There’s a new spark in the lives of Sanjida Begum and Abdul Hamid. Because Abdul’s brother Sapper Arif Mohammed, branded a deserter five years ago when he disappeared near the Line of Control, will be back home next week: a hero, emerging from a Pakistan jail where he had been kept as a Prisoner of War. In Arif’s Mundali home, there’s also confusion. Sanjida and Abdul are not quite sure how Arif will react when he’s told that his mother is dead and his wife has married again. The very thought of breaking this to him has had his brother and bhabhi on the tenterhooks. 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.
