9 April 2005	Saturday	29 Safar 1426

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MUZAFFARABAD, April 8: The more Ghulam Fatima tried to control herself, the more her eyes filled with tears as she saw her son Naseer Ahmed after 15 years. The emotional meeting was taking place in the green lawn of the State Guest House here on Friday after a breakfast at which the Muslim Conference president Sardar Attique Ahmed Khan had invited the 19 passengers of the first trans-Kashmir bus from the other side of the Line of Control.

AJK President Sardar Anwar Khan, Prime Minister Sardar Sikandar Hayat and former premier Sardar Abdul Qayyum, cabinet members and some political leaders were also present on the occasion.

As Ms Fatima spoke about the one-and-a-half-decade-long separation, tears again started rolling down her cheeks.

Mr Ahmed, also in tears, tried to comfort his mother.

He told this reporter that it seemed to him as if he was meeting his mother not after 15 but 150 years.

“Of all my family members, I have missed my mother the most,” said the 35-year old.

“And the thing which stuck my memory were her pieces of advice on everything,” he said, receiving a kiss on the forehead from his mother.

Apart from the son, Ms Fatima’s daughter and her husband’s elder brother also live in Pakistan. Both children are married to their cousins.

Ms Fatima was accompanied by her husband, Abdullah Butt. The couple could not earlier visit their children because of the impossibly complex bureaucracy involved in getting a visa as well as security clearance for the journey.

As they spoke, Mr Ahmed received a call on his mobile phone from his sister, who was in Karachi to look after her ailing uncle, also her father-in-law.

He passed the phone to his mother who was wearing the traditional black Kashmiri burqa.

“I am eager to see you and your children. I want to hug you,” she told her daughter, sobbingly.

Inside the hall of the guest house, Ashiq Suleria, 46, was elated over his first ever meeting with his cousin, Firdous Nasim and her husband Khalid Hussain.

“I never had an idea that we could ever meet each other. I am very pleased,” he told Dawn.

Mr Hussain, a former bureaucrat in the held Kashmir, and his wife had received threatening phone calls allegedly from the militants to cancel the trip. However, they did not change their plans.

“Yes, I was threatened, but I decided we must go. I thought both the governments have taken a very positive step to facilitate a meeting of the divided families and we must avail this chance,” he told this reporter, as he gripped the hand of Mr Suleria to express his affection for him.

Mirpur (AJK)-born Mr Suleria said that when he learnt that his relatives had been threatened to cancel the trip, all of his family members became very upset.

“But they restored our jubilations by informing us that they were coming,” he added.

In a lighter vein, Ms Nasim said she had seen her cousin in pictures.

“Earlier, he was slim, but now he has put on some extra weight,” she said.

She said she was sure the trip would be memorable.

Another group of seven, comprising elderly Said Mohammad, his wife Sher Bibi, son Mohammad Ghani, daughter-in-law Khadija Bibi, and three nephews, Mohammad Azam, Mohammad Taj and Mohammad Rasheed, all from Rajouri area, also left for Mirpur in the afternoon.

In the main old city of Muzaffarabad, the house of Alauddin Shah was flocked by relatives who wanted to meet his elder brother, Zain al Abideen Shah, 63, from held Kashmir.

Mr Shah had last visited AJK in 1987 but could not come again despite the death of his father in 1991.

The first thing he did on Friday was a visit to the local graveyard to offer Fateha at his father’s grave.

“The purpose of my visit was family reunion and to offer Fateha for my father,” he told Dawn.

His sister Mumtaza, who and her husband had migrated from the held Kashmir in 1986, said she was highly excited to see her brother after 18 years.

“You can understand the atmosphere of a meeting taking place after such a long period,” she said while wiping the “tears of joy”.

Reuters Adds: Raja Naseeruddin was just three when his father died in a traffic accident. On Friday, 59 years later, he saw his father’s grave for the first time.

Naseeruddin was one of 19 Indian Kashmiris who travelled to the AJK by bus on Thursday.

“How can I express myself? I simply don’t know how,” said a tearful Naseeruddin after offering prayers at his father’s simple grave in the mountain village of Lawasi.

“I don’t remember my father, I was too young when he died,” he said. “Now, at least, I feel relief to have visited his grave. I want to come here again.”

Naseeruddin’s family, like so many others, was split apart by the 1947 partition.

After his father was killed in 1946 near Muzaffarabad, his mother took him to live with relatives near Srinagar.