This real-life reunion had all ingredients of a reel-life potboiler. A woman who was secretly married off to a Kashmiri man by her uncle in West Bengal when she was just 14, reunited with her mother after 12 years.
According to The Indian Express, her mother says that after she went “missing” from her home in the Sunderbans in South 24 Parganas district of West Bengal 12 years ago, she didn’t know that her daughter had been taken away by her uncle.
It’s a story of a reunion that took over a decade and spanned a distance of over 2,500 km — from a village in the Sunderbans delta to a village in Himalayan Kashmir. It’s also a story of reunion that would not have been possible without the effort of the woman’s 35-year-old brother-in-law and HAM radio enthusiasts.
The woman — her mother says is now 26 — was secretly married off to a Kashmiri man by her uncle when she was just 14. After marrying her off to a man in the Baramulla district of Jammu and Kashmir, the uncle went missing without a trace. While the uncle didn’t let her parents know about the address of her in-laws, he gave the husband a sketchy Sunderbans address.
All these years as she tried to settle into her new life in a new place, among unknown people, unknown terrain, and unknown language — she grew distant and sad, says her brother-in-law.
“When my brother married her, we asked her uncle about her age. He told us in writing that she was 19. As a young bride, married off thousands of kilometers away in Kashmir, she would always be sad at our home. I felt this especially when my sisters used to call my mother. They would speak for hours on the phone, and I could see the sadness in her eyes… This struck me hard and I began to search for her parents,” says her brother-in-law.
For him, the search for her parents began in 2017, a few years after she married his brother.
“I knew only one name – Madhavpur. Her uncle told us that her family lived in Madhavpur in West Bengal. I began my search on the Internet and tried to locate the place. There were many places by the name of Madhavpur in West Bengal alone… So I approached the local police here and asked them to interrogate two locals, who arranged our meeting with her uncle to find her address in West Bengal, but that didn’t yield any results,” says the brother-in-law.
Then, he started making friends in West Bengal through Facebook. “My first question to any new person who I befriended on Facebook was ‘Do you know anything about Madhavpur?’. But none of my online conversations led me to her family. It was only during one of our conversations with her in 2019 that she told us the name of her school,” he says.
Armed with this new information, he started another round of searches on the Internet. But the abrogation of Jammu and Kashmir’s special status and the Internet shutdown in the Valley for almost six months hampered his search.
After the Internet was restored, he was able to locate the school in the Sunderbans. “I found the contact number of the police station in the area and called there. I shared the information and requested them to find her parents. But the officer told me that it is a big area and it would be difficult to locate her family… One day, a woman officer with the social welfare department told me to contact the NCW. When I approached the Commission in May this year, they were of great help. They helped us locate the family through HAM Radio,” he says.
The NCW got in touch with the Baruipur police station in South 24 Parganas, where the officials contacted the local HAM radio of West Bengal Radio Club, a community radio station that mostly works in disaster management.
“I received a call from an official at Baruipur Women’s Police Station… When we tried to speak to her directly, we had to arrange for an interpreter in Kashmir — who is a part of HAM radio — as she speaks Urdu now. She didn’t want to speak with strangers at first, so we had to send HAM radio operators to her house. Her brother-in-law acted as an interpreter in our interaction. I spoke to her directly over the phone and she revealed the name of an ice cream shopkeeper and a school, located in a particular block of Baruipur sub-division,” says Ambarish Nag Biswas, secretary of HAM Radio, West Bengal Radio Club.
A senior police officer at Baruipur said she had forgotten everything — from Bengali to her food habits, “but she remembered her mother”.
Biswas adds, “We were able to locate her family and asked them to come to the local police station so that they could speak with her via a video call. Today, her family is in Kashmir to meet her… We are very happy that after many years, a woman was finally reunited with her family and this reunion was made possible through HAM radio. This is a success for humanity.”
