Under a crumbling facade in fading green and white paint, bearing remnants of Persian architecture, more than a dozen men, old and young, sit huddled on charpoys, blocking way to bare-brick rooms inside. It’s here in one of the rooms with uncleared debris of bird nests falling from the ceilings that Rehmati and Mehrunnisa, two women have been taking turns to cry and cook food for a family of eleven.

Rehmati’s son and Mehrunissa’s husband is 31-year-old Mohammad Iqbal, alias Abdur Rehman, who they saw on TV on Thursday night after his arrest by the Delhi Police in the capital.

Neither of the two women had seen him for almost a year and villagers remember him as a “calm” cleric who once left the local mosque after it didn’t give him a raise and then went missing for months until they heard about his arrest.

The police story is far removed: they said he was a militant of the Harkat-ul-Jehadi-Islami (HuJI), he was carrying explosives, he knew about the Jaipur blasts last fortnight and was also wanted for last year’s blasts in Varanasi, Gorakhpur and the attack on board the Samjhauta Express.

Rehman was brought to his native village Lilaun in UP’s Muzaffarnagar district a day later but his relatives say they were not allowed to meet him. Even Mehrunnisa, who was brought by the police to Lilaun from her parents’ home in Bilaspur after almost a year with her three children Jainab (7), Fatima (5) and Ahmed (1) said she couldn’t meet him: “I only caught a glimpse of him in the police van. He has grown pale,” she says.

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