| Mute woman wants to get back home |
KARACHI When India and Pakistan celebrate 65 years of independence next week, a deaf and mute Indian woman stranded in Pakistan will be thinking of only one thing: How to get home to see her family.
Geeta, now 21, was found by police 13 years ago, sitting alone and disorientated on a train that had come across the border into Pakistan’s Lahore.
As no one claimed her, officers took Geeta to the Edhi Foundation, Pakistan’s largest and best-known charity, in whose care she has remained ever since.
Geeta, desperate to get back to India, has tried to run away several times but, defenceless and unable to explain where her family live, has failed.
However, activists are now making a renewed push in the hope that Indian and Pakistani authorities can intervene to find her parents.
“It is simple for her,” Bilqees Edhi said at the tiny apartment where she cares personally for Geeta in the same building as an orphanage and a hospital.
“She thinks she’ll be in India as soon as she leaves us. She desperately wants to meet her family but she only knows she lives in India, nothing else.”
At first, Geeta lived in a shelter in Lahore as the charity tried to track down her family, but years went by without success. After she tried to escape several times and quarrelled with staff, Bilqees, who always had an easy relationship with her, brought her to Karachi six months ago and welcomed her into her own home.
Geeta has her own form of sign language and can write in Hindi: “India, seven brothers, three sisters”.
She adopts the Hindi custom of greeting elders by touching their feet and pressing her two palms together close to her heart in the gesture of Namaste.
Speaking through sign language, she said one day she became annoyed after being told off by her parents, left the house and kept walking for hours.
“Then,” she swings her hands back and forth in a loop, a sign for a moving train, “I boarded the train and slept.” Geeta writes that her mother used to call her “Guddi”, which means doll in Urdu and Punjabi. Through sign language, she says her home is next to a river, set in fields with the house behind a hospital and a restaurant.
“You know, it could be any village or town. We have so many places like this,” sighs Bilqees.
Agence France-Presse
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