‘Ammi don’t cry, I will come back soon’

KARACHI: Razia Begum cries spasmodically, her body shivering with excitement. She has tears of joy in her eyes. She has heard her son’s voice after seven long, anxious, miserable years. “Ammi, don’t cry. I will come back to Pakistan soon,” Muhammad Ramzan tries to console his mother speaking by the phone from the Indian state of Bhopal.

Ramzan was separated from his mother at the age of 10 when his father took him to Bangladesh and remarried. After being tortured by his stepmother, the boy crossed the border alone in 2011 with the hope of coming back to his mother in Pakistan. He had travelled to many states before landing in Bhopal where he was shifted to a shelter home run by Childline charity.



Razia chokes back tears. They speak for an hour as Ramzan tells his mother about his life at the shelter home where he studies Hindi and plays cricket. Razia remembers her son as a small boy who liked playing with beyblades and eating chicken karhai.

Ramzan’s voice is heavier now, and a recent monochrome photo, which Razia holds onto dearly, shows he has grown taller. The picture was sent by the shelter home.

“Please bring him back to me. I’ve waited for years. I can’t wait any longer,” she pleads after the phone call, as she sits anxiously at the office of Ansar Burney Trust in Karachi.



Razia, a Bengali born in Pakistan, was only 12 when she was married off to a factory worker. By the age of 16, she had had two children – a daughter Zohra and son Ramzan. In 2004, the couple divorced. Razia’s former husband took the children away after two years of divorce. Then he took Ramzan to Bangladesh with him, leaving his daughter with her mother.

“He remarried in Bangladesh and his wife was very cruel to my son. They would kick him [Ramzan] out of the house. They would not let me talk to him when I called,” Razia recalls.

“His friends advised him to slip into India as Pakistan was just next to it,” Razia tells The Express Tribune. “He was young and innocent and did exactly that.”



Ramzan’s father told her that the boy had gone missing. “I had no idea he was in India and came to know [this] only two months ago,” says Razia, who works as a domestic aide.

One day her employer read a story about Ramzan shared on the social media by a boy living in the same Bhopal shelter home. She called social activist Ansar Burney and hence the contact was initiated with the shelter home in Bhopal. Then she was finally able to speak to her son.

Ansar says he will do everything to bring the boy back.



Times of India newspaper reported earlier this week that the Indian government has decided to send Ramzan as a ‘return gift’ to Pakistan for returning Geeta, a hearing- and speech-impaired girl, nearly 15 years after she accidentally crossed over to their territory. A representative of the Ansar Burney Trust, Shagufta Burney, said they cannot confirm the news.

The mother and the son, who could not be reunited back in 2011, hope their reunion will work out this time. Geeta’s return to her homeland has rekindled this hope of the families, whose loved ones are stranded across the borders of the hyphenated but hostile neighbours.


Published in The Express Tribune, October 29^th, 2015.