Indian prisoners in Pak jails-II
A daughter's desperate wait
From Rahul Das & R. Suryamurthy
Tribune News Service

He reads the palms of senior Pakistani jail officials. However, Roop Lal cannot read what destiny has in store for him and when he will return to his motherland — India.

Arrested by the Pakistani authorities on charges of spying in 1974, Roop Lal was sentenced to death, which was later converted to life imprisonment.

His daughter, Snit, who was barely six months old then, has not lost hope of seeing her father. The bus diplomacy between the two countries and subsequent exchange of prisoners has once again made some light appear at the end of the tunnel for her.

The waiting, the family hopes, would end soon, after his death sentence was changed to life imprisonment. As he has undergone a long imprisonment and the Pakistan Human Rights Commission is making persistent effort to have him released, Snit is optimistic that "my father would be back home soon."

For quarter of a century, the bond between daughter and father has only been an emotional one. Neither of them have any idea of what the other looks like. Snit, who resides in Hari Nagar in West Delhi, says that she is still clinging to the hope of meeting her father one day.

She said, "I do not remember him. I can just imagine his face. His suffered a paralytic stroke a few years ago and his eyesight is declining."

"When he returns we will like to go back too my ancestral house in Saigon Mandi, village Amritsar", Snit said.

The only channel of communication between them has been the letters written by Roop Lal once in a while to Snit. In a letter received early this month, he has dwelt at length on his past and written about the "bitterness of truth".

In his letters, Roop Lal has narrated how he spends his time in Sahilwal prison in the Punjab province of Pakistan — reading lifelines of senior jail officials.

Snit's mother married another man when she was a small child. "I was raised by my father's mother. My grandmother ran from pillar to post, knocking on the doors of the Indian authorities right until her death. I was eight years old when she passed away. But no one bothered," Snit recollects.

"None of my uncles made efforts to get my father back. I used to work at their homes," she states.

In 1989, Dr Kisen Kumar Cholera married Snit. And then began the efforts, once again, to trace a forgotten parent. Mr Cholera began corresponding with his father-in-law. "The death sentence of my father-in-law was converted to life imprisonment due to the efforts undertaken by the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan and specially, its chairperson, Asthma Jahangir," he said.

This development has also brought a ray of hope for Snit. "My feelings for my father range between hate and love. In many ways, he is a complete stranger," says Snit.

"Why can't they just repatriate my father-in-law who has languished in prison for 25 years, if nothing then on humanitarian grounds," questions Dr Cholera.