Lost Pak boy ready for bus ride home

Asked on how he strayed over the border, Munir says, his mother Halima had sent him to his uncle’s village to borrow Rs 500 and ‘‘I lost my way and had crossed the river.’’ Although he was scared initially, he says, the policemen at Kesaringhpur police station were nice to him.

He also talks of the gifts and the rakhis he received from the other children at the juvenile home in Bikaner. Munir has spent over a month in India. He spent the past ten days at the juvenile home in Bikaner from where he arrived at the capital.

Unfazed by all the cameras around him, Munir is eager to answer all the questions put to him repeatedly. He proudly speaks of how he is taking back gifts for his sisters, of how he wants to go back to tending cattle. The child in him surfaces, when he says: ‘‘I want to come back here, but I know my father won’t let me come here.’’

When asked what he likes about the city, he says, ‘‘the wide roads here’’. Munir is excited at the prospect of his first bus journey on the Lahore bus on Tuesday morning. With one day in hand, before he leaves, the boy is certain about what he wants to still see, ‘‘the wide roads’’.