NEW DELHI: The death this week of a 26-year-old woman from a poor village has ended a Bollywood-style melodrama that had soap-opera obsessed Indians sitting on the edge of their seats.

It is the tale of a wife torn between two husbands. One was a soldier who returned from a Pakistani jail after being missing for years. The other had been a long-time friend by whom the woman, Gudiya (doll), was eight months pregnant.

Gudiya’s dilemma hit newspaper front pages in September 2004 and her life immediately caught the public imagination.

Journalists from India and abroad descended on the small village of Pataudi near the capital New Delhi where she was living, vying for interviews. Her tale was even being turned into a movie due for release this year.

The soldier, Mohammed Arif, turned out to have been a prisoner-of-war in Pakistan for five years after being captured in 1999 when Indian and Pakistani soldiers came close to war over Kashmir.

After waiting several years for Arif, Gudiya, with the blessing of her family, wed another man, Taufiq, a childhood friend and was carrying his child.

“I had to go on with my life,” she said when the story broke.

Arif, with whom she had spent all of 10 days before his unit left, wanted her back — but not her unborn child.

The heavily pregnant Gudiya refused to return to Arif unless he would accept the baby. Her new spouse wanted her to stay with him.

Newspaper headlines asked: “Kiski Gudiya” or “Whose doll?”

The conservative Muslim community in which she lived ruled that as there had been no formal divorce her second marriage was invalid under Islamic law and she must go back to Arif.

Finally Gudiya and the two husbands were persuaded to appear in a bizarre reality TV show on India’s private Zee network that drew huge ratings.

The channel also assembled in the studio village elders, Muslim clerics and scholars to discuss the fate of Gudiya. She agreed to follow their decision.

By the end of the show, Gudiya said she would return to Arif after he said he would also accept the baby.

But she was clearly in torment, declaring, “Who knows what will happen to me? I don’t even know whether I will live or die... No one can say anything.”

This week, the story came to an end.

Gudiya died at a military hospital on Monday from multiple organ failure triggered by an auto-immune disease.

“Gudiya’s sad story ends in quiet tragedy,” the Times of India newspaper said in a headline.

On Tuesday, crowds turned out for her burial in Arif’s farming hometown of Mundali. At the funeral, Arif carried the year-old-son fathered by Gudiya’s second husband Taufiq, who did not attend the ceremony.

A distraught Arif was quoted by The Indian Express as saying Gudiya’s child “is mine now.”

“There is nothing left for me and I want our only child to be with me. I will raise the child and keep him forever.”—AFP