Was overjoyed to see tricolour at Wagah: Mumbai woman tricked by agent returns from Pak after 22 years
Mumbai | Ensconced in her one-room home and surrounded by children and grandkids, Hamida Bano had a piece of advice for those seeking jobs abroad: “Always use the proper channel if you want to avoid what I went through.”
Hamida was speaking to PTI at her place in Kurla in central Mumbai hours after she reached the city on Wednesday. The 73-year-old woman spent about 22 years in Pakistan after an agent lured her with a "good" job in the Gulf and instead dumped her in the neighbouring country.
“Mumbai looks so different now,” exclaimed a beaming Hamida.
A bit of luck and a lot of hard work on the part of two activists, one in Pakistan and another in Mumbai, helped Hamida reunite with her family.
“I was overjoyed to see the Indian tricolour when I reached the Wagah border in Punjab from Lahore. After over two decades, I was ecstatic that I would finally enter my country and head to my city Mumbai,” said Hamida.
A resident of Kasaiwada in Kurla (East), Hamida came in touch with a Vikhroli-based agent in 2002 who offered her the job of a house help in Dubai. The agent took Hamida and four other women to Pakistan and handed them over to two men.
After being kept at an undisclosed location for some time, Hamida was left to fend for herself in Hyderabad, a major city in the Sindh province. But she had no documents to prove her Indian identity as the Pakistani agents took away all her documents, recalled Hamida.
Speaking to PTI at her 10ft X 10ft home, Hamida said, “I would like to caution people looking for jobs abroad and earn money that they should allow use the proper channel. Many women like me from India and Bangladesh who were deceived by agents are stuck in Pakistan.”
Hamida, who has two sons, two daughters and many grandchildren, said a fruit vendor took care of her all these years. "He was very nice. I would get angry when someone spoke against India," she said.
A chance encounter with an activist, Waliullah Maroof, in 2022 raised her
hopes. After learning that she was from India, Maroof searched for activists in Mumbai and got in touch with Khaflan Shaikh through social media in 2020.
Shaikh then shared a video of Hamida among his acquaintances and one of them told him that her daughter Yaseem lives in Kurla’a Kasaiwada. He got in touch with Yaseem and connected her with Hamida through a video call. PTI had reported Hamida’s discovery then.
Yaseem said the PTI report brightened the prospects of her mother’s return as her story reached a much wider audience and facilitated her documentation through official channels.
“We are thankful to PTI. We were informed by someone from Pakistan that my mother would reach the Wagah border on December 16 and were asked to reach there,” she said.
Yaseem said the Indian embassy in Pakistan made her mother’s passport, and thanked the Pakistani authorities for extending cooperation at every stage.
“My father Haneef died in 2002. We are happy that our mother is alive and back home. Earlier, she had visited countries like Qatar to work as a house help,” said Yaseem.
Shaikh, who is instrumental in Hamida’s return, said, “Though she was traced in 2022, it took efforts over the next two years to ensure that she was back in Kurla.”