Elderly Indian woman gets warm welcome in Pak
RAWALPINDI:AS 90-year-old Indian woman Reena Varma stands on the balcony of the house in Pakistan where she was born, visiting for the first in 75 years, she recalls her playful childhood.
“I would stand here and sing,” said Varma, as her eyes filled with tears. “These are tears of joy.”
Varma has vivid memories of the day she and her family let the small, three-storey home tucked away in the narrow alleys of the garrison city of Rawalpindi, where residents showered her with rose petals on her arrival on Thursday.
She also danced with some of the residents who beat drums as she entered the street, where she said she used to play from dawn to dusk.
“I’m very happy to see that the house stood intact,” she said ater spending several hours inside recalling memories of a childhood spent with her parents and five siblings.”
At one point she burst into laughter over being unable to climb a staircase without a support, saying she had once tackled it “like a bird” countless times a day, according to a member of the family that now lives in the house.
Varma’s family fled to the Western Indian city of Pune shortly before partition. She was 14 years old at the time. Crossing into Pakistan by road last week ater decades of atempts to get a visa, she felt a wave of emotion. “When I crossed the Pakistan-india Border and saw the signs for Pakistan and India, I got sentimental,” she said, speaking during a stop in Lahore. “Now, I cannot predict how
I will react when I reach Rawalpindi and see my ancestral home in the street.”
Varma is being hosted by Imran William, the director of the India Pakistan Heritage Club, which works to highlight the shared heritage of citizens on both sides of the border.
Varma urged both countries to ease their visa regimes to enable people of both countries to meet more frequently.
“I would urge the new generation that they work together to make things easy,” she said. “We have the same culture. We have the same things. We all want to live with love and peace.” When she lived in Rawalpindi hers was a Hindu street, she said, but Muslims, Christians and Sikhs all lived in her neighbourhood peacefully.
“I would say keep the humanity above everything,” she said. “All religions teach humanity.”