They hadn’t seen each other for 36 years. But the moment Kashmir Singh, freed from the Death Row in Kot Lakhpat jail near Lahore, crossed the border at Wagah today, he recognised his wife Paramjit Kaur. He hugged her and reached out to his physically challenged son Shishpal, calling him “Sher puttar (lion’s son)”.

As he bid farewell to Ansar Burney — Pakistan’s caretaker Minister for Human Rights, who got President Pervez Musharraf to pardon Kashmir, had come to the border with his wife and son — Kashmir turned around and looked at Paramjit, now 65. “No ordinary woman could have taken up this challenge,” he said.

But in Paramjit’s mind, there was never any confusion. “I always knew he would come back safe. I never had any doubts, not even for a moment.” Since 7 in the morning, she had been waiting for her husband’s arrival from Pakistan. She was ready to go, dainty in a pale green suit with golden embroidery, dull maroon bangles tinkling on her wrist. A far cry from her dishevelled work-day appearance.

“We don’t want to be late,” she said, telling you how her husband, a quiet voice on the phone last night, and a stocky presence on the Pakistani TV channels this morning, had told her that he would be back by 12 noon.

He had made a similar promise when he left home on a lazy Sunday morning in June 1972, never to return. Then, friends had urged this young mother of three, the youngest a little over one, to remove those bangles but she had clung to the tiny voice in her heart. “I knew he was alive, I knew he would return,” she said, looking at her worn feet, snug in a pair of shiny new brown sandals before suddenly grabbing her hanky to stop the tears.

... contd.