An accurate news report brings a ‘disappeared’ child back home after being adopted into a new family a thousand miles away from home and undergoing a change in name. Hear the story straight from the BBC’s J&K correspondent Riyaz Masroor himself
It’s a cold February morning. Arath, a sleepy interior of Budgam district, comes alive as people spot the BBC microphone. Sweets rain as a crowd troops into Ghulam Muhammad Wani’s courtyard. His 11-year-old son Nizamudin has returned after a prolonged disappearance from an Islamic seminary in the Central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh. “You got him back,” a village elder says lovingly as I enter Wani’s modest house.
The ambient jubilation contrasts the gloomy air that enwrapped Arath on my first visit past January to report Nizam’s disappearance. Back then, Wani’s wife had beat her chest saying, “God will never let me down. I am sure Nizam will come back.”
But Wani was unsure. “We lost him in a big country, getting him back is like finding a needle in the ocean.” Three weeks after the BBC report went on air the mother’s faith marks a stunning victory over the father’s despair.
By the time BBC picked up the story, this grief-stricken family had thrice shuttled between Srinagar and Bhopal, 1620 Kilometer (1025 miles) distance, and swallowed hollow promises of politicians of all hues.
This fair, jolly boy greeted me lively but shied away from a formal gratitude his family wished he should extended to me. Yet he quickly replied questions in somewhat twisted Hindi. Having reported disappearances for years, I had never seen my ‘subject’ reappearing in a matter of weeks. I found myself in a trance as Nizam appeared before me in blood and flesh.
From his sudden disappearance from Darul Uloom Sendhwa, MP, to his dramatic homecoming, Nizam went through interesting yet paradoxical times. In 2011, a Police campaign to arrest potential stone pelters, many of them in their teens, worried Ghulam Muhammad Wani, who leads prayers at the local Jamia Masjid in Arath. He sent Nizam to the Sendhwa Seminary, Madhya Pradesh, and after twenty days received news that Nazim was missing.
Nizam says he never wanted to be in a Quran school without textbooks, TV and football. “It was boring. There was one pitai uncle (Uncle for beating up). He would beat those not making it to Fajr (early morning prayers). I got beaten twice.”
Nizam looks too tender to undertake such a regimented religious course. He made up his mind to flee only on the third day of his admission. Three weeks later, Nizam tiptoed to the backyard washroom and wriggled out of the seminary through the toilet window. After an aimless walk of fifteen kilometers he boarded a bus, he says, that took him 190 kilometers away to Indore. A six-month paradoxical spell of his life’s fragile stage began.
The little boy learned his first lesson from the tea stall owner, his first employer. “If you want a job, never tell anybody you’re a Kashmiri.” Now, Nizam became Munnu and “I am from Nepal, I am a homeless orphan.”
Shankar Lal Parwani, Munnu’s second employer, is the owner of Ashirwad Hotel. Munnu’s innocence and precocious demeanor impresses Parwani who adopted him, named him Munnu Parwani and put him up with his three sons. The youngest of them, Rishab, 12, became Munnu’s buddy. “I miss Rishab. I will tell baba to take me there sometime in summer,” Nizam says in a nostalgic tone.
Shankar Parwani, whose family had long back immigrated to India from Pakistani Sindh, planned to admit Munnu in a local school. Munnu now had a bank account in his name in a local bank. “I got pocket money, nice clothes and good food.”
Munnu got so mixed up with Parwanis that he began losing grip on mother tongue, Kashmiri. He enjoyed monthly temple visits with Parwanis and relished prasad (sweet offerings). Nizam hardly realized that he was actually nearing an unexpected reunion with his parents in Budgam.
Ultimately, the child’s brush with Parwani family ended when Shankar Lal Parwani listened to a BBC broadcast about Nizam’s disappearance. He got curious and accessed the story online recognizing Munnu’s picture. “I informed Sendhwa Police that already knew the case and the boy saw his real parents after six months. I am happy as well as sad,” says Shankar Lal.
Ghulam Muhammad Wani is so moved by Parwani’s gesture that he said he would prefer Nizam stayed with Parwanis if it were a Muslim family. “But,” Wani says, “Humanity is something that pulls down all the manmade borders. I will always remain grateful to Parwani family and the BBC.”
(Riyaz Masroor is correspondent J&K, BBC World Service. He can be reached at [email protected])
