’

Village elder Taushif Mian dittoes: ‘‘The boy has made our village proud. We knew all along he couldn’t have been a bhagora. Thank god, they were all wrong.’’